Category: Culture

Beatrix Potter’s work is now in the public domain

Authors write to make a living. Eventually, authors get old and die, but their work lives on. Books, paintings, even movies — all become part of our historical and cultural heritage. Imagine how we’d all lose if someone still held a copyright on Shakespeare’s plays, or Beethoven’s music, or the paintings in the Louvre.

But how long should an author’s heirs be allowed to profit from an author’s work? On that there is no agreement. In past years, it is profit that has been winning, and copyrights have been extended for longer and longer.

This year, the work of artists and writers who died in 1943 came into the public domain. That included the work of Beatrix Potter. Current copyright law in the U.S. keeps copyrights alive for 70 years after the author’s death. Peter Rabbit was first published in 1902, so that means that Peter Rabbit was private property for about 112 years. That’s a long time.

Copyrights were extended again (by the U.S. Congress) as recently as 1998. Mickey Mouse, Gone With the Wind, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue are still private property. Those who opposed copyright extension complained that the intent of the law was to protect lucrative franchises such as Mickey Mouse that corporate owners want to keep locked down.

This is a major conflict in our culture at present — the conflict between private property and “the commons.” For example, owners of beachfront property are in conflict with those who maintain that beaches are a natural resource that belong to all of us. For years and years, defenders of the commons have been losing. This means that a few people are much richer. But the rest of us are poorer.

Why is this on my mind at present? Partly because I wanted to use an excerpt from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay after the title page of Fugue in Ursa Major. I waited too long to check on the rights to Millay’s work, assuming that her work was now in the public domain. I was wrong. A foundation owns the rights to Millay’s work. To avoid any pesky legal risk, I had to apply to the foundation for permission, and I had to include a special credit line on my book’s ISBN page. This held up the publication of Fugue in Ursa Major. If I’m doing the math right, I believe we have to wait seven more years for Millay’s work to enter the public domain.

However, the publication of Fugue in Ursa Major is getting close, and I will be able to keep to the July 14 release date. The revisions are done, the type is set. Everything is in the pipeline. I’ll have much more to say about Fugue in Ursa Major as July 14 approaches.

P.S. If you haven’t seen the 2006 film “Miss Potter,” about the life of Beatrix Potter, I encourage you to put it on your must-see list.

From time to time, I have written here about John Twelve Hawks, and so I get a fair number of visitors to this blog who have searched the Internet for “John Twelve Hawks.” Some of you fans of John Twelve Hawks may not be aware that he recently created an official, verified Facebook page. He posts photos periodically and offers snippets from his off-the-grid life.

For my previous posts on John Twelve Hawks, use the blog search box to search for his name. To find him on Facebook, type his name in the Facebook search box.

And though John doesn’t know it yet, I plan to send him a copy of Fugue in Ursa Major as soon as it’s released, hoping that he’ll like the book enough to write me a cover blurb.

New proofs of Fugue in Ursa Major arrived today. This is the second proof set. Revisions after the first proof set were substantial, adding a couple of months to the production schedule.

However, I think the revisions have made it a much better book. Three chapters were completely rewritten. There are character and plot refinements throughout. To quicken the pace in the second half of the book, the revised version is almost 50 pages shorter. Still, at 300 pages and 94,000 words, it’s not exactly a short novel.

Ken Ilgunas gave me such good feedback on the first proofs that I asked the other first readers to stop reading and wait for the next revision. An author’s first readers are absolutely critical to the creative process. It requires experienced readers who can be good judges of the kind of story the author wants to tell. They mustn’t mince words when giving feedback. It can be like a kick in the stomach.

Fugue in Ursa Major is a pretty smart book, if I do say so myself, so smart first readers were a requirement. Though a lot of things happen in Fugue in Ursa Major, it’s not really intended to be action-packed science fiction. The book has strong contemplative, historical, and speculative elements that emerge during conversations between the two main characters, Jake and Phaedrus. Hopefully, Fugue in Ursa Major will be a brisk ride. But the heart of the book is in the lives of the characters. If Fugue in Ursa Major attracts enough readership, there will be a sequel. At the end of Book One, Jake and Phaedrus are just getting started with the world-changing task that has landed in their laps.

If all goes according to plan, the book should go on sale in March. There will be a trade paperback version, a Kindle version, and an Apple iBook (ePub) version.

Le Coucher de Sappho by Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre

I have been besotted with the ancient Greeks of late, working my way through the magisterial The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World, by James Davidson. The book is almost 800 pages long, in small type, so it’s a long haul. But I have had more fun with this book than any book I’ve read in months. Davidson is an Oxford-trained historian, but he writes with wit and humor. His approach is anything but dry. And rather than merely throwing out his analysis with a haughty academic attitude of take it or leave it, Davidson takes us into the texts. He lets us see for ourselves the basis of his interpretation of Greek history. We meet hundreds of characters from all over the Greek empire. He retells hundreds of stories from classical Greece. By the end of the book, you feel as though you’ve been on vacation in ancient Greece, and you’ve picked up a surprising amount of Greek vocabulary.

Thanks to Davidson, I also have discovered the poetry of Sappho. Right away I saw that she was the Greek Edna St. Vincent Millay. Here’s a fragment, translation by A.E. Housman:

The weeping Pleiads wester,
And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
Far sighs the rainy breeze:
It sighs from a lost country
To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And I lie down alone.

The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone;
The stroke of midnight ceases,
And I lie down alone.
The rainy Pleiads wester
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of,
And ’twill not dream of me.

What is sad is that very little of Sappho’s poetry remains. She was born around 600 B.C., but most of her work survived until Roman times. Then Sappho’s work was at the mercy of the Christians. It seems there were book-burnings. The church was redefining love according to its own brutally prudish theology, so these ancient ideas had to go. But it was not only an active purging of the literary record by the church. It also was neglect of those documents that survived and found their way into monastery libraries during the Dark Ages. Davidson tells us how this neglect probably happened:

“Time and again, a manuscript of Sappho’s songs or of Strabo or of Archimedes, one of only two or three copies in the world, or one of only one, was allowed to rot in the book box, while the scribe spent his precious hours making yet another copy of the painfully awful Greek prose of the evangelists. Or worse, the priceless thousand-year-old text was systematically erased and overwritten to make a private copy of the more polished pieties of some bestselling Christian sermonizer.”

It’s a pity that the sermons weren’t burned instead.

Fragments of a Sappho poem discovered and published in the 20th Century