April is both National Poetry and National Architecture Month.  Admittedly I don’t know a whole lot about architecture and probably take the art form for granted more often than not (which is a pity as I am sure there is a lot to appreciate in the architecture world — perhaps I should start another blog like “I Wish I Was a Scientist” called something like “I Don’t Know Jack About Architecture”).  I will try and put architectural appreciation on my long list of things to accomplish.

Poetry on the other hand is something that I like to think of myself as being quite familiar with.  While I love all forms of literature I would have to say that poetry is probably my favorite.  I have been writing my own poetry since I was in elementary school and probably have been reading poems for almost that long (I grew up on Shel Silverstein books).  While I would one day love to write my own novel or a book of philosophy/theory, I think that to publish my own collections of poems would be about the height of wonderfulness for me.  I love poetry (falls into the same line as “I like Books, Books are Good”). 

To celebrate National Poetry Month I told myself I was going to try and read and write more poetry in April.  As far as the writing goes I need to get started but I did succeed in finding a book on poetry to read today.  I came upon it by pure chance while compiling my list of happy birthday wishes for April 2nd.  Camille Paglia, one of my favorite authors and American Intellectuals, was born on this day in 1947.  Her most recent book, Break, Blow, Burn happens to be a personal survey of hers of 43 great poems.  Fortunately for me the Hughes Main Library of Greenville SC (my place of employment) had this book available.  I have already taken it out and it is sitting next to me on my desk (of course I have not had the chance to read any of it yet but I intend to during lunch).  I am very excited about this, 1). beacause I love poetry and 2). it has been entirely too long since I last read any Paglia.  For anyone who has not read anything by Camille Paglia I strongly recommend her, though she does have a bit of a reputation for pissing people off.  I believe some of her articles may be archived on Salon.com.

 I urge everyone to try and embrace the two art forms that are being celebrated this month.  Read some poetry, visit a museum of architecture, all around just get out and enjoy the art and culture around you — that is a very healthy thing to do.

~Nathaniel

ps.  Sorry for all the links on this post, I kind of got out of control (also through in some shameless self promotion).

For an individual who enjoys writing poetry I must say that I am very bad about reading other poets.  However, last week, while I was browsing the library’s online databases, I found one, the ”Granger’s Poetry Database” which has a huge collection of full text poems.  I found myself reading a lot of William Carlos Williams poems as I looked around in the database.  I believe my favorite poem by Williams is the short little verse entitled “The Red Wheelbarrow” which reads:

so much depends
upon

beside the white
chickens

It is such a simple, subtle, and short piece of literature and yet to me it paints this beautiful image.  I remember when I first encountered it junior year of college, in Poetry Workshop, wanting very badly to be able to emulate the precise physical simplicity of it.  I tried on a number of my own poems but feel that I repeatedly fell short.  I am certain that some critics are not big fans of either “The red Wheelbarrow” or William Carlos Williams but to me both are genius.  I find Williams’ verses to be very relaxing, they remind me, in some ways, of pieces of soft quiet piano music that one can feel comfortable falling asleep to.

This interesting article that appeared in The New York Times today got me to thinking about the cultural importance of food and the ways in which we eat it.  Further it made me think about the way in which we create stigmas and taboos in regards to the consumption of food.  The NYT article deals with MSG (monosodium glutamate) which for years people, especially in the USA, have believed is quite bad for you even though it is present in a number of commonly consumed food products.  I also find myself thinking about saturated fats and hydrogenated vegetable oils and the new considerations that both food producers and the consuming public are making in regards to the two. 

It seems quite obvious that we all need to eat.  We are organic living things that do not possess our own solar energy receptors (such as the chlorophyll used by plants for photosynthesis) and so must come to a source of energy by the consumption of material that our bodies can then metabolize and put to work.  For humans though food is a lot more than just a means of energy and nutrients, it is very much tied into the nature and identification of culture.  Just consider the definition of various cuisines, we literally break food up along national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries — Italian, Mexican, Thai, etc, etc.  Food, that which is eaten, the way it is prepared, the dominant flavors, and what is or isn’t allowed, is just as important a cultural construct as clothing and language and the arts.

In the United States, a nation that has become increasingly aware of concerns over obesity and its negative health effects, consciousness of health consumption has become a big market.  It is impossible to go into a supermarket nowadays without seeing some product that has a label of low fat, fat free, organic, or something else of the like.  The way in which our food is marketed and labeled is just as much a comment on our current culture as is the kinds of foods we are choosing to eat. 

I find the whole thing rather fascinating really.  I had a roommate in college who almost always insisted on buying name brand products at the supermarket instead of generic store brand.  This baffled me and still does because I cannot often tell much of a difference between name brand and generic besides the fact that one is quite a bit cheaper.  I think a part of it is just our general consumerist society while another part is a psychological perception of name and quality.  All around I would have to say it is great.

Food is just as much a part of popular culture as say music and movies and the coolest new TV shows.  Our modes of eating and choices of consumption follow along with other trends that define the social norms of any given generation.  I remember my dad telling me once how when he was growing up a simple dairy product like yogurt really had very little popularity.  This now seems absurd to me as it seems like every time I watch television I see a commercial for Yoplait or some other yogurt brand.  I could say the same for salsa, or sushi, or any number of other foods that were once almost completely unheard of here in the States and now are everywhere in our daily lives.

I think we might all take it a little bit for granted the role of food.  Sure we know it is important and probably most of us really enjoy having something good to eat, but how often do we really sit back and think about the greater value in which food plays in our very definitions of being human?  I challenge everybody to take a few minutes to think a little bit more about the food on your plate before you dig into your next meal.  What does it say about yourself?  What does it say about the greater society and culture you are a part of?

~Nathaniel 

This past Sunday (Feb. 24th), actor Daniel Day-Lewis won the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor in a Film for his performance as Daniel Plainview in the movie “There Will Be Blood.”  The film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, has had a lot of attention since it’s release.  I have been meaning to see the movie for some time but did not get around to it until last night.  Having read multiple reviews and heard all the hype about the movie leading up to the Academy Awards I assumed that “There Will Be Blood” was going to be a pretty good movie.  Having now seen it I will  say that “There Will Be Blood” was a very good film in my opinion.  In fact I think it might be one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time.  I’m not even sure if the awesome and amazing Academy Award winning Best Picture of this year, “No Country For Old Men” is as good as “There Will Be Blood.”  That is a bold statement, this I realize, “No Country For Old Men” is undoubtedly a great piece of film but I get the feeling, personally, that “There Will Be Blood” is, in the long run, the better of the two.  So why did it not win Best Picture?  Good question, maybe it should have, but personally I think it makes sense that it didn’t.

I went to see “There Will Be Blood” with Bear and when the film was over the two of us left the theatre in relative silence.  Then we both had a kind of “huh?” moment as if neither of us were sure how we were suppose to react to the two and a half hours of movie we just finished watching.  I believe I said I needed to sleep on it, and now I have, and I am still in the state of “huh?”  The “huh?” is not because “There Will Be Blood” is bad by any means but more so because it is an enigma.  It is a piece of art that expresses something deep, profound, and all around rather disturbing about humanity; you can feel this as you watch.  Several times throughout the film I realized that I was sitting on the edge of my seat leaning towards the screen as if trying to hear something that was just a whisper in a given scene.  That is the thing about “There will Be Blood” the dialogue is so little and then when it does occur what is said is often so short and blunt, that you, as the audience, have to be looking for the greater detail in the images and sounds that occur outside of speaking to put together the whole image.  “There will Be Blood” isn’t vague, in fact I would call it almost blunt force.  Here is Daniel Plainview.  Here is Eli Sunday.  Here are ideological men; men with purpose, ambition, drive; men willing to kill or die for or do both in the pursuit of their personal goals.  I think the sheer blunt rigid presentation in this film more than anything is what makes it so hard to both understand and deal with.  I think that the ”huh?” that Bear and I experienced as we walked out at the end of the movie was a reaction similar to somebody who had just been unexpectedly slapped.  “There Will Be Blood” might seem like it is dragging a bit, or really slow to start, but it is building momentum the whole time.  From the very start with Plainview as a silver miner the gears of the whole story are in motion and picking up steam and leading to the climax. Then it happens, the moment that all others have been building to, and then cut to credits.  I don’t want to give away how the movie ends to those people who haven’t had the chance to see it  but what I will say is that the film’s title is so purposeful that you cannot really appreciate it without seeing the whole movie.

Besides the outstanding cinematography and amazing acting I think my favorite part of “There Will Be Blood” was the soundtrack and sound editing.  The music that is used is all at once powerful and gripping and disturbing.  It is, in itself a character, in the movie, that sets the mood with perfect precision.  To me the music was almost like the narrator that filled in where the character dialogue was so sparse.  It reminded me some of the sound that Kubrick used in both ”The Shining” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  It was fantastic.

In closing, I found myself thinking about Charles Foster Kane, the media tycoon from Orson Welles’ classic “Citizen Kane”, last night before I went to bed.  The character of Daniel Plainview is something like Kane and yet I get the feeling he was even worse.  Kane could be a monster, a ruthless individual who had no fear of crushing his competition and those who stood in his way but then again he had the whole Rosebud thing, this longing and nostalgia as if he wished he had had a different life, one where he wasn’t the mighty media millionaire and considered a heartless fiend of a man.  I didn’t get the impression that Plainview in “There Will Be Blood” was like Kane in this one aspect.  Yes he was heartless and driven and probably insane but he didn’t have a redeeming Rosebud in him that makes us the audience in the very least want to believe he wasn’t a complete monster of a person.  Plainview personifies an evil of humanity that lacks a redeeming quality and it is chilling.  In many ways Plainview is actually much more like Anton Chigurh, the brutal killer from “No Country for Old Men” (actor Javier Bardem won the Acadamy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of this character) than he is like Charles Foster Kane.  I cannot help thinking of Kane becuase of some similarities but in the end I really think that it is Chigurh who Plainview is really like.  Utter purpose regardless of all else in the world, and that kind of person should not exist because it seems that it is in them that a true monster is formed.

~Nathaniel 

Here is a really cool slideshow from The New York Timesof some of the works of art at the MoMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit.

I love this kind of merging or art, technology, and nature not only because it usually looks very cool but also because I think it says something about our own human connection to the world.  Arguably all art is in some way based off of the natural world around us but advances in technology have allowed both scientists and artists to view the natural world in new ways.  Once humanity was limited to only the senses we were endowed with but now we are able to observe things that even a hundred years ago we had no idea existed.  From the very small to the utterly enormous we have expanded the range of our perception of the universe and as such our artistic expressions are given new material to work with.  But not only does this expanded sense of the world and beyond give us material to work with for artistic purposes but it also allows for further increase in technology and science.  The natural world seems to do things very efficiently and by observing natural processes humanity has the potential to increase it’s own productions.

I find it all to be very cool stuff.

~Nathaniel

I originally intended to write about this article by Gary Kamiya entitled “Rock vs. Jazz” yesterday, but my computer was acting up and so I was unabel to give my two cents. 

The article appeared yesterday (February 19th, 200 on Salon.com one of my favorite websites to get news about politics, art, and entertainment.  I particularly enjoyed this piece because of my everlasting love of Rock music and my evolving appreciation and interest in Jazz.  Seeing Herbie Hancock win the Grammy for Album of the year was quite a shock to a lot of people, but personally I am of the opinion that it is high time that we see a Jazz musician get the respect they deserve for their complex and difficult art.

Personally, as far as music tastes go, I have spent most of my life as a fan of Classic Rock.  I credit my father with being responsible for my developing this particular musical preference.  Since I was very young my dad was constantly playing cassette tapes of great bands like The Beatles, The Who, Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, The Band, and many many more.   These musicians got ingrained in my mind.  In 7th grade while a lot of my friends were listening to The Wu-Tang Clan, DMX, and other rappers, I was blasting Floyd’s “Animals” and The Beatles “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (I really didn’t develop an appreciation for Rap until my college years, though now, I admit, I am partial to a number of artists in the genre).  Classic Rock maintained its position as my first choice in music all the way through high school (though by graduation I was moving into a bit of the broader Rock genre with Progressive Rock, Alt. Rock, Indie, etc).  It was college that really kicked off my quest to find enjoyment in music of every genre, and in particular it was my first roommate who got me to pursue this. 

Jeff was an amazing guitar player.  At 18 years of age he owned something like twelve guitars (four of which, if I remember correctly, we custom made by his father).  Though he denied it, I still think that Jeff must have had pretty near perfect pitch because of his amazing ability to be able to play almost any music he heard on his guitar just by listening for a few minutes.  He was a cool dude and I learned a lot about music from him.  Besides his talent at guitar playing he also played piano, drums, and I think saxophone and owned a huge collection of music.  Like me he was a big fan of the Classic Rock genre but he also liked everything else.  One of Jeff’s favorite genre’s was Jazz and he owned albums by artists like Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and many others.  Though I am sure that I had heard Jazz music before, it wasn’t until I was living with Jeff, listening to it play off of his computer or out of the CD Player, that I really started to get into it.  Jeff only attended one year at the same school as me but in that year I had been confronted by a whole new range of musical enjoyment. 

I continued my new interest in Jazz by frequenting the AV section of my schools library (where I just happened to work).  The AV section was quite impressive and had a large number of CDs as well as a ton of older vinyl records.  Most of the music selection was made up of Classical composers but there was also a very nice amount of Jazz and Blues available.  In three years time I am pretty certain that I listened to just about every Jazz or Blues CD the library had.

My personal favorite to this day has to be Miles Davis, I can’t get enough of his stuff.  “Kind of Blue” is without a question one of my all time favorite albums in any genre. Throughout college I would frequently put it on while writing a paper, or just as I was going to bed.  I have also gotten really big into Pat Matheny, John Coltrane, Sun Ra (whose Arkestra I got to see live a few years ago), Dave Brubeck, Wynton Marsalis, and several others.  Jazz is great, I love the stuff.  Just the other night I was out at a bar that had some live Jazz playing, it was quite wonderful (and took my mind off the fact that the drinks I ordered were really expensive).

I think part of what I really like about Jazz is the way it challenges me.  While I am a big lover of music, I am not in any way musically talented myself.  I know what I like to listen to but I cannot really claim to have a strong musical ear.  My mother and father have both on occasions said how they think that all Jazz sounds the same, which I will admit, I can see as being easy to say if one doesn’t listen to it regularly enough.  But that is part of what I love about Jazz.  The first time I hear a piece of music in the genre I might just think, “oh, here is some Jazz music.”  It is not until I really take the time to listen to an artist or a piece that I am really able to notice the uniqueness and subtlety of it.  I suppose all music is like this to a degree but to me it seems like Jazz has such levels and degrees that one can encounter with some serious listening.  Gillespie is different than Armstrong is different than Davis is different than whoever else you want to stick into the equation.  Sure maybe they all have effected and inspired one another in different ways, sure they all play in the genre called Jazz, but it is all unique and wonderful and awesome.  The fun, for me is finding these differences and seeing how they create a newness to the music.  Essentially, someday, I would like to be able to listen to Jazz recordings historically to really hear the influences and changes over the years, of course finding the time to do such a venture isn’t really all that easy.

I think pretty much all genres of music are great in their own ways.  Further I think it is important to experience the differing types of music that exist because music is such an important part of all human culture.  If you have not listened to much Jazz yourself I’d strongly urge checking some out.  Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” is one I’d suggest putting in the old stereo or the CD player in your car, it is absolutely fantastic.  

~Nathaniel

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” ~Marcel Duchamp

I am quite fond of the above quote by the artist Marcel Duchamp as I think it does a wonderful job at illustrating an important point about art.  To Duchamp art is more than just the product of the artist, but instead is the way in which that product’s existence interacts with an audience beyond just the creative expression of the artist.  I have long held a very similar belief, that, when considering artistic expression of any kind, one needs to look at more than just the creator or the creation but must try to see how both of those elements work with the greater realm of social and cultural significance.

I am very fond of Marcel Duchamp and his artwork.  Junior year in college I was in Poetry Workshop and we read a poem by X. J. Kennedy that had been influenced by Duchamp’s famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.  My professor in the workshop had an image of the painting projected from the Internet on the classroom screen (the same day in class we also read a poem by Joyce Carol Oates in tribute to Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks).  Duchamp’s abstract image of a woman walking down a flight of stairs captivated me immediately.  I am not sure why, but I found it to be a very beautiful piece of art.  A year later Mad, my friend Nate, and I went to Philadelphia for a long weekend and decided to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I did not know it when I first entered the museum but discovered awhile later to my sheer delight that they had Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 on display.  When I saw it I think I probably just stood captivated for about ten or fifteen minutes studying the piece.  It really amazes me how powerful an experience viewing a famous piece of art can be.  I had seen images of Duchamp’s painting before but at that moment I was actually looking at the real thing.  The painting is quite large, almost five feet tall, and I think I must have slowly inched closer as I was looking at it, because soon I found myself examining the very brushwork that had gone into the piece.  To date I think that the surprise of finding Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 has to have been one of my most profound experiences with a single work of art.  I remember as soon as I got back to school sending a lengthy e-mail to my professor from Poetry Workshop telling her how I had seen the painting and remembered the poem about it we had read in class.  I should also mention that the Philadelphia Museum of Art has quite an admirable collection of Duchamp’s works and I enjoyed getting to see some of them for the first time.   If you have not ever seen any of Duchamp’s paintings I recommend that you check them out as they are all quite good.

~Nathaniel

When I read an article like this one from CNN.com about the arrest of a poet in Myanmar (also sometimes referred to as Burma) I cannot help but feel grateful to be living in a nation that has a constitution whose first amendment protects my freedom of speech.  On the other hand I am saddened that even in the 21st century there are still many places in the world where voices are silenced by the will of oppressive governments.  Very often it seems that it is the voices of great minds that get smothered out in places in which a dictator or other figure holds absolute power.  With such consideration I have always been very anti-censorship and am disturbed when I hear cases of attempts at silencing expression here in this country.  Expression does certainly have the potential to upset from time to time and it is easy to think that allowing this or that to be silenced we are not really hurting anything, but if we decide that it is okay to prevent one form of expression how long before we deem another of also being dangerous or unsavory?   For me the stifling of freedom of expression is one of the most oppressive things that a government can do.  I urge people everywhere to fight for the freedom of their voices and ideas.  In the pursuit of a better world we need the power to express ourselves and our beliefs  because it is in that way we begin to enact change. 

~Nathaniel

Being an English major graduate I love finding any articles that discuss literature and debates that are going on in the literary world.  Sure a simple book review can be interesting but for me there is little better than a new good piece of criticism on a well known text or a heated debate about the quality of interpretation of works.  This article from the New York Times today is one of those debates I cannot help but enjoy reading about.

The whole problem deals with the transcription of some of Robert Frost’s notebooks in which there is claims of numerous errors by one side while the other side defends the transcription as accurate.  It is a rather lovely example of what gets literature geeks excited.  Having not read the transcription or ever seen the actual source notebooks I cannot claim to have much of an opinion on the accuracy or lack there of but I can say that with the use of primary documents being involved we are dealing with something quite fun.  

Interpertation in literature is obviously a big challenge and leads to all forms of literary discussion and criticism.  When we are given a primary source, such as an author’s notebook or journal, we are suddenly thrown a new loop in that we would like to assume that we are looking at something that is closer to the original source than say a novel or book of poetry that has gone through the whole editing and publishing process.  It is interesting to be able to look at the actual hand written notes of an author or poet but I do not know if I agree that this is giving us all that much more insight into the individuals works or not.  I know from personal writing experience that I write lots of notes and keep a number of varying drafts of works but I do not like to think that if someday I became successful and somebody found these notes and drafts that they would really be getting all that closer to understanding the actual piece of work.  The reason I write drafts in the first place is to experiment and the reason I take notes is because I often have many ideas floating around and note taking helps me decide which ideas to work with and which not.  I guess my point is that even when confronting a primary source we have to realize that interpretation must still occur to a degree because while we may like to think that a notebook is closer to an author’s actual thoughts the reality is that unless we are in his or her head we cannot ever actually know what the writer is thinking.

With all that being said though I think that when we are trying to present something as a transcription of a primary source we do need to scrutinize the details and make sure that we are transcribing accurately so as not to falsely display what somebody wrote.  So if the accusers in the case of the Frost notebook transcriptions are really certain that the transcription has been done poorly then it is worth the argument and debate and I would say it is important that more individuals get involved in to the scrutinizing process to determine the facts of the matter.

A little note on Robert Frost and my college years:  Robert Frost was a faculty member at Plymouth State University (where I got my Bachelor’s Degree) for one year in 1911.  Big deal right?  Plymouth sure thinks so.  There is a Robert Frost House on campus and a bronzed statue of Frost sitting on a bench outside of Round’s Hall.  I think that the most interesting fact about Frost’s teaching at Plymouth was that he did not actually teach poetry there but instead taught psychology.  When the statue of Frost first appeared on campus (I think it was my junior year) it freaked a lot of people out because this is a life size statue that just sits serenely on a bench while writing a poem.  The first time I saw the statue I remember thinking, “boy that old guy can sure sit really still” only to discover as I got closer that that was because the old guy was made out of metal.

~Nathaniel    

I think that this is a question that I end up bringing up quite often.  Who owns what?  A rather large question seeing that the natural response is “well it depends on ‘what’ it is that you are talking about.”  My friend Olivier wrote a post on his blog, The Brand Builder, today dealing with the question of ownership on the web and in regards to blogging specifically (incidentally I have not sent Olivier and email asking him if it is okay that I am referencing his blog but I am hoping that because I am giving him credit and linking to his page that we shouldn’t have any problem). 

The interesting thing for me is asking what makes something worth owning in the first place?  Personally I  would assume that it has to do with a value on which the thing creates.  Obviously if that which is owned can produce some sort of financial gain then it becomes an item of more value for owning.  But ideas also are taken quite seriously in the whole ownership deal.  Sure ideas can turn a profit in some ways but I think that often the importance of the ownership of an idea is merely the desire for the credit in saying “I was the one who first thought of that.”  Further more, probably everything that is of some value of ownership, whether it be an object that we purchase to own ourselves, a cooperate company, a work of literature, or any number of other things that are considered owned, all of them had to begin as an idea at some point.  Does that make the idea thinker the prime owner and one deserving of credit for the existence of the thing?  Does the person who first invented the coffee pot actual own the coffee pot, or does the consumer who buys the coffee pot own it, or the company that manufactures it?  Obviously I am being a bit absurd about this.  We know that we live in a system in which we have patents and copyrights which points to who owns what in a certain way and probably we don’t have to worry about Mr. Coffee Company employees coming into our houses to reclaim the coffee pot that they insist is theirs.  But I still have to wonder about ideas.  Who really owns an idea?

I suppose the challenge is in realizing that ideas are not something that can come out of void.  We, as thinking people, think in context to so many elements around us.  Take for example this blog post.  While I consider it an original piece (I am not stealing or plagiarising it from somewhere else, these are my original thoughts) I cannot deny that had I not read Olivier’s blog post I may not have thought to sit down and write this post myself.   Even the existence of this MadLord Innovations blog isn’t a complete original idea on my part as it is a cooperate between myself an Mad.  Ideas do not spawn out of vacuum, there is context from which they grow and originate.  Ideas are the incorporation of a whole number of elements including personal experiences, observations, the intake of other ideas, etc, etc.  So what is a truly original idea?  Does one actually exist?  My answer would be both no and yes.  No because again I do not believe an idea can just come from nothing, they are products of a whole number of different things.  Yes because somebody can take all the unique aspect that they encounter and use them to formulate a thought in a truly original way.  Perhaps the ownership is in the moment that we begin to think differently using what thoughts have already existed.

I have my Bachelor’s Degree in English with a Writing option which means that while I was in college I wrote a hell of a lot of papers.  One of the most emphasized things of importance that was ground into me in college was the use of proper citation whenever I was writing anything that referenced other works.  I have nothing against this because I think it is important to give credit where credit is deserved and when writing a critical paper often times many of the ideas you are dealing with are coming from other sources than your own sheer creativity.  Now that I am out of school I am not writing nearly as many papers that need a lot of citation (every once and awhile I write a little something in which I make sure to jot down bibliographic info in regards to who previously wrote or said what).   Recently I have been doing a lot more writing on blogs and often times I will post about quotes and links and online material that I find interesting.  I tend to agree with Olivier’s stance that if one is blogging and wishes to reference something else that they find on the Internet then providing the credit for who wrote it, or said it, or drew it, and also giving a link, is reasonable enough because honestly it doesn’t seem to me to be all that much of stealing any such thing it is merely referencing something that caught ones attention.  The matter becomes different when we see people trying to pass off others’ works as their own at which point I would have to consider it a theft and say that they need to remedy the way they are handling other people’s material. 

But isn’t it important that we also think about the way in which we make things public on the Internet.  I am constantly reminded about all the potential problems that can arise with sites like MySpace or Facebook and the content that users put in these websites.  Who actually owns that stuff? I believe you’ll find that the terms of use for such sites say that the site itself owns what is put on there and that the users need to be aware that the information they are sharing is being made potentially public.  But that is so even in the matter of my blogging here.  There is nothing that can really stop just about anyone from reading what I have written here.  If I do a Google search for my name this blog will actually turn up somewhere down the list (actually quite far down the list seeing that first several links go to some ancestor of mine from Ipswich Massachusetts).  The thing is that the Internet is not a private medium in which we can feel secure with everything.  If we are concerned about ownership then that is fine but we should realize how we willingly allow certain degrees of relinquishment of ownership depending upon where we put our material.

It is a great discussion that I believe will exist for a very long time.  Ownership and originality.  How do ideas move about the greater human culture?  I love thinking about it because it provides a challenge that I do not doubt will in itself spawn many new ideas. 

~Nathaniel