My mental circus, inside and out.

Intellectual property seems like an abstract concept until you find yourself infringed.  Then all the talk about the free marketplace of ideas and the liberation of creativity go right out the window.  Suddenly, it gets very real. So it has happened to Emma, whose book has been infringed by an opera company, and if it seems completely weird that someone is making an opera out of Emma's work (without asking or acknowledging), you can imagine how Emma feels.  Emma is in fact dazed, confused, and rather pissed off.  This is, in fact, causing more stress than she could have imagined, what with having to talk to lawyers and all the rest of it.  But even more importantly, what is the very root of this stress, the feeling of ownership of one's hard work and creativity.  Yes, ego, all ego, there's no doubt about it.   Emma understand perfectly well, in the abstract, that she owns nothing since she is not a stable entity that can own any other stable entity, all things being impermanent.  And yet, she cant get over this feeling of ownership and having been stolen from and at the same time being flattered that someone felt the story was good anough to be made into an opera. ' It is an intense internal struggle.  Why not just let them usurp it and who cares?  Because, at base, Emma can't give up her identity as a writer, as embodied in this book. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 18, 2007 00:35 | link | comments

So Emma is planning to buy a Honda Civic, and she goes online to shop for prices.  She discovers that owners of Honda Civics watch CSI and Law & Order and like to garden.  Yeah, women of a certain age, eh?  Drat, how transparent can ya be?

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 15, 2007 07:47 | link | comments

This is the first weekend in a long time that Emma has an empty house.  Wow, it's quiet.  Nothing has been very inspiring in Emma-world, nothing inspiring enough to blog about.   Watching the Republicans go down was fun for a while, there was some egotistic stress over a promotion bid, but mostly it's been as placid as a utopia, and everybody knows that in heaven, nothing ever happens.  It's really too nice in autumn for any kind of hell, the weather reaches a state of perfection for a couple of months before the ice blows in.  Even the headline today is merciful:  Humberto Bringing Beneficial Rains.  But then again, for some excitement, there's always poor Brittany.

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 14, 2007 19:57 | link | comments

In honor of Pavarottii.   Click.

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 06, 2007 21:04 | link | comments (2)

It was a really thrilling thing to go up into this clocktower of the basilica.  I grew up across from a courthouse that had a clocktower, but were never allowed to climb up into it.

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 04, 2007 19:59 | link | comments (1)