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In ‘Languages of Truth,’ Salman Rushdie Defends the Extraordinary
- david-gpu 5y agohttps://archive.is/inJf2 https://archive.is/inJf2
- 52-6F-62 5y agoThere’s no paywall on the article. And we wouldn’t share license keys for software we might believe should be free, or ad free, so why is this acceptable?
- xdennis 5y agoWhen I come across old HN posts, some links are broken. If someone looks at this post 10 years from now he'll be thankful that someone bothered to post an Archive link. Edit: Also, many articles are edited with no transparency about what's been changed. It's useful to have to have the state of the article at post time.
- geokon 5y agoCouldn't you use the exact same argument for software? It too gets taken down all the time I never really understood how Archive.org operates. This is an honest question.. But they doesn't own this piece of writing, so what's the legal basis for them to redistribute it? Could they slap a few ads on their website and make some money as well? Can they host a copy of Harry Potter for instance? If I made my income from writing I'd prolly be pretty pissed if some chumps scrapped and re-hosted it. Do authors have any legal way to defend themselves? EDIT: https://archive.is/faq https://archive.is/faq "Will advertising appear on the archive one day ? I cannot make a promise that it will not. With the current growth rate I am able to keep the archive free of ads. Well, I can promise it will have no ads at least till the end of 2014."
- kijin 5y agoArchive.org operates on the same principle that libraries do. If you were an author, would you also be pissed that public libraries allowed anyone to read your books for free? If you don't like it, just put up a robots.txt to ban the wayback machine from your site.
- geokon 5y ago1) I assume b/c libraries purchase the book it's not equivalent. Do they purchase a subscription to the NYT and then lend it out to people? From what I gather on their website it doesn't seem like it 2) I'm not sure why you just made that up .. https://archive.is/faq https://archive.is/faq "Why does archive.is not obey robots.txt? Because it is not a free-walking crawler, it saves only one page acting as a direct agent of the human user. Such services don't obey robots.txt (e.g. Google Feedfetcher, screenshot- or pdf-making services, isup.me, …)"
- kijin 5y ago1) There doesn't seem to be much difference in terms of "lost sales" (a common metric in copyright disputes) when a library purchases 1 copy of a book and lends it out to 100 people, versus when the Internet Archive purchases 0 copies and lets 100 people view it. Edit: Besides, the way the FAQ describes it ("acting as a direct agent of the human user"), we can't preclude the possibility that they're getting content through a paying subscriber's account. The Internet Archive used to collaborate with Alexa, which is known to have used browser plugins to collect data from users' browsers. 2) It used to work reliably a few years ago, but it seems that they changed their policies and my knowledge is outdated. Sorry about that. In any case, the New York Times is perfectly capable of putting up a paywall on any subset of visitors they want, but chose to turn a blind eye on a broad set of crawlers -- presumably because they want the Google traffic. That could be seen as tacit consent to being crawled, so I'm not sure how much legal ground they're going to have if they later decide to sue the crawlers.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y agoI think part of the confusion is that they were referring to archive.org, which is a service of the Internet Archive. Archive.is is a separate site run by someone else, operating under different guidelines. There is no need to be rude over a misunderstanding.
- 52-6F-62 5y agoI could assert all kinds of qualifiers as to why I should get everything I want for free, too. That doesn't mean I'm justified. And this isn't a document of immense historical import we're discussing. It's a short (and if you ask me, incompletely considered) book review. Just the same, if it were my work and people wanted to read it but they didn't want to pay I'd be at minimum very hurt, and probably pretty angry if they just started helping themselves to it while trading nothing in return. I'm sure you would be, too. It's a bit of a professional slap in the face that one's work should apparently be free for all, but software should be highly paid for. Especially in a forum where a large number of the participants are highly paid relative to the rest of the world.
- david-gpu 5y agoI think whether or not there is a paywall depends on the reader. There was a paywall for me, which is why I liked to archive, as a service to others. Have a nice day.
- 52-6F-62 5y agoAh you may be right about that the paywall. There was none for me, only a “call to action”. I understand why people use those links, but given we’re in a technical forum it probably stands that people know how to leverage those services themselves.
- ttonkytonk 5y agoI could not have read the article without the provided link. At least I'm assuming I could not - I didn't want to risk using the data (the link took only one mb).
- 52-6F-62 5y agoI thought it was clear I wasn't judging anyone's personal use of archive.is or any other internet archive or slimmed-down reader-view—just remarking on the sharing of those links on a professional forum. The widespread sharing of those links shows a pretty great lack of regard for the work on the other end. It's highlighted when it's the only top-level comment on a submission on a forum like HN.
- arbitrage 5y agooh gosh but you're wrong?
- ekianjo 5y ago> And we wouldn’t share license keys for software we might believe should be free, or ad free, so why is this acceptable? Why do you care? The NYT's business model does not depend on shoving ads on eyeballs only, they have memberships too.
- 52-6F-62 5y agoI care because they’re people as much as any of us are, and I don’t believe we should be sharing software keys or Netflix passwords on here, either, even (or especially) if everyone attending the forum is fully capable of acquiring free access for themselves. All major publishers rely on multiple revenue streams to pay the bills. I’m not waging any moral arguments about anything except that I’m just saying I don’t think it’s appropriate to share around those links in the forum. It’s about showing a modicum of professional respect.
- balfirevic 5y agoSharing paywall workarounds is endorsed by the mods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
- 52-6F-62 5y agoI'm not a mod. I'm just a guy with an opinion. It does make me curious about their stance on software keys.
- doggodaddo78 5y agoIt's paywalled for me.
- nineplay 5y ago> the classroom imperative to “write what you know” has led to dullness, angst and dead ends: cold and bony literary mumblecore. I agree with this, I think modern "serious" fiction has gone away from the idea that you should write an interesting story[1] and has turned into kind of a dull sludge. Though to contradict myself, I think when some modern writers do tip their toes into fantasy they do a dreadful job[2]. Still Rushdie may just be making excuses, his earliest novels were amazing but his last couple just seemed plain lazy. It's a bit snotty to blame some kind of literary zeitgeist. [1] By comparison, I think Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner could all write interesting stories that were certainly literary. [2] See Kazuo Ishiguro
- mtalantikite 5y agoPersonally I blame the entire Iowa Writers' Workshop for this. The publishing game for a long time now has been you go to Iowa and get a six-figure advance from a major publisher, putting out a technically solid and utterly boring work of literature. Then a bunch of those graduates go and teach at all the MFA programs and here we are. I'm always reminded of Toni Morrison: "I tell my students; I tell everybody this. When I begin a creative writing class I say, 'I know you've heard all your life, "Write what you know." Well I am here to tell you, "You don't know nothing". So do not write what you know. Think up something else. Write about a young Mexican woman working in a restaurant and can't speak English. Or write about a famous mistress in Paris who's down on her luck."
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoIsn't this the opposite of the modern zeitgeist on this topic
- browningstreet 5y agoMaybe the noisiest current of our zeitgeist is on the wrong foot.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
- paxys 5y agoI always look forward to anything Salman Rushdie writes. Midnight's Children introduced me to reading and writing back in the day and literally changed my life.
- jancsika 5y ago> Rushdie fears that writers no longer trust their imaginations, and that the classroom imperative to “write what you know” has led to dullness, angst and dead ends: cold and bony literary mumblecore. Sounds like advice from someone who lives in a bubble. There is an enormous number of aspiring anythings who are too afraid to start doing a thing. If you ask them to just "do what they know," these people would respond that what they know cannot possibly be worth doing. The next obvious step is to get them to do that thing. Complaining about this obviously useful step is like criticizing Bobby Fischer for encouraging so many kids to use boring chess openings of moving a pawn. It's unwitting comedy.
- 52-6F-62 5y agoI agree with you. At the same time, it seems like an interesting discussion to be had, but it started the wrong way. I have to apply it to songwriting because that's an area I have more experience. Most (if not all) of the songwriters I've ever admired tended to come from the same place (paraphrasing here): "the song chose me, I didn't choose the song—it came on the wind/from intuition/from somewhere else/I only channeled it". Usually pointing to some sensitivity to the unconscious and imagination, collective unconscious, intuition, or even to the spiritual. The best songs (my opinion, don't shoot) tend to come from songwriters who make those kinds of claims about their creative process. There's definitely nothing "bubbly" about how some of those songwriters got started. Many of them came from no means and even less education. Ignoring automatic writing and similar techniques, more authors seem to assert more agency than songwriters on the same process. It's probably true in most cases. Rushdie almost sounds more like a songwriter here, except that he hangs it all on something so concrete as a single philosophy. I kind of like his statement, but I don't think it's a complete thought. I don't know if that's due to Garner's interpretations or if it's really what Rushdie meant in total. Then again, I've held similar opinions about classrooms when it comes to music; that learning to play music at the Royal Conservatory or at Berklee will provide you with all kinds of tools and industry knowledge, but don't really teach intuition. Can they? How many John Prine's has Berklee turned out? Maybe he should have said something even more concrete: don't just end your education in the classroom, get out there and feel something and then put it all together. It's not enough to match the form, after all.
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- doggodaddo78 5y agoI don't see how a writer has to or should be limited to the false dichotomy of what they know or only to magical realism and fantasy. Mix the two however you like. Furthermore, I wrote a few almost "novella" drafts in the throes of COVID lockdown due to isolation, loneliness, and "cabin fever" where my mind began auto-generating fantastical stories in the imagination comprising different people, places, and nearly outlandish, but still plausible within the suspension of disbelief, plot-lines. One centered around Latinx polygynous (I would call that a sizable cultural taboo) tensions between two respectable families and criminal one. PS: Currently rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Coincidentally, there are still Márquez banners up at UT about the archive exhibit.
- Jiro 5y agoAt the time of the Satanic Verses controversy, there was the irony that he wrote things that were anti-colonial and anti-Western... and his life was threatened by third-worlders with a religious philosophy that directly contradicts Western ideas about freedom of speech and religion, while the West had to protect him from those third-worlders.