This is the latest book (which could be mistaken for any of his other books) from Lewis Hyde, your typical run-of-the-mill "popular" academic writer, who is BY NO MEANS a Revolutionary, but instead a REACTIONARY posing as a revolutionary writing a book which has NOTHING to do with Revolution! Do not be fooled, oh my Comrades, and stay away from this book! The owners of G'nosh franchises, if they actually read books, would read something like this! Here is the book description, taken from Amazon, that site of shameless capitalist propaganda:
"The question of how [Don't start a paragraph making a statement about a question -- just ask the fucking question!] our cultural commons [What the fuck is that? Isn't that where they used to pasture sheep together back in Merrie Olde Englande? And if it's common, then it doesn't NEED to be made compatible with copyright law!] , our shared store of art and knowledge [Okay, there IS no shared store of art and knowledge because art is and always has been elitist and becomes less and less interesting to the general public as time goes on, while "art" of the G'nosh variety is the "shared store" -- and KNOWLEDGE, well, who has THAT anymore?], might be [Or might not be. Take a stand! Is it or isn't it? I HATE all the prevarication and hedging in academic writing! Just fucking SAY SOMETHING!] made compatible with our modern age of stringent copyright laws [Actually, they've always been stringent since the first one in, what? 1710 or something? The one written under Queen Anne] , intellectual property rights [which obviously AREN'T as stringent as some people -- Hyde, perhaps -- would like them to be! Fucking capitalists! This whole thing is, of course, like everything, underneath it all really just capitalist propaganda] , and restrictive patenting [Sounds like they're talking about tight corsetry] is taken up with considerable brio [Okay, NOBODY in academia writes with "brio" since the standard for academic writing is mummy-grade aridity] by Hyde (The Gift) [Which sucked]. Moving deftly [For deftly, read "clumsily" and "clunkily"] between literary analysis [Always default to what you know, even if it doesn't apply. What the fuck does literary analysis have to do with copyright law? Oh, and, literary analysis = BORING!] , historiography [BORING!], biography [SUPER BORING!], and impassioned polemic [You mean "whiny meandering"], the book traces the idea of commonage [Whatever THAT is, as I said] from its English pastoral manifestations [See, it WAS where they kept the sheep! Quite a leap from sheepshit to art, Hyde. or maybe not] and pays particular attention to the American founding fathers' ideals of self-governance [They didn't believe in self-governance!] and civic republicanism [And if you can tell me how THAT fits in to all the other shit he's got going in this monstrosity of an academic piece of shit boring-ass readerless fuck of a book, I'll send you a prize] grounded in the vision of a public realm [Not the actual realm itself, mind you] animated by openly shared knowledge [When did THAT ever happen?] and property rights [How can you have the two together? WHAT?] that functioned for the benefit of society [Yeah, right] rather than individuals alone [This review has spun out of control. That sentence could have been taken from the text itself, it's so larded and loopy]. Hyde leaps nimbly [What, he's some tights-wearing fairy dancer now?], if sometimes too hurriedly [True, one's nimble leaping should be slow and deliberate. WHAT?], from the Ancient Mariner [Why? WHY? Spare me!] to the human genome project [Uh ... WHAT?], ultimately offering a vision of human subjectivity that is fundamentally social, historical, and plural [Oh, you mean like EVERY OTHER DAMN "VISION" OF HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY ever offered since, like, 1962?]. If the book is perhaps not wholly successful [Or even partially successful. Or perhaps just plain wrong. Or maybe just overly derivative. Or just FUCKING BORING!] in showing how we might concretely legislate [As opposed to abstractly legislate? WHAT?] for a cultural commons [Which he says we ALREADY HAVE] that would simultaneously allow for financial reward [FUCKING CAPITALIST!] and protection from monopoly [FUCKING CAPITALIST!], it is nonetheless a fascinating [I doubt that] and eminently readable [Now, I KNOW that's not true!] attempt ["There is no try, there is only do!" Thanks, Yoda] to coordinate commerce and creativity [Oh, yeah, because that's something a BOOK can do, shit] in what he sees as an increasingly restrictive economy of ideas [Including his own, which are shrunk to the size of walnuts in this retarded "attempt" to sound way smarter than he is]."
Avoid, avoid!
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