From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 09/26/03-05:47:25 AM Z
Yesterday I wrote a post about oiled paper negatives, all the ins and
outs of oiling negatives, since I've oiled a ton of them, but when I was
done I couldn't make my finger click the send button. Not that I haven't
said most of the same things here before in one post or another, but
suddenly it feels very different to me; it feels like all I'm doing is
writing someone else's book for them. How much sense does that make,
exactly? So instead of sending the post to the list, I sent it to the
trash.
But at the same time the whole thing has started to tickle my funny bone
somehow; I mean, how would you even know what to put in? Someone asks a
question about gum, and back comes a cacophony of conflicting advice;
how would someone who doesn't know gum printing from an experiential
base even sort out which advice is useful and which isn't? It would
just have to all go in, I guess, and what a mess that would be!
Kate's right (and BTW I've been offlist for a bit so don't know if
others besides Kate have commented on this) a book written by
cutting-and-pasting from other people's observations rather than out of
personal day-in day-out experience printing gum wouldn't be very useful
and would inevitably get many things wrong, and there's some consolation
in that. I have noticed that when people have repeated back what I've
said here, more often than not I've only barely recognized it. It's kind
of like seeing yourself in a funhouse mirror; the parts are there but
they're in the wrong proportion to each other and reflect a distorted
picture of the whole. I'm not sure if I'd be more annoyed if my
contributions were appropriated without attribution, or if a mangled and
distorted version of my ideas was attributed to me. Either one would be
pretty darn annoying.
But lest anyone be confused about what I'm concerned about here, I
certainly wouldn't (couldn't) object to a book that included my
contributions, properly represented and properly cited. My contributions
to the list have been cited in books and other publications; as far as I
know, I've always been asked permission for the citation, and when asked
have granted permission gladly.
My objection was to the attitude that it is perfectly all right to lift
things from here and publish them without permission and perhaps even
without attribution, based on the flimsy excuse that copyright has
somehow been nullified by the way the information is archived, which of
course is not true.
Katharine Thayer
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