At last, Rita Mae brown and I have lift off. “Southern Discomfort” now reads like a letter from a long-lost friend. Montgomery, Alabama finally comes to life and it starts at page twenty. The writer’s aesthetic also comes clearer now: mayhem and confusion in the first five minutes or so. The language and the idioms are also rather new to me which Trevor and I try to discuss. Without a southerner or an American at hand it wasn’t easy but it is fun.

The other day he caught his sexton, Cecil Romble, singing “Hello, My Baby.” Linton pitched himself a fit and fell in it. Cecil Romble might never sing again after that display.

“Linton pitched himself a fit and fell in it.” “To pitch” in place of “to throw”, as when someone throws himself a fit. But to fall in it? It is meant perhaps to be hypocritical, Trevor explained.

“Southern Discomfort” presents the class and racial differentiation in the south of the United States of America. The dependence between these different sets of people is loud and clear that one almost forgets the line between the aristocratic and the working class. Only the middle-class sat somewhere alienated.

“The middle classes will endure anything so long as they can make money and be allowed their comic social pretensions.”

To be honest, I picked out “Broken Music” to read, a memoir, because I thought that I might write my own. My mom always spoke of why Trevor and I were moving to the countryside. She said it for us, “to write our memoirs.” Now, nearly finished with the book, I wondered about the original intention.

The repetitive drama of meeting a person or turning left or saying “no” that would forever, always forever and always drastically, change one’s life has come to a tiresome end. Could I ever really see my life like that? A past of episodic trails or a vivid picture of the effects of my choices on the future?

I had some chillies roasting in the oven when I finished “Girl with a Pearl Necklace.” Later that afternoon, I would roast some garlic while reading “Broken Music,” and burn them.

For now, I am happy that I have actually finished reading a whole book, from cover to cover. I cannot for the life of me remember ever doing that. Trevor asked how could I have finished university and even teach there if I couldn’t read. I thought that a totally reasonably question until I learned that my good old Auntie Frine who has a PhD in Education at Indiana University - in the 50s and 60s when people were intelligent and PhDs meant something - never went to the library to read or read a book in its entirety when she was at school. She remarked once, all you need to do is read the footnotes. But I suppose this was at a time too when footnotes had something to say. She also recalls being ‘forced’ into the library by a friend who had 'smuggled in' a bottle of perfume to share with her. The bottle crashed, the library smelled like a funeral parlor and they were promptly let out. That was the only and last time she had gone into the library. Decades later after her retirement from civil service, she taught Statistics at Graduate School, and yes indeed, I never saw her read or carry a book.

“My mother did not tell me they were coming.”

That is the first line in the book I am reading now. Yesterday, we walked down to the market, the Municipal Library and to the beach, about half a kilometer or so from our home. At the library I said to myself “I’m going to find a good book to read.”

The library was rather small, maybe 6 square meters in all, and most of its books were donations from people living in Baclayon. Trevor and I have donated books there ourselves. Trevor, some of what he calls “silly thrillers” of the likes of Wambaugh and Ngaio Marsh. Me, a book written by a friend, Alan Story, about international copyright law. I gave a copy to the library because I had two. Trevor has tons more “silly thrillers” collected from the second-hand bookshop in Quezon City over the 4 years we stayed there.

A few days ago, I tried reading a book. A novel. Trevor, a voracious reader, suggested that I read “Southern Discomfort” (1982) by Rita Mae Brown. A few times, Trevor reads out portions of the book to me, particularly the funny witty portions. From what I heard came to my mind the picture of a western rather than a southern.

My own attempt at reading wasn’t so successful. The novel started with two characters which merged together so well I couldn’t tell which was which. I had to read a few sentences twice, sometimes more. I told Trevor about my problem and he confirmed that even he had difficulty telling who was who, but on a more general sense - as in, almost all novels he’d read. Well, at least I’m not that bad!

A Commercial Economy of Commodified Knowledge
By Trevor Batten (Philippines)

This article is a response to the UK Guardian news article “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist” by George Monbiot, published in http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-... in August 29, 2011.

Can "Parasitic Practices" have a value?

The fact that "Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us" does seem a rather strange business. However, there are presumably good reasons why the system has developed in the way it has. Encouraging (or forcing) researchers to publish in free, open systems might help cover up the obvious symptoms -but will it actually cure the underlying problems which presumably lead to the current situation?

What might be some of these underlying problems?

A Commercial Economy of Commodified Knowledge:

Clearly, by choice or imposition, we live in a globalised commercial system in which making money generally appears to be seen as the most important human (or social) activity imaginable.

Tanáw: Seeing and Shaping the World in the Philippine Landscape
Fatima Lasay
(Draft version only. Please contact the Central Bank of the Philippines for more information about the book "Tanaw." Send email to the BSP Corporate Affairs Office thru cao@bsp.gov.ph or FDelacruz@bsp.gov.ph)

ABSTRACT. In this essay, we will define the concept of landscape through three elements: the horizon, ground distances, and the dialectic between nature and culture. Underlying these three elements are three principles: space and illusion governing the mechanism of vision and perception; picture grammars governing the different systems of representation; and philosophical balance, which governs a culture’s worldview and imagination of the universe. Utilizing these three elements, we may come to expand our understanding of landscape as social and cultural constructions, define it in both conceptual and visual terms, and ultimately differentiate and value the relationships between notions of intellectual and visual realism in the landscape.

The Filipino word “tanáw” means “visible from afar” or “seen from a distance.” The word also means “scene”, “view”, “panorama” or “landscape.” One can also say “tanáw” to mean “an expectation of satisfaction or advantage in the future.” In the aesthetic dimension, “tanáw” and “tánawin” are often associated with “gandá” or the concept of desirability. When one says “magandá ang tánawin”, the concept “gandá” is used as an orientation referring to physical and abstract beauty.

The English term “landscape” refers to a portion of land or territory and all the objects it contains which the eye can comprehend in a single view. In the pictorial aspect, landscape is a picture representing actual or fancied scenery, the chief subject of which is the general aspect of nature. The Germanic term landschaft first came into use in the fifteenth century to refer to an area of the land and to a way of seeing. The Italian paese was used at around the same period to refer specifically to paintings. The Spanish paisajes or representation of scenery came to the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period. While landscape is primarily a visual term used in painting, it has also historically become instrumental to the practical appropriation of land and to the expected appropriation of the natural or cultivated fruits of the land.

Is there anything left after property rights?
by Trevor Batten

All Property is theft -and Intellectual Property is Intellectual Theft!

As expressed in NIPPS, the country’s National IP policy is founded on what IP Philippines calls the “IP Value Chain.” According to NIPPS, there are three steps in the “IP Value Chain” – first. is intellectual capital or intellectual assets; second is the acquisition of intellectual property rights; and third is commercialization and value creation.

The third step in the “IP Value Chain” focuses on the creation and exploitation of the economic value of knowledge products. This third step is also considered in NIPPS as the “trigger” in the “IP Value Chain” because it supposedly starts the whole chain once more: “commercialization spurs competition, competition spurs innovation, and innovation spurs creation.”

Through the mechanism of the “IP value Chain”, NIPPS asserts the idea that creative and innovative acts are uniformly economic acts and that there exists a correlation between economic incentive on the one hand and innovation and creativity on the other. NIPPS also assumes an unproven economic motivation for all creative acts, and equates the motivations and interests of individual authors and inventors with those of vendors and markets.

- Fatima Lasay, ‘The National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy’ – personal communication, August 2009.

The NIPPS doctrine raises many questions -but perhaps a fundamental approach requires us to ask if the employment of the “economic incentive” to encourage the commercial exploitation of “assets” is both morally legitimate and practically efficient in a social context.

So what’s the problem?

A Rose by any other name would taste just as awful …

What’s in a Name?
by Trevor Batten

If one is planning the establishment of a “think tank” (or any other, similar, study group) involved in exploring the problems and potential solutions concerning any specific subject -then it might be essential to first think very carefully about how to define (and name) that subject before starting the “practical” work.

This is because the name given and the concepts associated with that name are very likely to have a powerful effect on the way both oneself and others will approach the problem: In most cases, the way the problem is defined will act as a powerful “funnel” channeling the creative process in specific directions -which may be difficult to deviate from -simply because deviations are likely to involve issues which were originally seen as being “outside” the (original) definition of the problem, and therefore considered as irrelevant to its solution.

Questioning the Connection Between Intellectual Creation, Commercialization and Commodification : A Challenge to the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines

By the Development and Intellectual Property Study Group 1

The National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS) is an initiative by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IP Philippines) that seeks to institutionalize the inter-agency coordination on the enforcement of intellectual property rights as well as increase the awareness of the Filipino public about intellectual property. The NIPPS document has since been submitted to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo during the first National Innovation Summit last November 26, 2007 and is currently being implemented by IP Philippines as the “Philippine Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy.”