Today I got serious.  I emailed the permissions department of The New York Review of Books to start the process of securing the rights to use some of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s aphorisms as the chapter headers.

I use The Waste Books as translated by R. J. Hollingdale as my source.  Here’s where it gets funky:

• Translation, introduction, and notes copyright ©1990 by R. J. Hollingdale
• First published by Penguin Books 1990
• This edition published in 2000 in the United States of America by The New York Review of Books, 1755 Broadway, NY NY 10019

Normally, the copyright holder gives permission for this kind of thing [1], but the problem here is that Reginald John Hollingdale died in 2001.  I have no clue who holds the copyright at this point—heirs and assigns, sure, but who are they?

So the permissions department at NYRB is as good a place as any to start.

Lichtenberg is now more famous today for his aphorisms (written in his waste books) than his scientific research.  (He discovered the principles of xerography, for example.)  It was one of his aphorisms, in fact, that led to the founding of the Lichtenbergian Society in 2007.

Here are some of them:

• Every man also has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum. (B.12)
• Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure.  To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure. (E.36b)
• If you want to make a young person read a certain book you must not so much commend it to him directly as praise it in his presence.  He will then go and find it for himself. (F.141)
• It is good when young people are in certain years attacked by the poetic infection, only one must, for Heaven’s sake, not neglect to inoculate them against it. (L.69)
• It is true I cannot say whether things are going to change for the better, but what I do say is that things will never be right unless they do change. (K.102)

The epigraph for the book itself is “Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book.” (E.16)

The epigraph for the first chapter, “Introduction to Lichtenbergianism,” is “If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.” (L.23)

You get the idea.  It’s kind of important that I get permission to use the material. [2]

In other news, technology reared its ugly head this morning when my actual Lichtenbergianism file caused Scrivener to crash repeatedly.  I was beginning to panic at the thought that those particular 21,635 words were screwed, but (tl;dr alert) opening a copy warned me that the original file was “in use,” which of course it wasn’t.  A shutdown and a restart of the computer sorted out the confusion there, and we’re back in business.  Whew!

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[1] Which is how I got permission to set Nancy Willard‘s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn to music: she owns the copyright to the text and said “yes” with no hesitation at all.

[2] Or, of course, translate them myself, or have my German-Studies-degree son do it, or even my good friend Jennifer Schottstaedt who translates for money do it.

Today let’s look at one of the basic premises of writing a book and getting it published: do I have a good enough idea for a book?  We will pretend that we do not already know that this is the best book idea ever and explore the main questions as listed in The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published [hereinafter EGGYBP].

Audience. Who would be interested in reading a book about procrastinating and how to use that to become more creative?

Excellent question. As we’ll see when we go check out the competition, people really want to be more creative.  They are under the impression that reading a book will help with this—and who am I to disagree?  The current craze for adult coloring books, for example, feeds off this basic urge to MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT. [1] I talk about the genesis of this book in Chapter One as springing from a seminar I did at the Governor’s Honors Program in 2013—if the students’ response to the Nine Precepts is anywhere close to representative of a populace hungry for permission to create, then I think the audience will be solid.

Who knows?  This could be a niche book that only my friends and family will plow through, or it could become one of those freakish trends: “Become more creative by not doing anything!!”

Competition. If we go and look for books on creativity, there is no dearth of available titles.  Why add this one?

Leave it to an independent bookseller (hi, Janet!) to immediately link to a book about the benefits of procrastination, apparently also written in an entertainingly humorous style.  Missed that one in doing my research.  However, in the overall philosophy of Lichtenbergianism procrastination is really just kind of a gimmick to hook the reader’s attention.  There are eight additional Precepts that form a framework for getting your work done.

Also, most of the other books on the creative process are focused on specific fields: drawing, painting, writing, etc.  Lichtenbergianism is a concept that is usable in every field—and not just in artistic ones.  You can increase your productivity through TASK AVOIDANCE no matter what your job, hobby, or avocation is.

We’ll put off Marketability, Authority, and Salability until tomorrow.

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[1] In the book, I intend to set all our Precepts and Key Concepts in small caps.  Since my blog doesn’t do that, I’ll put them in ALL CAPS.  Ugh.  Bear with me.

Recently we traveled to Virginia to visit with the in-laws and to continue to help tidy up the old homestead in preparation for an eventual move, maybe perhaps.  One task this trip was clearing out the antique secretary in the living room (not to be confused with the antique plantation desk in the den), which meant looking through the collection of antique books contained therein.  I got an old edition of A Christmas Carol, and this:

What is it, you ask?  It is an actual field notebook, you guys!

For those of you just joining us, I am a huge fan of the Field Notes Brand notebooks, even going so far as to subscribe to their Colors quarterly special editions.  They are just the coolest ever; the recent Winter edition has a pure white cover that turns blue in the sunlight.  (I’ve written about them here and here and here.)

The company tells you on their website that they are paying homage to the old field notebooks given to farmers by one supplier or another as advertising, so when I opened my new find, I knew exactly what I had.

It has a leather cover, and I presume the front was stamped in gold which has faded.  The interior is fabric, cotton or linen, and you can see the stitching near the spine: that’s a pocket, both front and back covers.

The front pages are ads for Richmond Guano Co’s wares (fertilizers), followed by all kinds of helpful and inspirational platitudes.

The back pages are useful tables of yields and prices.  And the center…

…is the grid paper I’ve come to know and love as one of the papers used by Field Notes!  So cool, you guys!

It is unused, except for the top of that page on the left in the above photo and part of the last page of grid paper being torn out.  And finally…

It’s 115 years old.  Awesome.

Since I just realized that I have never actually blogged about the Nine Precepts of Lichtenbergianism, I shall do that now. (I have mentioned them once, but gave no explanation of them.)

As I explain in the upcoming Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, these Precepts spring from a seminar some fellow Lichtenbergians and I gave at GHP in 2013.  In preparing to sit in what turned out to be a crowded room and to discuss how putting off doing any work had actually made us more successful creators, I boiled down our experience to nine keywords.  In the seminar, we simply threw each term up on the screen and then all shared how they affected us as artists/teachers/programmers/veterinarians.

Here are the Nine Precepts:

1. Task Avoidance: Obviously. Cras melior est.
2. Abortive Attempts: Give yourself permission to create crap.  Lots of crap.
3. Successive Approximation: Give yourself permission to change what you’ve done.
4. Waste Books: Create a system to record your ideas willy-nilly.  Sort them out later.
5. Ritual: Find ways to make your work flow.
6. Steal from the Best: Pay attention to the past, learn from it, then run with it.
7. Gestalt: Look at your work and see what’s there and what’s not there, what needs to be there and what needs to be not there.
8. Audience: Have someone in mind.
9. Abandonment: Give up.

There’s a lot more complexity to these ideas, of course.  I discuss that in the book.  Reserve your copy today.  Or tomorrow.

In our topic today, ‘IP’ stands for ‘intellectual property,’ i.e., copyrights, patents, all those kinds of things that are not physical property but which are protected by various laws and lawyers.

Mostly lawyers.  Have you ever tried using a Disney character for some purpose of your own?  Try it sometime.  Leave the number of cease & desist letters you get in comments.  (For a saucy explanation of copyright protection and fair use of copyrighted materials, see: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo

So here’s my interesting scenario.  I’m working on Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, and I’m clipping right along at about 1,000 words per day thank you very much.

As I work, I’m collecting examples, images, quotes that support the Nine Precepts.¹ As I do so, I am quite aware of whether or not I will have to seek permission from a copyright holder in order to use those items in the book.  (I am aware mostly because Dianne Mize, in a letter describing her progress with her editor/publisher for Finding the Freedom to Create, described several roadblocks in finding a translation of the Tao Te Ching that she was allowed to quote from in her book.)

For the most part, I’ve used materials that are either in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license.  Direct quotes are cited fully in footnotes and bibliography and so fall under fair use.³

But today, in discussing the precept Steal from the Best, I directed the reader’s attention to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and explained how a good artist would “copy” the African masks which inspired part of Picasso’s painting (leaving them and our world unchanged), while Picasso, a great artist, “stole” the masks, changing both them and our world in the process.

I know for a fact that there are usage restrictions with the Museum of Modern Art’s image, because their website says so, right there on the painting’s webpage along with a link to the company that handles licensing for MOMA.  For such a small scale work as Lichtenbergianism is bound to be, I figure it cannot be worth even a small sum to secure the rights to the painting’s use.

So I’ve linked to it in a footnote.  The reader who is unfamiliar with the work can put that URL into the browser and see the painting immediately.

Will I have violated copyright law by doing so?  This is an interesting question to me.  I haven’t reprinted their image without permission.  I have referenced it, and I’ve provided the information for my reader to find it, and in fact I’ve benefited MOMA by driving traffic to their website.  But it could be argued (in court…) that I have used Picasso’s Demoiselles as an illustration in my book: the reader simply opens up the webpage and then reads along in Lichtenbergianism with the painting there before him.

updated to add: Moreover, it could be argued that I intended to illustrate my book with MOMA’s image, that if it were public domain or CCC-licensed, or if I had had the funds to license it, I would have included the image. (Why am I contributing to the unraveling of the Commons here by doing their lawyers’ work for them??)

The floor is now open for comments.

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¹ It occurs to me that I have not blogged specifically about the Precepts of Lichtenbergianism.  Tomorrow, perhaps.²

² That was a joke.

³ The biggie is the book of Lichtenbergian aphorisms from which I pull quotes.  My use of them exceeds fair use, and the translation I’m using is definitely copyrighted.  So I see a couple of exchanges with R. J. Hollingdale in my future…