Monday, September 26, 2005

Reality is the only true Shareware, copyright protected

So they always say, write about what you know. And I feel like I have a book inside. Not necessarily a novel, but a book of things. The only problem is the thing that I know best, or the thing that I recognize that I know the least about, is me.

When you read Dave Eggers, as I have frequently been doing of late, you recognize what must be his life in there. Obviously moreso in "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" than in "You Shall Know Our Velocity!", but it's still there. If you know about his loss, you know how he's describing it is very real and well known to him. And he probably talks the way Will does too. You always know that Mordecai Richler's characters were people he knew, but Dave Eggers seems different somehow.

But I don't like to put up pictures I've taken of other people in Flickr unless they say it's okay, because it's theirs. Or at least it's ours together.

And that's it, my life is co-owned. Not the way I experience it in my head, but the actual events, which one could describe in order to, in turn, convey the experience, which is the part that I know best, or maybe least...?

So is Toph really pissed off at Dave Eggers? Is whoever is Hand in real life, if they are in fact still alive, really pissed off at him too?

Just because it's shareware doesn't mean that their aren't those tricky moral complications of 'ownership', whatever that means.

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