{"id":14556,"date":"2013-06-24T17:52:26","date_gmt":"2013-06-24T21:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/06\/24\/14556.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:06:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:06:19","slug":"a-zombie-novel-by-which-i-dont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/06\/24\/a-zombie-novel-by-which-i-dont\/","title":{"rendered":"A Zombie Novel, by which I don’t mean…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I see that Diana Wynne Jones’s final book completed by sister<\/a>, and that it will be out (from HarperCollins<\/a>, who at the moment don’t seem to have a page for it yet) in the Spring or Summer. And I, for one, am very excited about this—I have read more than a dozen of her books, and enjoyed very nearly all of them. Some of them I have enjoyed very much indeed. And while I don’t know any of Ursula Jones’ stuff, I don’t on the face of it have any qualms about her co-authorship. So: author I like having her ouvre extended posthumously by close kin: happy Vardibidian.\n

Oddly enough, one or two down from the DWJ story on the Publisher’s Weekly<\/cite> site is an article on An Anniversary and a Rebranding for Richard Scarry<\/a>, in which the Random Penguin is re-releasing some of Richard Scarry books with new covers. The writer of that article, Sally Lodge, interviews Richard “Huck” Scarry, Jr, who is a professional illustrator and who evidently has continued to produce Richard Scarry books after his father died. And I found the whole thing quite repulsive and commercial in the worst sense of that word: art-like works being produced merely to exploit a market. So: author I like having his ouvre extended posthumously by close kin: gripey Vardibidian.\n

Now, to be fair to myself, I’m not sure how anyone could ever read an article extolling the rebranding<\/strong> of anything without being disgusted by market capitalism. So I was in a gripey mood by the time I got to the bit about the kid (now nothing like a kid) continuing to milk the dad’s intellectual property. I was all primed to think of it as cheap commercial exploitation, because the rebranding is<\/cite> cheap commercial exploitation. Perhaps perfectly reasonable exploitation—hey, the market is what it is, and I have most of the Oz books in the Dover editions<\/a> with matching covers myself. Of course, the Oz world has its own exploitation issues.\n

And the kid—well, it’s like the zombie strips in the comic strip syndicates. I mean, really? I like the Busy, Busy World, but isn’t there enough Richard Scarry in existence? We need more?\n

The thing is, I’m sure “Huck” Scarry doesn’t think of himself as tapping his dad’s money factory. I suspect he thinks of himself as completing the work, guarding the legacy. Doing all the stuff that Ursula Jones thinks of her<\/I>self as doing. I think he’s wrong<\/I>, and I suspect that Ursula Jones is probably right—if I am in fact correct about their opinions of their own actions, which maybe not. Still.\n

And of course the whole other issue I have talked about before, where I remain deeply, deeply skeptical, as an American, of some sort of inherited right to profit from somebody else’s work, just because of a genetic link. Smacks of aristocracy to me—and I suppose I have to say, it smacks of that kind of nasty aristophilia that Diana Wynne Jones so clearly subverts in her books, over and over.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger judges books by their authors. Or authors by their books. Or living co-authors by their dead colleagues. Or something judgey, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16685,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14556\/revisions\/16685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}