Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2008 January 2

# (1) 02 Jan 2008, 01:51PM: What Do These Have In Common?:

• Tapestry
• The First Duty
• Pegasus
• Chain of Command
• Allegiance
• The Drumhead
• The Game
• The Masterpiece Society
• I, Borg
• Ensign Ro
• Loud as a Whisper
• Samaritan Snare
• A Matter of Honor
• The Ensigns of Command
• Lower Decks
• Rightful Heir
• Lessons

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# (4) 02 Jan 2008, 04:03PM: Yay For Our Common Heritage: According to a blog that watches the public domain, as of yesterday lots of works became free for all of us to reprint, remix, and generally be creative with. Depending on the country you're in, the magic year is probably 1937 or 1957 (the date of death of the author). Some of the authors whose works passed into the public domain yesterday:

• Russian novelist, playwright, and essayist Yevgeny Zamiatin (a.k.a. Zamyatin), author of the very weird dystopia We, written as Soviet Russia was beginning to show its true colors. I have bought one copy of We, and received one as an anonymous gift mailed to my workplace. And soon you can read it for free! Think Gogol.
• American composer George Gershwin, of George and Ira Gershwin.
• Bengali scientist and author Jagadish Chandra Bose. This is the kind of guy you thought died with the Englightenment. Wrote sci-fi, did groundbreaking physics and botany, all while Great Britain had India under its boot.
• French author Jean de Brunhoff, author of the Babar elephant books.
• American fantasy and science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu mythos. Whoooo! Scary!
• Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who freaking invented the radio (basically) (and oh yeah was a Fascist).
• American statesman and Nobel laureate Elihu Root, arguably one of the 100 most influential people in US history.
• Scottish novelist and dramatist J.M. Barrie (except for Peter Pan).
• French composer Maurice Ravel, famous for Bolero -- or is that chunk of work waiting till 2015?
• Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, a collaborator and rival of Sigmund Freud.
• American novelist Edith Wharton, author of about a zillion books including The Age of Innocence and The Buccaneers. No one except my sister and me remembers the Masterpiece Theatre presentation of The Buccaneers, featuring a guy exclaiming with a weird aristocratic accent, "I'm not a monster!"

As a celebration of our love for public domain literature, Leonard and I gave a Christmas gift to a few of his family: the Project Gutenberg best-of DVD. Leonard burned them and I decorated them with the label "Civilization: A DVD Archive."

For a measure of the long tail, check out the top 100 books downloaded from Project Gutenberg over the last 30 days. Half of them I'd never heard of before. Makes me wonder whether Leonard or I will be on that list someday.

It's your past, your cultural heritage, your public domain. Promote it, celebrate it, and use it, or we will lose it.

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