Richer fare in melting pot
You may think you need the recipe for my pork, mushroom, cheese, pasta, anchovy, wasabi, soy and tomato bake, but you don’t. It’s a mongrel dish. I hit upon it by chance and so can you. Just mix the ingredients in proportions that seem suitable and you’ll know if it’s right when you taste it. There’s a muscle in the back of the knee that goes weak with pleasure.
I took a plate of Mongrel Pork to the sofa and turned on the television. The news was too grim to accompany haute cuisine, so I turned to the 17 channels of sport. In sport there are no bushfires or Trump. In sport the war is pretend.
We men claim to watch sport for the skill, the beauty and the teamwork. We lie. Skill, beauty and teamwork are frills. The thrills are partisan. So long as you want one side to win, all sports are watchable, even, astonishingly, darts. You just have to favour one tented behemoth over the other.
I watched the highlights of a sevens tournament, a weekend of football compressed into an hour. I knew the tournament was taking place in Cape Town, with Table Mountain belittling the action, but I didn’t know when.
It might have been last month or last century and it just didn’t matter. I wanted the Kiwis to win – even though they already had or hadn’t – so I watched to the end.
It can’t be long now before no more sport will need to be played. There will be enough recorded and it can just be shown in perpetual looping replay. By the time any game comes round for the second time we’ll have forgotten who won.
Sport is like war in Orwell’s 1984: the enemy keeps changing, but the purpose doesn’t, which is to keep the proles patriotic, eager and malleable. Sport and war are bromides.
The sevens players were magnificent specimens, honed and buffed like race horses, and like race horses they are shipped from place to place to perform. Dubai one week, Shanghai the next and Whocareswhere the following. I hope they find it as glamorous as they thought it would be when they were young.
As I forked pork I watched the Kiwi men’s and women’s teams progress to the playoffs. By the time they reached their respective finals I felt I knew the players. Most had skins in enviable shades of brown. And oh what names were pinned across their backs. Those names were palimpsests, were the history of these islands.
Hyphens abounded, not to yoke aristocratic dynasties but to record the hotch-potch of migrants. Risi Pouri-Lane and Ngarohi McGarvey-Black told of 200 years of melting pot.
William Warbrick might have played for the Tudor English, Theresa Fitzpatrick for the Anytime Irish and Tim Mikkelson for the Scandinavian All Stars but each wore black.
Huia Harding flicked the ball to Stacey Waaka who flicked it on to Ruby Tui, whose parents were surely Beatles fans. The family tree of Tyla Nathan-Wong must have roots around the globe and then there was Tone Ng Shiu. The one name missing from the Kiwi team sheets was Mohammed but I bet he’ll be there within a decade.
No other nation’s names bespoke such cultural blend. And no other nation could beat us. We won both cups. It pays to mix things up. In sport, in nationhood and in the kitchen, mongrel’s good.
As one decade ended and another began, the hacks of the world – in whose esteemed company I’m lucky to find myself – took to writing obituaries for our once great, once lucrative industry. The media was again in crisis, only this time the illness was terminal. They’re not totally wrong. Things aren’t all that flash for we hacks (a term I prefer to that cloying, condescending neologism, ‘‘content creator’’).
But our current crisis isn’t new – it’s simply the latest act in a conflict that goes back centuries.
The problem is the conflict between the ideas and content, which are ephemeral, and the usually physical media used to deliver them to consumers. Whether this column is being read on a website, via social media, or in a newspaper doesn’t change the fact that it’s owned by the publisher (my boss), but it does alter their ability to charge for it.
The problem had its greaktest airing in the
150 years after the reign of Queen Anne (the one Olivia Colman played before she did Queen Elizabeth II) in the early 18th century.
She formalised what we now know as copyright, but inadvertently sparked a brouhaha between the courts of England and Scotland, which were then, as now, distinct legal systems within Great Britain.
The Scots took a literal reading of copyright legislation, which said then that people would own copyright for a maximum of 28 years. After that time, books were fair game, or ‘‘public domain’’ in our modern argot. Publishers could (and did) buy books, copy the text inside them and sell their own cut-price editions. The Scots did a roaring trade, selling cheap editions far and wide. Some even made their way to Thomas Jefferson’s library in faraway Virginia.
The English took a different view. They looked at copyright like any other kind of property. You wouldn’t turf people out of their house they owned after 28 years, so how could you justify doing the same to poor authors by axing their copyrights after just 28 years – being an author is just like any other job, so why should the property they earn by doing it be treated differently?
The case was litigated all the way to the House of Lords, which sided with the Scots on most points. But it agreed that copyright was like all other properties. The difference, however, was that the writings of authors created such widespread public good that the property had to be extinguished after 28 years. This balanced the public’s right to knowledge (the ‘‘diffusion of knowledge’’ as it was put at the time), with the authors’ right to fair
Jeremiah 29:11
Windfall gains accrue to the creators of technology, rather than the creators of the content that populates that technology.
remuneration for their work.
This wasn’t the end of the story.
The problem with a 28-year copyright was that it often left authors’ children with no inheritance to fall back on. Writers were also frustrated that their copyrights would often expire just as their work was becoming well known. William Wordsworth famously said the best author must ‘‘create . . . the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’’.
He meant that the worst kind of writers write only for their contemporaries, while the true greats look ahead, create new fashions that may only be enjoyed when they’re on their deathbeds.
Technological changes reduced the cost of books, allowing more people to read them, but this didn’t always trickle down to authors’ pay. Alas, writing lasting literature tends not to be very lucrative. Wordsworth found an example in his contemporary, the penniless Robert Southey – a great writer in his own time, but perhaps today best known for coining the words ‘‘zombie’’, ‘‘autobiography’’, and for writing Goldilocks and the Three Bears – who experienced severe financial distress later in life.
Wordsworth lobbied Parliament intensely. Each year between 1837 and 1842 a copyright bill was brought to Parliament, debated, and shot down, before one finally passed that allowed authors copyrights that lasted seven years beyond their own deaths. The bills were the subject of intense opposition. Unions, the pro-democracy movement, even early suffragettes opposed them, all on the grounds it would make reading more expensive and keep knowledge in the hands of the privileged few. But a balance was struck, which kept books affordable and authors in work.
Once again, changes of technology have brought the work of authors, be they writers of novels or journalism, to larger audiences than ever before. But these technologies have severed the link between the author of a work and their customers. Windfall gains accrue to the creators of technology, rather than the creators of the content that populates that technology.
It’s not beyond the powers of governments to intervene, as they did in the reign of Anne, or in the 1840s. Intervention isn’t, as some would have it, an unnecessary interference in the free market economy. It would simply be the latest play in a delicate balancing act that goes back centuries, and has produced some of our greatest literature and journalism.