Linked Stories by Gina Isabel R.

At first I had intended to make a simple work featuring robots.

You’re not going to believe this, but it had fifty-four rejections. Fifty-four. Some editors are not particularly bright, so some of them didn’t understand it and wrote stupid letters. Some liked it, but felt it wasn’t publishable. And others wrote letters that sounded like Nobel Prize citations, but the kicker always was, “I can’t get it past the sales people.”

Cels are symbolic representations.

I’m making it for black teenagers.

It says in this book as a little game with itself: Reader is not going to use any of the references, then I deliberately use one four lines later just to be contrary in fact. Then there were a few facts I had to use since I had all these references to suicide. I didn’t want to leave out all important suicides.

R— is someone who is aware of the fact that even if she dies, there’ll be another to replace her, so she doesn’t value her life very highly.

As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. For an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first. For works first published prior to 1978, the term will vary depending on several factors.

For us, separately and in partnership, it is and always will be about the books. Your books.

When I was a boy Joyce was a titan.

14:00

The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.

Disregarding the intent of making that linework into a representation [of something] implies that it doesn’t communicate any idea at all, any concept at all. Under these conditions, the last episode wouldn’t be any better than a jumble of slogans [aphorisms/sentences].

Once you hold the prejudice that you can’t use anything but cels to represent characters, you’ve finally become a fetishist.

It comes from a Christian word meaning “Gospel” and it’s supposed to bring blessings. It has has some Greek roots. I chose the name because it sounds complicated.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

To express something is basically said to be the task of filling in what’s missing. It’s the effort to get an idea across to others. The effort of trying to make yourself look normal. Those who are unable to relate to strangers in a normal way try to do something shrewd in order to maintain their relationship with them. That’s what it is for me, at least.

I talk about the so-called Reader for roughly 20% of the book. In the last three, that figure is mentioned about 1½% of the time. Of course, the intellectual odds and ends are meant to convey a portrait of what’s in his mind. My object is to create him, too, and it seems to work.

And I was hoping that everyone else would want to see it too.

In other words, we’re offering viewers to think by themselves, so that each person can imagine her own world.

Examples of what might have caused the work to be in the public domain in the United States include lack of proper notice, failure to renew, failure to comply with manufacturing requirements, being a sound recording fixed prior to U.S. protection, and lack of national eligibility, that is, the source nation and the United States did not then have a treaty relationship.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.

This is not a merger of two widget makers that nobody will notice.

Don’t expect to get answers by someone. Don’t expect to be catered to all the time. We all have to find our own answers.

It’s a very big universe I’ve created and there’s a lot of stories sitting in there.

I borrowed from everywhere. Even names that have no bearing on anything actually came from the countless rules that govern these things. It might be fun if someone with free time could research them.

In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.

About the time that the production system was completely falling apart, there were some opinions to the effect that, “If we can’t do satisfactory work, then what’s the point of continuing?”

No one, no “person,” says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading.

Once this is finished, he’s done everything he’s ever wanted to do. He will have completed his task as a man and a filmmaker.

I thought the last scene meant to say that life goes on, but I could be wrong.

Authorial intent:

After a week pent up at home thanks to Hurricane Sandy, my response to our current readings (Reader’s Block and ”The Death of an Author”) in Zadie Smith’s class, mixed with my discussions with @skim_this regarding copyright, my marathon of NGE with Oscar, and feelings about the recent merger and $4 billion buy.

For sources, click on end punctuation.