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June 16th marks the hundred-and-second anniversary of Bloomsday, the date on which the events in James Joyce's "Ulysses" take place. There will be the customary commemorative celebrations surrounding Leopold Bloom's famous walk through Dublin: public readings and festivals in cities around the world, including Dublin, New York, Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Melbourne. In Budapest, two hundred or so academics will convene a Joyce symposium—the twentieth to be held on Bloomsday.
There is a chance that Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce, will go to Budapest. He lives in the French town of La Flotte, on the Île de Ré, off the Atlantic Coast. He loves the island, which is the Martha's Vineyard of France, but he has sometimes been willing to leave it when academics have invited him to attend Joyce commemorations and symposia. The scholars' courtesy is, in part, tactical: Stephen is Joyce's only living descendant, and since the mid-nineteen-eighties he has effectively controlled the Joyce estate. Scholars must ask his permission to quote sizable passages or to reproduce manuscript pages from those works of Joyce's that remain under copyright—including "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake"—as well as from more than three thousand letters and several dozen unpublished manuscript fragments.
Sometimes, Stephen has declined an invitation to a gathering but then appeared anyway; more than once, he has insisted that the assembled scholars make room for him on their program. The aim of his presentations has been to question the value of academic criticism. "If my grandfather was here, he would have died laughing," he likes to say. At a 1986 gathering of Joyceans in Copenhagen, he explained that "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" can be "picked up, read, and enjoyed by virtually anybody without scholarly guides, theories, and intricate explanations, as can 'Ulysses,' if you forget about all the hue and cry."
Stephen is a handsome man of seventy-four, with a gray beard, sloping forehead, and deep-blue eyes—he looks the way Joyce might have looked if he had not smoked and drunk himself to death, at fifty-eight, in 1941. Stephen sometimes walks with an ashplant, just as his grandfather did. At academic conferences, he is combative and sardonic. "I am a Joyce, not a Joycean, and there is more than a nuance to that fact," he often says. And he insists on being addressed as Stephen James Joyce, his full given name.
His audacity and his pique have amused some Joyceans, and at times the Joyceans have provoked him. "Should you care to observe some of our proceedings or interfere with them, you would be welcome to join us at any stage—and naturally, the usual conference fee would be waived," an invitation to a 1996 Zurich Bloomsday symposium read. Stephen wrote back, "When you and your colleagues disagree, have opposing views, or engage in unseemly scholarly brawls this constitutes dialogue, exchange of views, differences of opinion. When I express my opinions orally or in writing this is labeled 'interference'—most instructive and interesting."
Over the years, the relationship between Stephen Joyce and the Joyceans has gone from awkwardly symbiotic to plainly dysfunctional. In 1988, he took offense at the epilogue to Brenda Maddox's "Nora," a biography of Joyce's wife, which described the decades that Joyce's schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, spent in a mental asylum. Although the book had already been printed in galleys, Maddox, fearing a legal battle, offered to delete the section; the agreement she signed with Stephen also enjoined her descendants from publishing the material. Shortly afterward, at a Bloomsday symposium in Venice, Stephen announced that he had destroyed all the letters that his aunt Lucia had written to him and his wife. He added that he had done the same with postcards and a telegram sent to Lucia by Samuel Beckett, with whom she had pursued a relationship in the late nineteen-twenties.
"I have not destroyed any papers or letters in my grandfather's hand, yet," Stephen wrote at the time. But in the early nineties he persuaded the National Library of Ireland to give him some Joyce family correspondence that was scheduled to be unsealed. Scholars worry that these documents, too, have been destroyed. He has blocked or discouraged countless public readings of "Ulysses," and once tried unsuccessfully to halt a Web audiocast of the book. In 1997, he sued the Irish scholar Danis Rose, who was trying to publish a newly edited version of "Ulysses," calling it "one of the literary hoaxes of the century." (Around the same time, Stephen expressed his intention to obstruct a proposed new edition by the American scholar John Kidd; he told the chairman of Kidd's publisher, W. W. Norton, that he was "implacably opposed" to the project, which was never completed.) According to Hans E. Jahnke, Stephen's stepbrother, who once had a stake in the Joyce estate, the suit against Rose, which lasted five years, cost the estate roughly a hundred thousand dollars. The estate won the case. In 2004, the centenary of Bloomsday, Stephen threatened the Irish government with a lawsuit if it staged any Bloomsday readings; the readings were cancelled. He warned the National Library of Ireland that a planned display of his grandfather's manuscripts violated his copyright. (The Irish Senate passed an emergency amendment to thwart him.) His antagonism led the Abbey Theatre to cancel a production of Joyce's play "Exiles," and he told Adam Harvey, a performance artist who had simply memorized a portion of "Finnegans Wake" in expectation of reciting it onstage, that he had likely "already infringed" on the estate's copyright. Harvey later discovered that, under British law, Joyce did not have the right to stop his performance.
Stephen has also attempted to impede the publication of dozens of scholarly works on James Joyce. He rejects nearly every request to quote from unpublished letters. Last year, he told a prominent Joyce scholar that he was no longer granting permissions to quote from any of Joyce's writings. (The scholar, fearing retribution, declined to be named in this article.) Stephen's primary motive has been to put a halt to work that, in his view, either violates his family's privacy or exceeds the bounds of reputable scholarship. The two-decade-long effort has also been an exercise in power—an attempt to establish his own centrality in regard to anything involving his grandfather. If you want to write about James Joyce and plan to quote more than a few short passages, you need Stephen's consent. He has said, "We have proven that we are willing to take any necessary action to back and enforce what we legitimately believe in." Or, as he put it to me during two phone calls that he recently made to me from La Flotte, "What other literary estate stands up the way I do? It's a whole way of looking at things and looking at life."
The first time that Stephen called me, he seemed to be in a good mood. He said that he and his wife, Solange, had just returned to La Flotte from a trip. He noted that a letter I had sent requesting an interview had pleased him, but added, "I am not ashamed of my middle name. It's Stephen James Joyce." (The second call was less cordial, and he declined my request to visit him in France.)
In our conversations, Stephen spoke proudly about his fights with scholars. "I am not only protecting and preserving the purity of my grandfather's work but also what remains of the much abused privacy of the Joyce family," he said. He added, "Every artist's born right is to have their work . . . reproduced as they want it to be reproduced." This was particularly important in the case of Joyce, whom he calls Nonno_—_the Italian word for grandfather. Stephen said that Joyce's genius could be found in his several books. (His own library of Joyceana, he once told Le Monde, "is less than a metre wide.") He did not see what the two hundred and sixty-one works of criticism in the catalogue of the Library of Congress, say, could add to this legacy. Academics, he said at one point, are "people who want to brand this great work with their mark. I don't accept that."
He depicted himself as an average reader who wanted other average readers to share in the pleasure of what he had discovered only later in life. In school, he once said, English was his worst subject; for many years, he had been intimidated by his grandfather's writing, and had not read it. Eventually, he said, he read "Dubliners," then moved on to "A Portrait of the Artist" and "Ulysses." (He did not mention "Finnegans Wake.") He had found the books not only readable but appealingly human. "As I got older, I realized Joyce is not the difficult writer they say he is," he said. "When they say, 'We've done so much for him,' I think, What about the thousands, not to say millions, of readers they scared off? All this crap they write—that's good old American slang!"
To him, the three books form a single Bildungsroman closely based on James Joyce's own experiences. "The sixteenth of June is 'Ulysses' Day," he said. "Bloom is not mentioned until the third chapter. Why is so much more, then, written about Leopold Bloom?" His relationship with the characters was the reverse, he implied: "Stephen Dedalus is, in a very important sense, Nonno's character."
Stephen discussed some of his ground rules for dealing with scholars. He looked askance at academics whose requests contained typographical errors; such slips promised sloppy scholarship. More important, he added, the Joyces' private life was "no one's fucking business." (This claim, it can be argued, clashes with his notion that Joyce's work is essentially autobiographical.) And then there were the Irish. If he ever had the energy, he said, he would write a book on "the shitty treatment my grandmother and grandfather got from their country of origin." Nora had contemplated reburying Joyce's body on native soil—he had been buried in Zurich during the Second World War—but Irish officials rebuffed the idea. Worse, when Joyce died, Ireland did not send a representative to his funeral. Stephen had been almost nine, and he saw the family's dismay. "I will never forgive that," he said.
Stephen was funny and playful on the phone, although a subtext of anger was often evident. Acknowledging his pugnacity, he said, "It is better to be pissed off than pissed on." He said that he didn't much like the work of Vladimir Nabokov, though perhaps he had just "read the wrong book"; he admired William Styron's "Tidewater Tales"; and he thought "the only worthwhile book published in the past twenty years" was a novel by the Irish writer John McGahern. He also admired the poet Patrick Kavanagh, who had written the first anti-Joyce-industry poem, in 1951: "What weapon was used / To slay mighty Ulysses? / The weapon that was used / Was a Harvard thesis."
Stephen's parents, Giorgio Joyce and Helen Kastor Joyce, had lived in the New York City area during part of the nineteen-thirties, and Stephen's English was infused with the slang of that era. He talked about opening his "yap" and "getting a fair shake." He also displayed many of his grandfather's traits: the passion, the certainty, and the sense of aggrievement. (Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James, memorably called Joyce "the Injustice Collector.") Stephen had a melancholy side to him as well. "I have no children," he said. "The line dies with me." He wondered if his focus on the estate had "ruined" his wife's life. And he told me, "Stephen James Joyce is weary with hunting and fain would lie down"—quoting the ballad "Lord Randall." Moments later, however, he'd be swearing once again to defend the estate. Academics, he declared, were like "rats and lice—they should be exterminated!"
Stephen Joyce is hardly the first executor of a literary estate to resist the agenda of scholars. T. S. Eliot's widow, Valerie, has opposed all biographies of her husband in the forty years since his death, and has withheld the balance of his letters—a first volume appeared in 1988—for almost two decades. A former assistant, writing in an English newspaper last year, recalled Valerie's distaste for members of the "Ph.D. industry" and her "dry, formal, excessively polite notes giving them the least help possible." Marianne Craig Moore, the niece of Marianne Moore, has been unusually strict with permissions; in 1989, she demanded that a biographer remove all quotations from the poet's unpublished letters. Ted Hughes destroyed Sylvia Plath's journal of their last months together. "I did not want her children to have to read it," he said.
Stephen has made his presence felt on a much broader front. Most prickly literary estates are interested in suppressing unflattering or intrusive information, but no one combines tolltaker, brand enforcer, and arbiter of taste as relentlessly as Stephen does, and certainly not in such a personal way. In 2003, Eloise Knowlton, a Joycean and a novelist, asked permission to publish a fictional version of "Sweets of Sin," the risqué novel that Bloom picks up for his wife, Molly. ("Ulysses" offers only a glimpse of its contents.) Stephen wrote back, "Neither I nor the others who manage this Estate will touch your hare-brained scheme with a barge pole in any manner, shape or form." When turning down a request for permission from an academic whose work was going to be published by Purdue, he said that he objected to the name for the university's sports teams: the Boilermakers. (He considered it vulgar.) Michael Groden, a scholar at the University of Western Ontario, spent seven years creating a multimedia version of "Ulysses," only to have Stephen block the project, in 2003, with a demand for a permissions fee of one and a half million dollars. (Before Stephen controlled the Joyce estate, such fees were nominal.) Groden's sin was to have praised Danis Rose's edition of "Ulysses" as "confident and controversial," in a reader's report for Rose's publisher; he had also helped the National Library of Ireland to evaluate some Joyce drafts prior to acquiring them. "You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you'll never quote a Joyce text again," Stephen told Groden.
Stephen's hostility toward scholarship is striking, considering the intricate and allusive nature of his grandfather's work. Interpreters were there at the beginning—Stuart Gilbert's guide to "Ulysses" appeared in 1930, only eight years after the book's European publication. And it is hard to imagine Joyce's books without all the books that have been written about them. As Joyce told one of his translators, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
It is also not easy for scholars to decode Joyce's puzzles without addressing his personal life. Joyce frequently said that he drew his events from the newspapers and his observations from his life. "I'm like a man who stumbles," he once said. "My foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I'm in need of." In "Finnegans Wake," Joyce describes a character whose work is written "over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body."
More than a dozen Joyce scholars told me that what was once an area of exploration and discovery now resembles an embattled outpost of copyright law. Robert Spoo, who used to edit the James Joyce Quarterly, which is published by the University of Tulsa, quit the job to become a copyright lawyer. "New biographies, digital representations of Joyce's work, analyses of Joyce's manuscripts, and, to a lesser extent, criticism—they hardly exist," he said. "People either despaired of doing them . . . or the demands were so high that they just didn't feel it was worth continuing the discussions." Although more than fifteen hundred letters and dozens of manuscript drafts have been discovered since Stephen gained control of the estate, scholars told me that no new biographies of Joyce or his family are under way. The estate has not licensed online versions of "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake," seminal works for hypertext theory. Anyone who plans to study Joyce today has to wonder whether it will be worth the strain. In 2003, Thomas Staley, the director of special collections at the University of Texas, in Austin, folded the Joyce Studies Annual after twelve years, in part to avoid dealing with Stephen. "He is an almost impossible person," Staley told me. (Buck Mulligan to Dedalus: "O, an impossible person!")
Once, the death of a major literary figure marked the moment when scholars could interpret his work with genuine freedom. After Proust died, for example, academics began excavating the connections between his homosexuality and his art. Yet when Stephen Joyce succeeded in muffling a whole field of study with a combination of litigation and bravado, others took notice. Paul Zukofsky, the son of the poet Louis Zukofsky, said of Stephen's efforts, "What I've heard sounds very, very good. He is a staunch defender of rights." The Samuel Beckett estate sues theatre companies that mount unorthodox productions of the plays. A year after Stephen announced his suit against Danis Rose's "Ulysses," the Nabokov estate fought an unsuccessful battle to prevent the publication in English of "Lo's Diary," an Italian novel based on "Lolita."
Joyceans find it especially galling that the estate representing one of the most censored writers of his day—"Ulysses" was banned in America until 1934—has itself become a censor. A few have been outspoken in their anger. Michael Groden, the Western Ontario professor, recently gave a talk at Cornell about the Joyce estate, during which he projected images from a book called "Take the Bully by the Horns: Stop Unethical, Uncoöperative, or Unpleasant People from Running and Ruining Your Life." Others have tried to befriend Stephen, even knowing that such ententes usually end badly. Sam Slote, the co-editor of the forthcoming book "How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake,' " who enjoyed Stephen's patronage for a time, joked, "It's sort of like the moment of death. You know it's coming. You just don't know when and you don't know why." Some scholars plan to wait until Joyce's unpublished writings enter the public domain, in 2012.
This is a risky strategy, however, because copyright law has proved to be highly elastic. Copyright has its origins in eighteenth-century English law. In America, the idea that authors and inventors, for a time, should exclusively collect profits from their work was embraced by Congress, which initially provided for copyright to extend for a maximum of twenty-eight years after a work's creation. But over time the copyrights for recordings and Hollywood films proved extremely valuable, and American corporations persuaded Congress to lengthen the term of protection again and again. (Writers and their estates were the accidental beneficiaries of this process.) Most recently, in 1998, Congress added twenty years to the term of copyright. As a result, any work created by an individual is now protected for at least seventy years after the creator's death. Had the bill not passed, the burst of American creativity in the nineteen-twenties and thirties—everything from Bugs Bunny to "Rhapsody in Blue"—would have soon passed into the public domain. Disney, for instance, would have lost the rights to Mickey Mouse in 2003. (Critics call the 1998 extension, which Disney lobbied for heavily, the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.)
There is an element in American copyright law that allows people to make "fair use" of protected work: a scholar, critic, journalist, or parodist may reproduce a modest portion without permission. But "fair use" has proved extremely hard to define. How many words can be quoted? From how many works? What about unpublished texts? Moreover, European law does not explicitly recognize "fair use." As a result, Joyceans are often unsure if they are violating the law, and when the estate objects they usually give in.
Yet, for the first time, a Joycean is fighting to free herself from Stephen's control. In 2002, Stephen learned that Carol Loeb Shloss, an English professor at Stanford, was about to publish "Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake," a life of his mentally ill aunt. Stephen wrote to Shloss, implying that he might sue if she quoted from copyrighted material. He pressured her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which asked Shloss to cut many quotations. An expurgated version of the book was published in December, 2003.
In the midst of her fight with Stephen, Shloss met Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, who was willing to take on her case pro bono. Lessig had just argued before the Supreme Court against Congress's 1998 extension of copyright. He had lost the case, but he was eager to find another way to show that distended copyright laws were not in the public interest. Shloss gave him the correspondence that Stephen had sent her over the years, and he was excited by what he read. "The letters were extreme," he recalled.
This week, to coincide with Bloomsday celebrations, Lessig plans to file a suit against Stephen Joyce in United States District Court. He believes that it is the first to accuse a literary estate of "copyright misuse"; the charge is usually levelled against corporations in patent disputes. Lessig is a capable lawyer, and at Stanford he has considerable resources; four attorneys work on his staff, and he has free help from law students. "It's in the DNA of lawyers not to be intimidated," he said. In other words, Lessig intends to fight on and on, just as Stephen Joyce does.
For all the enmity Stephen Joyce has aroused, it can be argued that he has succeeded in fulfilling his grandfather's wish to have his life and work treated with respect. As Richard Ellmann's splendid 1959 biography points out, James Joyce was a strict guardian of his own image. In "Finnegans Wake," he coined the word "biografiends" to describe nosy academics. He fought Herbert Gorman, his authorized biographer, whenever Gorman's idea of Joyce's work diverged from his own. And he demanded that Gorman "obliterate" a passage revealing that Joyce and Nora had not married before leaving Ireland, in 1904, meaning that Lucia and her brother Giorgio were illegitimate. A half-dozen times in his life, Joyce threatened or filed lawsuits. The publication of "Dubliners," in 1914, required seven solicitors, in part because he refused to remove pointed references to actual people and places. Some of the lawsuits were justified—he sued an American publisher who pirated "Ulysses"—but others were misguided attempts to protect his dignity. He charged an actor with slander after the actor told others that Joyce owed him a hundred and fifty francs. He eventually withdrew the suit, an episode that is amusingly revisited in Tom Stoppard's play "Travesties."
Upon Joyce's death, however, a different set of hands began to shape his image. His will gave control of his literary estate to Harriet Shaw Weaver, his patron. (Nora Joyce, his wife, received all the royalties but did not have an active role in the estate.) Weaver's stance, and that of the trustees who succeeded her, was that Joyce should be made accessible to the world. Revelations followed: Joyce's 1919 affair with Marthe Fleischmann, in Zurich; his brazenly erotic 1909 letters to Nora (in one, he calls her a "darling brown-arsed fuckbird"). In 1951, Nora died, and her children, Giorgio and Lucia, became the beneficiaries of the estate. They were not in a position to mount a vigorous opposition to scholars: Lucia was institutionalized, and Giorgio had a severe drinking problem. According to Hans Jahnke, who is Giorgio's stepson from his second marriage, Giorgio was mostly interested in the money that the estate generated, and he left the details to others.
But Stephen, by then in his thirties, was angered by the way that academics were circumventing the wishes of the estate. For instance, when the estate registered its desire to keep Joyce's erotic letters to Nora private, Ellmann maneuvered around it. His 1959 biography alluded to the correspondence; his 1966 volume of Joyce's letters contained expurgated versions of the letters; and his 1975 "Selected Letters" contained every word. In 1909, Joyce had implored Nora to "be careful to keep my letters secret." Stephen viewed the letters' publication as a transgression against his family.
Stephen Joyce was born in February, 1932, during a chaotic month for his grandfather. "Ulysses," published in France in 1922, had finally found an American publisher who would challenge its purported obscenity in court. Fragments of "Finnegans Wake" were appearing in print, and friends and patrons—even the usually docile Harriet Weaver—were expressing grave doubts about the book's merits. And Giorgio had just taken Lucia to a psychiatric clinic, following an outburst on Joyce's birthday.
The birth of Stephen came soon after the death of Joyce's father, whom Joyce had romanticized as the source of his talent. Joyce commemorated these events in the poem "Ecce Puer," which begins, "Of the dark past / A boy is born; / With joy and grief / My heart is torn." Stephen—German Jewish on his mother's side, Irish on his father's—was a beautiful baby. His mother, Helen, in an unpublished memoir that is housed in the archives of the University of Tulsa, describes him as "a handsome lively, wavy haired blonde, with bright blue eyes not as dark as his fathers and rosy cheeks and a bright smile (my smile, I think)." Joyce put the boy on his lap and told him stories. In 1936, he wrote Stephen a children's story, "The Cat and the Devil." Helen, in her memoir, captures their growing rapport: "As Stevie grew older I loved to watch him crawling onto his grandfather's knee and asking him grave little questions. His serious childish face was charming to see as he listened to the slow and painstaking answers that [his grandfather] gave him in his slow careful Dublin drawl. [Joyce] was infinitely patient with him and was always willing to stop and talk to him or to answer as he grew older his incessant 'whys.' The answers needless to say were always wonderful ones."
The marriage of Stephen's parents rapidly dissolved. Giorgio, deciding that he and Helen were incompatible, largely abandoned the family, and when Stephen was six, Helen, suffering from depression, checked herself into a Swiss clinic. Stephen spent more and more time with his grandparents. He and Joyce took regular walks along the Zürichsee. Joyce bought him a box of toy soldiers. Helen recalls in her memoir, "I do not think that Stephen will ever forget his famous grandfather and their relationship was a deep and lovely one." Even now, when Stephen has to make important decisions about the estate, he sometimes goes to Joyce's grave to consult with him.
After the Second World War, Helen's family sent Stephen to Andover, where, in 1948, he wrote an essay about his grandfather, titled "The Man Whom I Loved and Respected Most in This World." Yet being related to a genius was also a burden. When Stephen was at Andover, this magazine wrote about him in The Talk of the Town. After Stephen recalled of Joyce, "He used to drop in before breakfast to talk to me about Greek mythology," he was asked if he remembered who Daedalus was. He responded, "Wasn't he a Greek in a big battle with somebody?" Some members of Joyce's retinue found Stephen a disappointment. In 1955, Maria Jolas, a friend of the Joyces, wrote a letter to Harriet Weaver, saying that Stephen had been "invited to leave Harvard because he wouldn't study." Jolas added, "I find his idle, intellectually mediocre existence deplorable," and suggested that Stephen had an "unjustified arrogance."
Stephen graduated from Harvard after eight years, in 1958. A year later, he became an aid official for the Organization for Economic Coöperation and Development, specializing in French sub-Saharan Africa. He stayed for more than thirty years, travelling frequently to Africa; his last position, according to the agency, was as a "mid-level manager." In 1991, he retired, and, as he wrote in a Harvard alumni publication, he began devoting himself to "the intricate and complicated job of running my grandfather James Joyce's literary estate." Until the mid-nineteen-eighties, he received no money from the estate.
According to the French scholar Jacques Aubert, during Stephen's years with the O.E.C.D. he often told Joyceans that "there are some things more important than going to literary conferences." But he had never stopped caring about his grandfather and the Joyce estate. In 1959, while living in Paris, he wrote to Ellmann, who had just sent him a copy of his Joyce biography. Ellmann's comprehensive interviews and persuasive reading of the life had been widely praised, but Stephen saw things differently: "Reading parts of your book did something to me deep down inside. I can best describe the feeling as one of hurt, sadness, disgust and in the end even anger. . . . All our inner secrets are bared for all to see, read about, and gloat over if they so desire." Ellmann wrote back, "There is no doubt that biographies are hard for the survivors, yet . . . this is the price of greatness."
In 1982, Lucia Joyce died; Stephen was one of her heirs. After negotiations with family members, Stephen acquired a fifty-per-cent stake in the Joyce estate. Eleven years later, Giorgio's second wife, Asta, died, and half of Giorgio's stake in the estate devolved to Stephen, giving him seventy-five-per-cent control. (Hans Jahnke and his sister Evelyn held the rest.) Before long, Stephen launched his expensive suit against Danis Rose's edition of "Ulysses." In 2000, Jahnke, who had to pay some of the legal fees, offered to sell Stephen his family's share in the estate. Jahnke, a professor of international development who lives in Berlin, recalled, "There was too much anger, too much work, and too many lawyers." The change was fine with Stephen: he preferred to stand alone.
In 1988, Carol Shloss began investigating the story of Lucia Joyce. Shloss didn't see Lucia as schizophrenic; rather, she saw her as a frustrated genius. James Joyce might well have supported this notion, for he had never accepted that his daughter was mentally ill. "Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia, and has kindled a fire in her brain," he said in 1935.
Shloss was particularly interested in Lucia's possible influence on "Finnegans Wake." Joyce had almost invited this reading. In a letter to Harriet Weaver, he wrote, "She is a fantastic being, speaking a curious abbreviated language of her own. I understand it or most of it." Lucia had schizophrenic symptoms—her sense of time and relationships was abnormal—and she was a dancer. "Finnegans Wake," as Shloss saw it, was characterized by word dissociation and informed by a dancer's sense of movement. "Something creative, compelling, and possibly dangerous had been going on between two extraordinary people," she later wrote. Over time, what began as a study in artistic influence became a biographical portrait.
One thing that had drawn Shloss to writing about Lucia was her absence from previous accounts of the Joyce family. Ellmann had accepted the traditional account of the relationship, calling Joyce "foolish fond like Lear" for investing so much time in trying to prevent Lucia's institutionalization. Maddox's epilogue on Lucia's later years had been suppressed. Contemporary accounts belittled her. Of the thousand letters that Shloss estimates Lucia wrote, only a dozen were in the archives; the rest had disappeared. Shloss suspected that Stephen had pulled documents relating to Lucia from the National Library of Ireland when he had obtained permission to remove papers from its archive. Yet when Shloss visited the library, she found something that had perhaps been overlooked: Lucia's medical bills. She made copies, and spent a year placing them against the doctors' published writings, reconstructing Lucia's treatment. Shloss speculated that either Joyce or Giorgio might have engaged in incest with Lucia, but there was no documentation to prove it. (This theory, which most Joyceans do not share, was based partly on "Finnegans Wake": Joyce implies that Issy, who is somewhat modelled on Lucia, has been violated by her father and her brothers.) As Shloss saw it, patriarchal suppression was forcing her book to become "an incredible act of circumlocution."
In 1994, Stephen Joyce learned of Shloss's project, and was displeased. Many of Lucia's extant papers reside at SUNY-Buffalo. Robert Bertholf, the archive's director at the time, said that Stephen delivered an indirect "warning" to him from intermediaries "in Europe," communicating his wish that Shloss be prevented from using its archives. (Stephen denied this.) Bertholf, who had secured a valuable arrangement to publish Joyce's detailed notebooks for "Finnegans Wake," was wary of angering Stephen, but he quietly allowed Shloss access. According to Shloss, during the time that she was consulting the archive, Bertholf picked her up in his car each morning and escorted her into the library before it opened. She added that he never officially signed in, to hide the fact that she had visited the library. (Bertholf said that this protocol was not unusual.)
Although Shloss was aware of Stephen's opposition to her project, she wrote him a letter in 1996, asking for his "blessing." She thought that Stephen might appreciate her view that Lucia was misunderstood, not mentally ill. He answered, "My response regarding helping and working with you on a book about Lucia is straightforward and unequivocal: it is a definitive NO. Our experience with Brenda Maddox has taught us not to work with anybody doing a book about, or on, any member of the immediate Joyce family. We have learned our lesson well!"
Shloss was shaken, but she didn't abandon the project. For one thing, she concluded that, despite Stephen's assertions, he did not control the copyright to Lucia's work: the nephew of her last caregiver did, and he gave his approval. (David Monro, a lawyer for the Joyce family, said that an agreement made after Lucia's death gave Stephen the copyright to her papers.) Moreover, American copyright law at that time provided that unpublished work was protected for only fifty years after an author's death. Considering that Joyce had died in 1941, Stephen was not in a position to stop her.
In 1998, Congress passed the bill extending copyright protection to seventy years after a creator's death. James Joyce's unpublished writing was now under Stephen's control until 2012. Nevertheless, Shloss finished her manuscript and sold it to Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2000. Shortly afterward, Stephen sent her a letter, warning her that he would not give her permission to quote from any document that was under his control. When an attorney for the publisher wrote Stephen to say that the book would limit its quotations to seven thousand words, following the provisions of "fair use," Stephen responded that "this sounds like a bad joke." Copyright, he wrote, was meant "to protect the author's rights as well as those who inherited them, which is my case with respect to James Joyce." He noted, "You should be aware of the fact that over the past decade the James Joyce Estate's 'record,' in legal terms, is crystal clear and we have proven on a number of occasions that we are prepared to put our money where our mouth is."
Shloss had half expected Stephen to challenge her, but she was saddened by the response of other Joyceans. A number of them told her that she should have known better than to write about Lucia. She attributed this reaction to the "climate of fear Stephen causes." Some Joyceans told me that their critiques were more principled. Luca Crispi, a research fellow at the National Library of Ireland, said that Shloss's project was filled with "innuendos" and was "not worthy of its subject." Nevertheless, he agreed with Shloss's point about Joyce's grandson: "Stephen's ruined what was otherwise a wonderful working community."
In June, 2003, Shloss attended a Joyce conference in Tulsa. Sam Slote, who was then working at SUNY-Buffalo, let Shloss know that Stephen expected him to report back on a presentation she was giving on Lucia. Slote, who was uncomfortable in such a role, told me he informed Stephen that he didn't go to the lecture because "everyone suspects me of being a spy."
Meanwhile, Farrar, Straus & Giroux was determined to publish Shloss's book, but it was wary of provoking a lawsuit; Shloss and her editor, Elisabeth Sifton, began making extensive cuts. For example, Shloss had originally quoted a statement that Joyce made to Michael Healy, Nora's uncle, describing Lucia's "form of mental or nervous malady." Joyce argued, "The real trouble is not violence or incendiarism or hysterics or simulated suicide. These are hard to deal with but they prove that the person is still alive. The real danger is torpor [and] losing more and more contact with the outer world." All but the last sentence was excised.
In an e-mail, Sifton reassured Shloss that the cuts had not compromised her book: "I honestly don't think it was a better book when you quoted ten thousand words of Joyce than when you quote only six thousand." Shloss, however, has said that "the process of deleting things that had taken years to find out was just excruciating." She had tried to get Stanford to indemnify her from a lawsuit. But lawyers at the university said that it did not offer protection for a professor's books. An individual risk policy cost fifteen thousand dollars, more than she felt she could afford. So Shloss began searching for another way out of the "mousetrap" that Stephen Joyce had sprung on her.
I met with Lawrence Lessig one afternoon last month, in the garden of the Stanford Law School, in Palo Alto. Lessig is the co-founder of Creative Commons, a popular online copyright-licensing project. That effort, combined with his fight against the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, has made him a leading authority on intellectual-property issues. In the 2003 Supreme Court case Eldred v. Ashcroft, Lessig argued that the Founding Fathers did not intend copyright to become a creative straitjacket. He quoted the Constitution to the Justices: "Congress shall have power to . . . promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings." Lessig had clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, and he expected him and the conservatives on the Court to respond to reasoning based on the original words of the framers. "But the conservatives sat silent," he said. "It was, in some ways, the dying moments of a naïve law professor."
Lessig thinks that Shloss's case is more likely to succeed. "Have you seen her?" he said of Shloss. "She's the quintessential academic—quiet, soft-spoken, modest. The idea that copyright law is going to descend on her and turn her life into hell shows that the law has lost touch with its purpose."
In March, 2005, Lessig had suggested that Shloss prepare to post on a Web site material she had deleted from "To Dance in the Wake." He then wrote to Stephen's lawyers, explaining that the purpose of the Web site would be "to aid scholars and researchers," and that, even though Farrar, Straus had asked Shloss to delete the material, the quotes fell under the doctrine of "fair use." On April 8th, Joyce's solicitors replied, expressing displeasure that Shloss was revisiting the subject of Lucia. Two weeks later, Lessig's office reiterated that the Web site would eventually be going online. (The site has not yet been made accessible to the public.) That May, the estate's lawyers wrote back that "Mr. and Mrs. Joyce have requested we convey their 'astonishment' " at "an unwarranted infringement of the Estate's copyright" and hinted at legal consequences. Lessig—with the help of Robert Spoo, the scholar-turned-lawyer, and David Olson, a Stanford associate—then prepared the suit.
Of the two dozen people I had talked to, Lessig was one of the few who weren't angry at Stephen Joyce. "I don't really blame people who exercise the rights the law appears to give them," Lessig said. "Stephen Joyce is using whatever power he has." But he added that Stephen had strengthened Shloss's case with the threatening letters, the calls to her publisher, the alleged spying and attempts to block her research. As Lessig saw it, the case was simple: Shloss was not trying to profit in an unseemly way off the Joyce legacy; she was an academic who was trying to make a literary argument. It was not at all important whether her argument was correct—only that it was a legitimate effort. To make her case, she needed supporting documents, and Stephen's obstructionism had, perhaps, adversely affected the reception of the book. The Times, for example, had described it as "more like an exercise in wish fulfillment than a biography."
"If a copyright holder misbehaves, we want people to know it's not costless," Lessig added. "It's not just the tone of Stephen's letters. It's who the letters were sent to: researchers, archivists, and librarians, people playing by the rules. It ought to be possible for people to be good."
Around this time, Stephen called me again from La Flotte. He didn't want to discuss Shloss's book. The first time we spoke, he had called it "the biggest pile of horse and cow manure. You'd want to mix it up and put it in a great big bucket." This time, he said simply, "It's so full of nonsense it's not even funny. There is, of course, the freedom of scholars."
Since his fight with Shloss, he had found a new source of resentment. In 2004, the International James Joyce Foundation, a group of scholars, had formed a fact-finding commission to collect stories about the Joyce estate's behavior. (Shloss and Spoo were members of the commission.) The foundation had written to Stephen to say that its goal was not to indict him; it simply wanted to clarify the rights of scholars. But Stephen considered the letter a hostile act. He said, "I am not the Italian Mafia. I am not the Russian Mafia." He went on, "I have to be very careful what I say. Too much is at stake for me. Are these boys the C.I.A., the F.B.I.?" He said of the commission, "So far, I've been handling it by ignoring it. But I'm getting prepared to lower the boom." He did not yet know about Shloss's impending suit.
A person with knowledge of the Joyce estate's finances said that it generates three to four hundred thousand dollars annually. Stephen therefore has money at his disposal for a protracted legal fight. He does not have a bad case, either: over the decades, judges have consistently confirmed the right of estates to exercise a firm hand. F. Scott Kieff, an intellectual-property specialist at Washington University, in St. Louis, said, "It would be really bad if Shloss won. If all I need to do to get access to your property is to say that the restrictions that you are using are unfair—and by unfair I only mean unpopular—then anyone who is unpopular loses their property rights."
The victor in a lawsuit is sometimes determined by stamina. And, as Stephen reminded me several times during our conversations, when it came to stamina he was without peer. He recalled that he had successfully fought to recover two Joyce keepsakes that had remained in the SUNY-Buffalo collection for forty years: a charm engraved with the words "Finnegans Wake" and a pen that Joyce had used to sign copies of that book. "How many people will fight on and on for something they believe in?" he asked me. "It is a typical Stephen James Joyce story." ♦


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>>>PBC Golfer of the Week History
MARTINEZ, Ga. – Senior Niclas Johansson (Skanor, Sweden) of the No. 2 Georgia College & State University golf team was named the most recent Peach Belt Conference (PBC) Golfer of the Week, the conference office announced. This is the second such honor for Johansson and the fourth for the Bobcat golf team this season.
Johansson turned in one of the most consistent performances in the PBC this year with a 71-73-70 at the prestigious Southeastern Collegiate in Valdosta, Ga. Johansson's final round 70 put him in a three-way tie for first place with Chad Smith of Valdosta State University and Matt Stauch of Florida Southern College. Smith won the playoff with a birdie on the first hole, but for Johansson it was his second top-five of the season and second consecutive top-10. Georgia College finished third in the 18-team event, lowest of any PBC school and only two strokes out of second.
The Bobcats return to action Monday, March 22, hosting the Bobcat Invitational at Cuscowilla on Lake Oconee.
The GCSU Department of Athletics, winners of the 2008-09 PBC Commissioner's Cup, sponsors 10 varsity athletic programs at the NCAA Division II level. As a Division II program, Georgia College prides itself on balancing the life of the student-athlete, evidenced by the Bobcats' multiple appearances in post-season competition as well as documented academic success and community-service involvement. Sign up at Twitter.com username GCSUSID for up-to-the-minute reports, and visit www.GCSUBobcats.com to nominate your favorite former Bobcats and Colonials to the GCSU Athletics Hall of Fame.

subset: commoncrawl


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I drew out my banner pattern on paper and traced it onto white paper. I cut it out and used a black marker to draw my letters. I also used scrap paper to make the paper flowers. I am loving how it came out. It definitely makes my "still unfinished" kitchen pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself
yes I know cabinet doors still need to be painted.
Click HERE to see what our kitchen use to look like.
I used coffee filters to make the garland above my chalkboard
I used the same Dyed filters to make a Coffee Filter Pom Pom
Want to know how I made my St. Patricks Day Pom Pom? Well let me show you. It is super simple.
I had left over coffee filters from a project I did over at bowdabra today. I decided to put them to some good use. I started out with a Styrofoam ball. I had one left over from this project.
I quarter folded the filters and began pinning them to the ball.
Continue till the ball is covered
A pencil helped when pinning
Fluff out your filters after pinning them
Take some festive ribbon and pin to the ball.
This is what you will use to hang your pom pom.
Hang and Enjoy!
To find out how I dyed the coffee filters and made this wreath
Hop on over to The Bowdabra Blog
I hope you guys have a great day. If you are a new follower to Blissful and Domestic
let me know, I'd love to follow you back.
Also don't forget to link up to my Sunday Blog Hop.
It is such a fun way to meet new bloggy friends.
Have a terrific Wednesday!


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Fun, adventure & total relaxation, we've got it all at Pine Grove
Welcome to Pine Grove Resort Cottages on the shores of the Pickerel River. When you arrive, you will enter 250+ acres of forested, peaceful, private land, in which to relax, unwind and enjoy your vacation. We are 10 minutes west of the community of Port Loring, which can take care of your supply needs and more. Pine Grove Resort Cottages is a small, pet- friendly, family owned housekeeping resort catering to fishermen and their families for over 40 years. Superb boating on 40 miles of the Pickerel River is awaiting the avid fisherperson and explorer alike. Fish the river, or enjoy a fishing experience on one of our outpost lakes. Accommodations include well-equipped and well-spaced cottages, as well as a 1 1/2 story farmhouse, and a superb secluded luxury chalet. Boats and motors are available to rent and we have a boat launch on site. Well-behaved pets are always welcome and both pets and owners will enjoy "Dog Patch" our just-for-fun agility course.
For those who like to shop, please take the time to visit our new Gallery/Gift shop The SunDog Gallery, for unique First Nations & northern inspired treasures.
At Pine Grove Resort Cottages there are no schedules and no one is organizing you. Spend your time outside on the water, on the beach or the trails, or inside by the fire – it's all up to you. Rest, relaxation, fun, adventure and new friends will be the legacy of your vacation at Pine Grove Resort Cottages.
To ensure that Pine Grove Resort Cottages is the resort of choice in the Port Loring area, we have an established program of continuously upgrading our facilities in order to meet the needs of our current and future guests.
Our cottage season is from May to November. The Farmhouse and the Chalet are open year round.


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Google SEO Training Leicester
My SEO training is suitable for everyone whatever their knowledge of SEO.
Unlike a classroom environment my 1-2-1 training sessions ensure you receive greatest benefit from the course by having my undivided attention with face to face personal tuition.
While I am onsite with you we can optimise your own website so that you can witness the SEO procedure first hand thereby giving you practical hands on knowledge.
I will go through the procedure with you step by step and explain exactly what is being carried out so that you fully understand the process and are able to implement the same procedure and carry out your own SEO on other websites.
If you are looking for easy to understand SEO Training delivered in plain English with hands on practical training, then take a look at my Google SEO course.
Search Engine Optimisation Training Course Content:
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) ?
Getting listed on Google
Installing Google Analytics to monitor website visitors
Overview of the process of search engine optimisation
On-site Optimisation:
How Google decides which websites to place in its results
How to optimise a website page to appear top in the Google results
How website design can impact your SEO
Frames, Flash, lack of content
Choosing the best domain name, site structure and hosting package
Off-site Optimisation:
How the Google Page Rank system works
Link building – the types of links
Which links will move your keywords up the Google results
Timescales for SEO campaigns
Just how long does it take to see results
Questions and Answers
Training courses are half day with dates arranged to suit you.
I will visit you on-site at your business premises, place of work or home.
Course documentation is provided with unlimited support afterwards.
Find out more about my SEO Training Leicester call the number below:
07522 312 284
email: email@example.com


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Your favorite musicals now have brand-new iconic artwork, bringing the professional look of Broadway straight to your theater. For the first time ever, Rodgers & Hammerstein offers you show posters, print ads, Facebook graphics, and marketing materials - all available in customizable formats.
This new official artwork gives a modern look to the classic R&H shows, drawing from the notability of historic images and provides an affordable alternative to hiring your own designer.
At clear, high resolutions, these graphics give you broad flexibility for edits, and come in even larger formats by specific request.
So how can this artwork be customized to fit your production?
If your theater uses Adobe Photoshop, layered graphic files will give you full editing capability, as well as guiding notes. The graphic elements separate, letting you rearrange design components while cropping or resizing the image. Each show's iconic title treatment can be used by itself, or paired with other parts of the poster. Add the title treatment to your production photos, for an even more personalized look.
But even without Photoshop, flat images are available. We designed these flat graphics to let you customize them with even the simplest free paint or photo editing program. You can type over the graphics to add show dates, directions, and other essential information.
All artwork files come with detailed step-by-step text and video instructions.
Whether your choose our versatile layered artwork or our easy-to-edit flattened files, Rodgers & Hammerstein offers you simple execution for a look that will dazzle your fans.
If you have any questions please feel free to email us at [email protected]
- Vector Title
Get out the word in print media with these high-resolution ads, designed for newspapers and magazines and other print media.
Don't worry about re-designing your show art to fit varying size requirements for different newspapers and magazines: These graphics come pre-sized in vertical and rectangular formats. Important design elements are placed away from the edges, letting you trim graphics to exact newspaper ad specs without sacrificing design.
Don't worry about how the show's colored artwork will appear in black and white: These print ads have already been converted to Grayscale, and adjusted to give you ideal contrast for highly visible black and white print ads.
Don't worry about optimizing your ads for printing – at 300 pixels per square inch, these graphics are high resolution, with CMYK colors ready for printing.
Don't worry about needing to customize files further – these layered .PSD files are ready to edit in Photoshop, letting you rearrange elements of the graphic and create new room for text, theater logos, and other elements.
- 2" x 10.5" vertical ads, in CMYK color and Black & White
- 10.5 " x 10" rectangular ads, in CMYK color and Black & White


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ATT: This Firmware is outdated. You can use this one: http://code.google.com/p/wl500g/
The Huawei E220 modem is more and more used as a mobile internet access.
Well, wouldn't it be nice to have a cheap wireless-router, capable to be installed fast and elsewhere?
A mobile USB modem and a Linux-Router allows you to achieve it!
Whether at the alpine-cabin, at the car park, campground or Grandma's, everywhere internet for all!
The Huawei E220 modem is increasingly used from an unbelieveable amount of isp's throughout the world.
An adaption of Olegs grandiose firmware called Koppel FW gives you the unique opportunity to turn your low price asus router
to a full fledged gprs/umts wireless router in an easy way.
Please read the entire howto before any installation.
The firmware is available for Asus Wl500gP, g, gx
-Download http://koppel.cz/cdmawifi/download (newest adapted, stable Oleg FW)
-Set at routers web interface, system setup to factory default. (of course apply & finish)
-Wait for reboot and click at menu system setup 'firmware upgrade' to upload your new firmware (1.71).
-Please wait several minutes and do not touch/unplug anything.....
Click on GSM / GPRS and input your data of your isp - done.
FOR ALL OLDER VERSIONS (<1.68) YOU NEED THE ATTACHED FILE 'dial.huawei.tar.gz' (or if your connection speed is too slow).
-After reboot choose USB Connection and select User defined.
-Upload attached user dial-up file 'dial.huawei.tar.gz'
-Then USB connection, dial-up Config, your username / password / APN / dialin number. (some isp don't need usernames/passwords)
Then apply and finish.
After each reboot the router connects automatically to inet. Use the webif to toggle between connect and disconnect.
Please note, that the modem must be switched with "windows mobile connect" to 3g preferred enabled and pin code disabled.
If you don't have your dial-in number and/or APN, just google for it or call support line of your isp.
With newer asus-routers (wl-500gp), perhaps you get a weak or no wireless signal. If this is the case, please log on (telnet) to your router (192.168.1.1) and add
to your post-boot (stored at /tmp/local/sbin/post-boot) with 'vi /tmp/local/sbin/post-boot' (if you are not firm with vi, google for vi manual, it's easy):
'wl antdiv 3'
This allows the router to select the best antenna.
As usual, store your post-boot with 'flashfs save && flashfs commit && flashfs enable && reboot'.
This HowTo is an excerpt from english Wl500g forum http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=7318
and (a german) UMTS Forum http://www.umtslink.at/3g-forum/showthread.php?p=528907
And last, but not least, many thanks to Oleg and Engy for such a grandiose firmware.
Have fun.........


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Keep Me Logged In
Catherine Bessant, chief operations and technology officer at Bank of America, discusses the risks the banking industry faces regarding cyber threats, and the related security and liability surrounding the industry with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin.
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Posts Tagged 'slides'
Presentation = Speech + Slides2008–12–17 | 17 commentsTags: comics, design, presentations, slides
By Derik Badman Back in October, Aaron Schmidt posted "HOWTO give a good presentation" to his blog walking paper. His second bullet point of "thoughts" on good presentations is: Please don't fill your slides with words. Find some relevant and pretty pictures to support what you're saying. You can use the pictures to remind yourself…


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Clay Buchholz may have next start pushed back
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Boston Red Sox right-hander Clay Buchholz could have his next start pushed back at least a couple days.
Buchholz, 9-0 with a 1.71 ERA this season, left his start Saturday in the seventh inning in the nightcap of a day-night doubleheader with what the team called "neck tightness."
Red Sox manager John Farrell indicated that Buchholz may not be ready to throw his normal between starts bullpen session on Wednesday. His next scheduled start is Friday.
"I think over the next couple days we'll get a better read on when his next start will line up," Farrell said before Monday night's game against Tampa Bay. "But most importantly he feels improvement over yesterday."
POWER RANKINGS:Red Sox in Top 5
RISING STARS:5 who could be among greats
Buchholz said he didn't plan to throw for the second consecutive day Monday.
"I want to be out there. ... I want to help the team," Buchholz said. "Me, going out there at 80% is not going to help anybody because there's going to be an apprehension of me throwing a pitch. I'd rather take care of it now."
Also, the Red Sox reinstated third baseman Will Middlebrooks from the 15-day disabled list. Sidelined by a lower back strain, Middlebrooks was in the starting lineup for Monday's game with the Rays.
With Middlebrooks back, Jose Iglesias, who had been filling in at third, will move into a utility role. Farrell said Iglesias should play at least three times a week on the left side of the infield.
"Will is healthy, he's back and in the lineup," Farrell said. "Jose knows that he's got a bright future here and he's earned his way to remain on this roster rather than go back down to Triple-A."
Iglesias entered Monday with a 13-game hitting streak, hitting .435 (20-for-46) over the stretch.
"Of course you want to play, but bottom line I'm happy to be here," Iglesias said.
To make room on the roster, Boston designated infielder Pedro Ciriaco for assignment.
"I think there will be a lot of interest in him," Farrell said. "He's a good player, and he's done a good job while here in Boston."


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Looks like you are using an old version of Internet Explorer - Please update your browser
Textbook reports on creatures that walked on structures extending from their nose!
What about our hands and feet? Do they show any evidence of a more 'monkey-like' condition in the womb?
No results found in .
Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.


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COLUMBUS -- No one could have blamed at least a few of the 19 seniors on Ohio State's football team if they had bolted for somewhere else.
The NCAA decreed last December that the Buckeyes couldn't play in a bowl or even in their own conference championship game after the 2012 season. The NCAA also said players were free to transfer without the usual penalty of having to sit out a year.
But all of those seniors stayed, and they were rewarded Saturday with an improbable 12-0 season.
"The most selfless group I've ever been around," coach Urban Meyer said after Saturday's 26-21 victory over archrival Michigan.
Unfortunately for the Buckeyes, now it's as if they're all dressed up with no place to go. While other, lesser teams prepare for postseason trips, they are on the outside looking in.
"It's all right," said safety Christian Bryant. "We're 12-0. That's good enough for me."
What bothers them the most is that no one will ever know what might have been.
"We've known for a while that we're not going to be able to prove at the end of the season how good we are," wide receiver/tight end Jake Stoneburner said. "If we are the last (unbeaten) team, I certainly think we deserve to be in the top two if not No. 1. But that's not for us to decide."
Their last victory was much like many of the others. In only a handful of games did Ohio State have the victory well in hand in the fourth quarter. The Buckeyes ended up winning six games by seven or fewer points, including two in overtime.
"The biggest thing is we refused to lose," safety C.J. Barnett said. "There's a bunch of times we were down, had to go to overtime and stuff like that. We found a way to win."
A lot of teams might have buckled under all the pressure. The Buckeyes relied on a number of bit players to take starring roles.
"I haven't been doing this a whole long time but I can't remember a greater 'team' season -- somebody else (making a big play) every time. Some other guy," said co-defensive coordinator Luke Fickell, the interim head coach during the tumultuous 6-7 season in 2011. "This team is unbelievable how they feed off each other."
Meyer gave all the credit to the seniors. Some of them deflected it back to him.
"I want to make sure they're properly recognized as one of the great groups of seniors in the history of this program -- however we're going to do that," the first-year Buckeyes coach said.
Then, tongue in cheek, he added, "Maybe we'll get 19 bronze statues."
Better make that 20.
"(Meyer) is the key ingredient that pushed us over the top," said one of the seniors, special teams player Zach Domicone. "Just the way he pushed us every single day and made us love one another and really preach team over self."
There is still a void left by not getting a reward for recording just the sixth unbeaten and untied season in Ohio State's 123 years of intercollegiate play.
"It's going to hit me when I'm not doing something next week, preparing for the next game," offensive tackle Reid Fragel said.
to the NCAA penalties.
The Buckeyes can't play in next week's Big Ten title game, even though they won the conference's Leaders Division outright. They won't go to a major bowl game.
But they will be getting a Big Ten division championship trophy. And they'll receive rings for winning that title.
Plus they'll know that they did everything they possibly could.


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LIke a lot of folks, I bought a few boxes of girl scout cookies during their annual drive. Often, I'll open a box and before I know it, I've eaten all the cookies myself. So, instead of doing that again this year, I started experimenting with ways of incorporating these cookies into desserts that I could share. The best idea was this caramel tart using Trefoils. The combination of caramel and shortbread is quite tasty. If you've gone through your cookies for this year already, you can easily substitute butter cookies for the Trefoils. Also, the inspiration for this recipe originally came from a walnut tart and I've provided a little direction on making that version as well.
Caramel Cookie Tart
1 1/4 cu All Purpose Flour
6 tbl Cold Butter, diced
3 oz Cream Cheese, cut or torn into small pieces
3 cu Trefoils Cookies, crumbled to walnut sized pieces
1 1/2 cu Sugar
1/2 cu Heavy Cream
4 tbl Butter, cubed
2 additional cookies, ground (optional) for garnish
9" fluted tart pan with removal bottom
Prepare crust by cutting butter and cream cheese into the flour and mixing until a dough forms; or place all three ingredients in a food processor and blend until dough comes together. Wrap dough in plastic and refrigerate for 30 minute. Remove and roll out on a lightly floured board, creating a circle about 11" in diameter. Transfer dough to the tart pan and uniformly press the dough into the fluted sides. Refrigerate pan for an hour.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Place tart pan on a baking sheet. Using a fork, poke a number of holes into the bottom of the dough. Bake for 15-18 minutes until crust just begins to color. Remove and set aside to cool.
Put sugar in a large saucepan, at least 12" in diameter, over medium heat. Shake the pan occasionally as sugar beings to melt. Regulate temperature so that sugar doesn't smoke or burn. As sugar has just about fully melted, stir gently with a wooden spoon until mixture is smooth. The melted sugar should be golden brown in color. Remove from heat and pour cream an butter into mixture. BE VERY CAREFUL during this step, as mixture will smoke and bubble up when combined. Stir mixture until caramel is fully blended and smooth. Add crumbled cookies and gently stir to coat all sides. Transfer mixture to the prepared tart pan and quickly spread the mixture evenly. Sprinkle the two ground cookies on top for garnish (optional). Set aside to cool before slicing and serving. This tart is great with a bit of whipped cream, garnished with lemon zest or a small scoop of vanilla ice cream.
For alternatives, you can substitute butter cookies for the Trefoils. Also, this makes a tasty walnut tart by substituting 3 cups of chopped walnuts for the cookies.
If you have any comments or questions, please send me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com or follow me on Facebook or Twitter.


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Other Available Formats
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|Published: March 1, 2011
|Standard Editions
|Trade Paperback
|Published: March 1, 2011
An ancient curse plagues the kingdom of Sherbourne, and unless it is stopped, all will fall to ruin. The King, obsessed with greed, cannot see the danger. But his teenage twin children, Aletha and Adin, know they must act. A hermit leads Adin to a magical map that will send him back in time to discover the origin of the curse. Once back, Adin must find the Keeper, who protects the Gate of Heaven, but all he has is a symbol as a clue to guide him. Unbeknown to Adin, Aletha follows her brother, but they both arrive in Sherbourne's past at the precipice of a great war, and there is little time to discover how to counteract the curse.
One unexpected disaster after another forces the twins to make difficult choices. Adin's only hope to correct the past is to return to the future to manipulate events so his quest can succeed. Through his trials and failures, Adin learns that nothing can stop heaven from accomplishing its goal, and that all events work for the good of those who trust heaven. An epic fairy tale with surprising twists, embracing the enduring power of love and faith.
In order to use the search feature, you will need to enter a valid search term.
Please enter your search criteria and press "Go" to start searching.


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Watch Now
Videos: Trailers, Teasers, Featurettes
Theo is living the good life in an upscale Brazilian neighborhood. He's a hardworking doctor, husband, and father. However, Theo has chosen his career over his family, and little by little he discovers that his world is crumbling around him. His beloved mentor and surrogate father is dying, and his wife announces that she wants a divorce. Yet nothing prepares him for the day when he comes home to discover that his 15-year-old son, Pedro, has disappeared. Theo takes to the road in search of his son. In a journey that leads him throughout Brazil, Theo discovers what really matters to him. Searching for his missing son, Theo finds himself.
Father's Chair streaming: where to watch online?
Currently you are able to watch "Father's Chair" streaming on Kanopy.


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Mariah Carey dazzles at teen awards show
Sometimes the carpet isn't red — orange? — but Mariah Carey can look pretty stunning on any old carpet. She proved it again Saturday night at the TeenNick Halo Awards at the Hollywood Palladium.
The Nickelodeon awards show, which honors teenagers who have done good deeds, was created by Mariah's husband, Nick Cannon and he was the host, so she was there to back him up.
Halo stands for Helping and Leading Others. The show airs Monday night on Nickelodeon.
Maybe the teens who were being awarded should have been the focus of the camera flashes, but, well, Mariah can be so distracting.
Especially when she's dressed in a Balenciaga dress, Gucci shoes, and Paolo Costagli jewelry, according to Just Jared.
It was a curvy sight, enough to forget for a moment that nasty feuding last month between Carey and fellow American Idol judge Nicki Minaj.
But no doubt we'll be reminded of all that again when Idol returns Jan. 16 on Fox.


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I wish to understand how one can programmatically identify if a window is playing video content?
I used spy++ to identify particular attributes for windows playing video but I did not find any particular attributes associated with window playing video.
I have handles to all windows on screen and want to find which ones are playing video ? Could you please throw some light on how can one do this and are there any special properties associated with a window playing video?


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1. The Sketchy ID Made In China
Pretty much all of us stumbled across those websites when we were younger. They listed "completely authentic looking, scanning, hologram IDs." As a young buck itching to get a sniff of the bar scene, you probably thought about how good of an idea it would be to send a substantial chunk of change anonymously to a group of offshore businessmen to manufacture you a piece of plastic that had the potential to yield you a class two felony. Some of us, of course, would give in.
For many, this is their first trip down fake ID lane. It's a lane that is unpaved, riddled with potholes, and ends with you eventually getting smoked by an IED. It's kind of like driving through the streets of Fallujah. This ID lives a rough life filled with condescending looks from bouncers and interrogations from liquor store clerks until its career is inevitably cut short by a club owner that got called over to check it out. While it definitely isn't the best option as far as fakes go, it's an experience that almost makes your earlier drinking years much more exciting.
2. Someone Else's Real ID
After either getting fed up with not having an ID, or having your shitty Chinese abortion of a fake ripped from your clutches by the local fun police, you're going to get a little more desperate for something useful. Something that will actually pass a hologram and scan test at a bar or a gas station. Something more legit. Lo and behold, you enter the next phase of your underage drinking conquest in attaining a real, yet pretty shitty fake.
This ID is probably something you found on the floor of Spinnakers or half buried in the sand while in PCB. That, or someone found it and tried to sell it to you like a scumbag. Either way, it's a real ID and the person on it is the same gender as you, so you decide to add it to your arsenal.
You're gonna have some issues with this one too, like the occasional bouncer questioning whether anyone with blonde hair would be named Carlos Pardiñas Estevez Jr. The mere fact that this card actually scans and has the "impossible to replicate" features of an ID makes it money in the bank. Bonus points if it's a state ID and not a driver's license.
This one might carry you all the way to 21 if you can get enough liquor stores and bars on lockdown where they don't card you anymore. You might not even hit the next option and go straight to number four. However, for those of us that aren't so lucky and have our hilariously obvious fake IDs taken at one source or another, there's the glorious savior in number three.
3. The Gold Standard
As far as fakes go, this one is pretty much the cream of the crop. Someone in your house that looked enough like you just graduated, and during senior send-offs they decide to gift you their ID as a token of good will. Or maybe they just tried to sell it to you for beer money. Either way, you've finally got yourself a decent fake.
There's a certain amount of hubris that comes along with this kind of ID. For the first time, you feel invincible. You have the perfect fake, and you can finally live the ultimate life of a full-fledged 21-year-old while still actually having your 21st birthday to look forward to. However, like it is with almost everything in life, you get humbled.
A decent ID that looks somewhat like you will work at most, if not all college bars, where bouncers are usually also students and on the same page when it comes to what you are trying to do. When you make the mistake of taking your decent fake into the city (or worse, Vegas), it's a completely different ball game. The linebacker is that man at the doors who are salaried to do basically nothing but look at IDs every night. The day comes where you make the mistake of handing it off to one of these guys. After the humiliation and disappointment of realizing your fake actually isn't the shit, you are brought right back to earth and realize that you're actually not 21 yet. Really, the only chance you have at full, non-volatile alcoholic freedom will have to wait until you're finally 21.
Unless you have your older brother's ID, in which case you're a lucky shit.
4. The Real Thing
Token Jaipur Union Caviar 500 Western Transfer Money Yup, that's right. After putting up with the stress that comes along with toting around a fake ID for a couple years, the fact that one day you are actually legally allowed to purchase and handle alcohol in public places takes a certain amount of time to sink in.
It's different for each person. Some may have lingering fake ID anxiety for months while others have zero change transitioning from fake to 21. Either way, it marks the end of a personal era, where just getting your hands on booze was considered a sport, and it was a fun game. It can be a sentimental time for some men.
My advice for you youngins: Cherish the fake ID days. The rush that comes with manufacturing your own way of getting into the local bar or buying booze from the gas station makes the act in and of itself that much more enjoyable..
Image via Shutterstock


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Things you won't see on CNN, FOX, or the other mainstream media.
I've always found it an exceedingly strange contradiction that we (Americans especially, but also Canadians) are so prissy and squeamish when it comes to the actuality of death considering that our popular culture has such an apparently indifferent regard for life.
Update: To facilitate your donations to victims of the earthquake in Haiti, the Harper government has set up this page on the Revenue Canada website. Clicking on the link to a searchable list of registered charities in Canada helpfully provides potential donors with the following:
Last modified 2½ months ago and nobody checked the dysfunctional link before directing thousands of people to it. Yikes! Crack efficiency, or what?


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Campgrounds and RV parks in California's Sierra Nevada foothills are finding it pays to be green, including Auburn Gold Country RV Resort in Auburn.
According to a press release, the 66-site park, which also has three rental cabins and a small tent section, just completed installation of $500,000 solar power system.
"It's a 105 kilowatt system that covers about 60% of our electrical needs," said park owner John Grant.
Grant received a federal grant for the project, which covered $150,000, or 30% of the cost. He financed the remaining $350,000 with a 6% loan from Placer County.
"We're a big rig park and those big RVs draw lots of power," Grant said. "But the savings from generating our own solar power will offset what we have to pay in loans, so we'll break even."
Grant added that he'll receive additional tax and depreciation savings as a result of installing the solar power system, which includes 444 panels on a 1.5-acre section of his park.
The solar system will also offset a considerable amount of carbon emissions each year, including 212,000 pounds of carbon dioxide; 145 pounds of NOX, a leading cause of smog; 36 pounds of S02, a leading cause of acid rain; and 42 pounds of particulates.
"We're able to achieve these carbon pollution offsets because the power we consume with the solar system doesn't have to be generated elsewhere," Grant said.
Auburn Gold Country RV Resort is not the only privately owned RV resort in the Sierra foothills to have solar power. Other facilities include:
• Angels Camp RV & Camping Resort in Calaveras County installed a solar energy system three years ago.
• Campland on the Bay in San Diego invested in water saving showerheads and recycle bins. The park also encourages its employees to bicycle across the park as much as possible.
• Cottonwood Cove Resort and Marina on Lake Mohave, which is owned and operated by Forever Resorts, plans to build the nation's first ever LEED certified floating green building this year. The floating eco-friendly structure will house boat rental and servicing operations.
• Coyote Valley RV Resort in Morgan Hill has invested in native, drought tolerant plants.
• Far Horizons 49'er Village RV Resort in Plymouth opened a new swimming pool complex three years ago that includes energy efficient pumps. Additionally, the park invested about $25,000 to develop a new source for raw water for resort irrigation needs.
• Pinewood Cove at Trinity Center, a 100-site campground uses only environmentally friendly cleaning products as well as energy and water saving devices, such as fluorescent light bulbs and low-flow shower heads
• Pleasure Cove Marina at Lake Berryessa, also managed by Forever Resorts, uses fluorescent light bulbs and low-flow shower heads at the marina's campground.
• Vineyard RV Park in Vacaville, a 119-site park, has invested in water and energy saving fixtures after requesting water and power audits from its local utilities.


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This Day in the Financial Crisis: Sept. 9, 2008
On Sept. 9, 2008, investors returned to work following a 289-point rally for the Dow as the government's rescue of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was initially applauded on Wall Street. Steven Russolillo reports on MoneyBeat.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
I ... I ... I ... all this ... money is recounting the events of September two thousand ate ... on September's nine two thousand ate which was a Tuesday investors returned to work following the two hundred and eighty nine point rally for the Dow Jones industrial average ... as the government's rescue of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was initially applauded on Wall Street ... but the euphoria did not last long ... that Tuesday the Dow then dropped two hundred eighty points Whitey away most of its prior gains as worries about the health of the financial sector and the global economy resurfaced ... Lehman Brothers shares plunged forty five percent ... as hope of a rescue deal with the Korean bank triggered the steep slide ... of the hopes that she did not the book layout so that trigger the steep slide ... the drop at the time with the investment bank's biggest ever percentage decline ... Annie came after Lehman shares of already been down about eighty percent for the year ... the tumble which occurred as Lehman was scrambling to raise fresh fresh capital and find a white Knight ... highlighted the continuing nervousness in markets that the panic of two thousand he was unfolding ... check out our running Recap sad this day increases history on the MoneyBeat blogged ... and fall all of WSJ's anniversary coverage on sweater with the hashtag Crisis Plus five ...


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Screen International, in assocation with Creative Skillset, last week hosted an industry roundtable to consider the key issues for the future of the UK film business in the digital landscape.
Digital technologies provide considerable opportunities and challenges for the film sector and are shaking up traditional business models. The new technologies impact every step of a film's lifecycle, from script, budgeting and shoot to theatrical, VOD and other types of release.
Screen International, in association with Creative Skillset, last week hosted an industry roundtable, called The New Business, to consider the key issues for the future of the UK film business in the digital landscape.
In a wide-ranging discussion, the panellists discussed the impact on the film business of piracy, narrowing windows and shifting value chains. The group also made some bold forecasts about the future and considered how the industry can better understand its audience and changing consumption habits.
This is the first in a series of discussions that Screen will host in association with Creative Skillset.
Screen would like readers' feedback on the hot topics discussed at the roundtable. Use the comments section below to sound off on changing audiences, the multi-platform world, and the future of VOD.
On the panel were:
- Clare Binns, director programming and acquisitions, City Screen
- Peter Buckingham, distribution specialist and former head of distribution and exhibition at the BFI
- Eve Gabereau, managing director, Soda Pictures
- Liz Rosenthal, CEO and founder, Power to the Pixel
- Debbie Rowland, director of sales, marketing and distribution, Curzon Artificial Eye
- Dan Simmons, head of film, Creative Skillset
- Thorsten Schumacher, managing director, HanWay Films
- Jill Tandy, producer, Qwerty Films, and co-founder of Inside Pictures
- Stephen Woolley, director/producer and co-director, Number 9 Films
Setting the scene:
Jill Tandy: This is the age of the entrepreneur. Today we see people coming to us at Inside Pictures with such different and varied skills.
Stephen Woolley: I have set my films up in a traditional way. I can see the writing is on the wall in terms of how we relate to foreign distributors. We have a lot of decisions to make over the next few years. The business is changing. The amount of films financed in the old school manner of presale and private equity still exist but there are less of them. It's about how we as producers accommodate changing audience habits. But audience loyalty is something that hasn't changed. People still have a loyalty to cinema.
Pete Buckingham: But sometimes people get too excited about what new technology can do and how it can impact their business. Actually it's not quite like that and the wheels turn a lot slower. Cinema is maintaining a value chain but other elements of the value chain are not. And change in itself can be difficult for us to encompass because we're at times not open enough or the digital world isn't interested in us enough which is a worrying aspect.
Clare Binns: This sector has recognised things much faster than the big multiplex chains and the studio distributors. They are struggling under bigger issues and greater financial pressures so they can't be as fleet as foot as we are. They are not prepared to be as flexible. On the independent exhibition side I think we're going back to the days of The Scala and a model like The Prince Charles Cinema where there's a different film every day but you might play films for 20 weeks. To try for 28 shows lasting one week is ludicrous.
Stephen Woolley: I wish Made in Dagenham had been able to play on week days for a longer period rather than on weekends. That model would have helped the film a lot. Digital distribution allows that flexibility around what you programme and when.
Eve Gabereau: And screen averages need to be understood differently. It has to be based on the number of shows. A film's perceived success will of courese be damaged by not digging deeper into how many screens it went out on.
VOD – A gamechanger?
Debbie Rowland: The beauty of day and date VOD is that we can reach someone in the Outer Hebrides the same day they read the five star review in the paper.
CB: We're doing more distribution, and we're doing more alternative content because that's what the customers are demanding. We could move into VOD, too.
Thorsten Schumacher: VOD is replacing theatrical already. I've just come from Beijing. People in China are not even buying pirated DVDs any more. It's too cumbersome.
SW: Piracy is still a major problem here, though. Kids are so accustomed to illegally downloading. It's so easy. It becomes a sport.
Liz Rosenthal: But consumers want well-curated film platforms.
TR: I don't think piracy will be our main problem. If you look at the music industry they changed the price model to 99 cents per song and everything changed. The business model changed.
LR: I was looking at some research last year about the percentages of streaming in residential areas. Netflix had the largest share at 30 per cent. Bit torrent was around 20 percent. This was a year ago.
CB: That's the point. The pricing is key. People don't want thousands of DVDs anymore.
PB: But the figures are horrendous for VOD. 2004 was a peak year in the developed film economies. The DVD market accounted for three times the theatrical box office. Screen Digest predicts they will be level in 2014. That's a gigantic decline in revenue. VOD is not picking up the slack. You can't just say VOD will pick up the slack. For whatever reason, consumers are not taking to VOD in the levels they were to DVD. The pressures existing on a declining value pot is one of the biggest problems we face. There is a short term boost with Netflix and LoveFilm offering big MGs but that's not translating at consumer level. That's the underlying issue.
TR: With DVD you had a limited number of sales outlets – HMV, etc. With VOD the price is lower but the reach is much wider. I think the major problem will be that everything will be available everywhere. The problem will be in the marketing. How do you make yourself visible in such a cluttered market? That's where theatrical comes in.
EG: Historically it's hard to define what VOD is. As a distributor we see VOD as an extension of DVD. If you're a producer you're looking for a higher pecentage of VOD as part of the theatrical or TV deal. I think VOD is also an extension of theatrical.
Technology – The elephant in the room?
LR: The underlying problem is also that we just don't have the technology. Technology such as connected TVs are clunky and many TVs may have the capability of being connected but they are not. The user experience is confusing. Do you get a set top box? Do you get a smart TV?
JT: Curating and recommending product will become vital.
LR: Yes, There are many more opportunities to personalise experience with digital technology. If someone can't get out and wants to watch it at home in a certain way you can personalise the experience.
CB: There is always fear out there. I remember going to Europa Cinemas conferences 15 years ago and people were saying 'we don't want digital, we're not going to have it'. There's always an element of fear in change.
Digital – A cheaper proposition?
CB: We talk about TV being clunky and technology changing too often but with digital cinema you have to buy library servers and think about which satellites are you pointing where and the cost of bringing content in via satellites. We're upgrading all the time. There's always another thing to buy. But obviously we wouldn't do it if we weren't making a profit.
On the flip side things have also become logistically easier in some respects. We're going to centralise trailering. I can sit at my desk and work out what will be trailered so much more easily.
EG: And of course historically distributors weren't paying for it but now we are.
CB: Less than half our screens have VPFs. We have long discussions about managing that because smaller distributors wouldn't be able to get on screens. But digital transmission also means we are able to show more alternative content which is booming for us. Even our afternoon sessions are selling out. The more alternative content we do the more appetite there is for it.
A multi-platform world
DR: Kids will watch films over a number of sessions on different devices now. And children are on Facebook while they are watching on various platforms.
LR: Kids want a film here, there, as a toy, in all kinds of forms.
TS: But people used to watch two-hour programmes in the cinema and consume all their news in the cinema as well. When TV arrived and people claimed it would be the end of the cinema but the TV industry became the back bone of the film industry worldwide. Is the same thing happening now in a way? You have art-house and blockbusters in the cinema but when people watch quality drama it's on TV.
CB: It happens that there is good TV at the moment. But there are plenty of quality films too. People have different needs at different time.
DR: For children, social interaction with their community is key. We need to tap into that.
SW: For my kids the most pressing problem when considering going to the cinema is price. It ends up being a much better option to watch it at home on DVD or VOD.
CB: And we're grappling with that. We have special prices for challenging films. It's about making films an event - family tickets. We're trying to programme things differently.
PB: According to a recent report I read about 18-24 year-olds they flag up the risk inherent in going to the cinema. It's a gamble. Cinema is not very sociable. "With the cinema you don't feel like you've seen your friends, only the film," said one respondent. The DVD experience is more sociable. Can I control it and can I share it are two questions consumers are asking.
In five years' time kids could club together and pay £50 to watch a film the same day it comes out at the cinema. I think that's a model. Even if they're not watching it at home they'll share it virtually. Similarly, in cinemas there will be wireless and people will be on their phones and sharing on Facebook while they are in the cinema.
TS: In rural areas in the US, the number of driver licenses has gone down. People are staying at home.
Dan Simmons: It's about understanding the decision-making process. We are talking to the IPA – the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. They do media behavioural surveys into what consumers were doing before, during and after consuming a film. We're interested to know whether we need more data to analyse this area. Do we need to bring in talent in from other industries to help us understand our audience, for example?
TS: But there's always France. They still have these big windows. And it works perfectly and they are all pretty happy. They have a huge cinema-going audience.
CB: I think we'll see exhibitors and distributors talking directly to filmmakers at an earlier stage in the future.
JT: We're going to see a realignment of IP and rights ownership. Producers will have to monetise slates rather than individual projects in the traditional way.
It starts with the audience….
CB: People want a range of things. They always have. What's changing is the way they get it.
SW: But you can't rely on the end user to take that risk. Somebody out there has to take the risk. There are 100 turkeys for every success. You don't get to the successes by simply following a pattern. It's easy in hindsight to say this or that film was going to be a success. Most people if asked whether they thought the Artist would have been a big hit would have said no. The reality is that in order to make a film like The Artist those people needed money. You can canvas an audience now and say would you like to pay for a black and white film with a little known cast that will cost x amount in a year or two's time and they'll probably say no, probably not. So you have to allow the creativity to come up with interesting ideas and for money to be there. You can't rely on the end user to take that risk. Somebody out there has to take the risk.
LR: Film is a wonderful experience. But now people want a very different experience. As producers and entrepeneurs we have to help them do that. We have to think in that way. People want content on multiple platforms. Iron Sky is a great example of a director who wanted to make a feature film but also spent a long time developing his community, making sure they were engaged in what he was making and developing other products for that community. There is a lack of lack of money and risk in that area. Building IP is important.
CB: Exhibition is making baby steps toward working closely with producers and project developers.
PB: But the industry doesn't seem to be properly concentrating enough on what it is the consumers are doing to come to that particular film rather than another film. The numbers are not good. We're not in an expanding business. If you're a young person wanting to join an expanding sector you don't join film.
LR: We have for too long thought that film is the top experience we can have. There are many experiences we can have. This is an exciting creative space and creators can do so much more with their content.
All photos by Phillip Waterman
Screen would like readers' feedback on these topics discussed at the roundtable. Use the comments section below to sound off on changing audiences, the multi-platform world, and the future of VOD.