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Midweek Miscellany

Midnight Cowboy — Andy Martin, author of The Boxer and the Goalkeeper, on Sartre and Camus in New York:

When Sartre stepped off the plane in New York in January 1945, only months after the liberation of Paris, his head full of American movies, architecture and jazz, he might have expected to feel in his natural habitat — the pre-eminent philosopher of liberté setting foot in the land of freedom, a nation temperamentally and constitutionally addicted to liberty. Was there not already something of the existential cowboy and intellectual gunslinger in Sartre’s take-no-hostages attitude? Camus must have thought so in dispatching him to the United States.

Wave of Mutilation — Joan Acocella on Grimm’s fairy tales, for The New Yorker:

Grimm tales… feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians. Toes are chopped off; severed fingers fly through the air… You get used to the outrages, though. They may even come to seem funny. When, in a jolly tale, a boy sees half a man fall down the chimney, are you supposed to get upset? When you turn a page and find that the next story is entitled “How Children Played Butcher with Each Other,” should you worry? Some stories do tear you apart, usually those where the violence is joined to some emphatically opposite quality, such as peace or tenderness. In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king who has twelve sons decides that, if his next child is a girl, he will have all his sons killed. That way, his daughter will inherit more money. So he has twelve coffins built, each with a little pillow. Little pillows! For boys whom he is willing to murder!

(As any parent will tell you, fairy tales really are most terrifying stories you can read to your kids…)

And finally…

Stuart P. Green,  author of 13 Ways to Steal a Bicycle, on theft law in the age of digital media, for the New York Times:

Illegal downloading is, of course, a real problem. People who work hard to produce creative works are entitled to enjoy legal protection to reap the benefits of their labors. And if others want to enjoy those creative works, it’s reasonable to make them pay for the privilege. But framing illegal downloading as a form of stealing doesn’t, and probably never will, work. We would do better to consider a range of legal concepts that fit the problem more appropriately: concepts like unauthorized use, trespass, conversion and misappropriation.

(via Nicholas Carr, who has some interesting commentary of his own here)