Oxford
“OXFORD” is EXTRACT FOUR — FROM PART TWO: EPISODE FIVE of tales told “out of school” and (intentionally) out of order: i.e., extracts from /S/4: Ego-histoire, an anti-memoir of a PhD project, written across the years 2021–2023, and ending with the (un)timely discovery of the mysterious phenomenon (agency) of THE EDITION OF ONE.
For a summary, plus DRAMATIS PERSONAE, see https://medium.com/@agencex/ego-histoire-85b118e1b986 …
EXTRACT FOUR — FROM PART TWO: EPISODE FIVE
A research sojourn in Oxford.
GATE 65 — VCE
I reached Gate 65 at VCE on September 7 just after the noon hour, with a flight to LHR. [REDACTED]
I was headed ostensibly to London, to travel “up to” Oxford to use the Bodleian libraries — at least that is what I told anyone who asked and myself. What would actually transpire was anyone’s guess. It was my intention, but I was on high alert for shifts in all plans. Nonetheless, I was leaving Slovenia again, as I often had in the past, with both a sense of relief and a sense of anticipation/trepidation — i.e., to return or not. It struck me the night of September 6 that it was a test of the premises of the thesis project, as much as anything personal — to come and to go, based on circumstances and necessity; to test the waters wherever the project led me, even if it was away from where I thought I wanted to be and where I had finally found a “home” for the project. Ljubljana was yet another mostly safe harbor; the fact that I also, on occasion, harbored misgivings about being there (mostly being stuck there) had little to do with the most recent exit. It was strategic, not personal. I was dancing with what I had come to call “Schengen Days” …
September 7, 2022
[…]
OXFORD
I took the Oxford Tube (bus) from Holland Park to Oxford High Street at 11:15am on September 8. I had for whatever reason decided to use their cellphone app for ticketing. This involved acquiring (downloading) the app, registering, and then ordering a ticket that was then only accessible via the app. Payment was made via another app — PayPal. I had somewhat intentionally and blindly decided to play at a new round of technical mischief, to bring myself up to speed — and for what it was worth. The ticket had to be activated online before boarding the bus. As I had no cellphone access other than via public or private wi-fi, I could only activate it by finding wi-fi near the bus stop in Holland Park and just before boarding the bus. The strange thing was that the ticket timed-out after 15 minutes of activation. Why? I studied options … I knew that there was a posh hotel at the bus stop in Holland Park. Could I borrow their wi-fi, activate the ticket, and board the bus all in 15 minutes? Seemed possible and risky, at once. The roundtrip fare was 18.00 GBP. I took the plunge into the app. It struck me as an experiment. At the worst, I would be able to give the ticket away (an option offered), save it for later (yet another “perk”), or never use it. I did something else unforeseen instead. I went into my US cell phone account settings and turned on “Travel Pass” … For 10.00 USD a day, I would have text, call, and internet privileges. The ticket was now 18.00 GBP + 10.00 USD. I went to Holland Park on the actual tube (London subway/underground) and arrived at the bus stop. Checking the timetable, I noted that a bus would arrive in 15 minutes. I then activated the ticket and watched the app as the ticket slowly headed to timing out. When timed out, it would then be invalid. The Oxford Tube bus arrived two minutes before the ticket would time out. I boarded with a sense of having played some unconscious game of chance. I had activated it prematurely. I should have waited for the bus to appear first and then activated it.
The bus crawled through West London traffic until it hit the open road (the highway). A gentleman just behind me on the upper deck was on a conference call on his phone, which I listened to for half an hour or so (having no choice), until I decided to move to another seat at the back of the bus. We arrived in Oxford around 1:45pm. I hopped out at the High Street stop to look for coffee. Instead, I had porridge with blueberries, strawberries, milk and honey. It was rainy and cold. While there I received an email from a friend about the passing of the Queen — i.e., that very morning. As I was in the Queen’s Lane Coffee Shop having porridge, I noted the irony that: 1/ porridge is a Scottish tradition; 2/ the Queen loved Scotland; and 3/ she loved Scotland so much that she refused to discuss devolution. She let the Commonwealth countries scurry away, if they wished to; but she would not let Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland slip away. They were, famously, “Her people,” all of them — even the Commonwealth countries, whether semi-autonomous or not. Yet Scots were doubly “Her people,” foremost because of Balmoral Castle, which was a private not crown property, Prince Albert having bought it for Queen Victoria quite some time ago. As national mourning set in for the passing of the Queen, I wondered if there would be anyone willing to acknowledge the ironies of the anachronistic system of privileges that was now to become a very public (and global) spectacle. Most likely everyone would close ranks for the interim.
I headed to Weston Library and the admissions office to complete the application sent previously and collect a reader’s card. I handed over proof of address (bank statement), ZRC-SAZU student ID and enrolment form, and passport. Boxes were ticked, my photo was taken once again, and the very gracious young lady at admissions handed over my Bodleian Libraries reader’s card. I opted for the six-month version, for 20.00 GBP. I could have paid 6.00 GBP for a week, but I chose to speculate that I would return again and again. I then headed to the Law Library where I began the process of hopefully closing up the readings on cognitive capitalism and IPR — having annotated and checked the reading list that was part of my thesis proposal in Ljubljana a week earlier.
September 8, 2022
[…]
ART + (THE) LAW
While browsing the database at the Law Library to get shelf numbers for the books on my reading list, I came across OIPRC (Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre), a group associated with the Law School, which I had tried in the past to engage with to no avail, albeit remotely by way of inquiries regarding opportunities for fellowships. A book I was looking for was in their special collection. This special collection was in the basement … I asked at the reference desk as to its location(s), and the librarian said, “Ah-hah!” … She then pointed to a staircase and said it was in a section that might be hard to find. She then offered to escort me there. We descended to Floor 0 and walked through stack after stack to a far corner of the basement room. She located the shelves, rolled the mechanical, sliding stacks and pointed to a vast trove of mostly journals on IPR. She returned upstairs and I began to visually and mentally scan the titles. Some very large, red folio-like bound editions were turned on their sides to prop up neighboring bound volumes on the otherwise very densely packed shelves. They called to me by their size, color, and disposition … The first one I removed revealed its identity on the spine only, which had been turned upward in the attempt to use the three oversized volumes as a wedge to fill a gap and support the neighboring books. Art & The Law … That was the title of the journal that had caught my attention for no apparent reason. Not “Art + Law,” as such, but Art & the Law. The ampersand seemed an integral part of the title, while the “the Law” part was a type of incidental superlative. Perfect. It was published by a group called Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (36 West 44th Street, New York, New York 10036).
The journals I had intuitively been drawn to were from the 1970s. In addition, they were from another library: “Webster and Sheffield Library, 237 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10017” to be exact. They had been accessioned to W + S on August 6, 1988. So declared a stamp on the first page of each volume. When they had been acquired by OIPRC and Saint Peter’s College was not clear. They were duly stamped, with book plate, upon acquisition by Saint Peter’s. There was even a DEMCO 32–209 borrower’s card in a sleeve from the W + S days. “Paul Weiss” had checked out Vol. 1 on “1/11/88” and Vol. 2 and 3 on “1/12/88” … The opening article in Vol. 1 (December 1974) was scintillating: “The Evolving Law of Artists: The Search for an American Law of Personality.” The author was Jerry Cohen, “an attorney in Waltham, Massachusetts, and former chairman of the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Committee.” The article had been previously published in Boston Bar Journal (1974).
The article generally bemoaned that in the US, under IPR law, artists were unable to protect their moral rights, as opposed to artists in Europe. He explicitly referenced the famous Article 6bis of the Berne Convention … Moreover, he specifically referenced droit moral in association with droit de suite:
“The droit moral has an economic corollary, droit de suite, literally the right of follow — meaning the right of the artist to share pro rata in any increase in value of his creative work as it changes hands over the course of many resales. Similarly an artist or author in European countries enjoys a right to share in growth of value of his copyrights long after he has assigned them.” Jerry Cohen, “The Evolving Law of Artists: The Search for an American Law of Personality,” Art & the Law, Vol. 1 (December 1974): pp. 1; 7.
I had stumbled (been led) into the dark tale of American resistance to acknowledging the moral rights of authors and artists as established in 1928, in Rome, during sessions associated with updating the Berne Convention. Article 6bis had been ratified in 1928 and the US had been resisting adhering to it ever since. As of 1974, the time of Cohen’s article, all attempts to change US copyright law to include moral rights had failed. The major stumbling block was always “industry” — e.g., in the early years, Hollywood and the film industry; and, in the later years, Hollywood and the film industry, plus the music industry, plus the book publishing industry, plus art collectors and auction houses (or, the so-called artworld). The postwar explosion of modern art in the US, and in New York, in particular, would by the 1970s inculcate a vast array of arguments and litigation on behalf of authors and artists, but artists in specific. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the issue of “the presence of the artist himself” (Malraux’s words) became the driving concept for a redress of grievances by artists and activists (inclusive of lawyers) to correct a long-standing favoring of industry by states versus any acknowledgement of authorial privilege beyond the point of “the right to sell your work” …
Cohen’s article was ironic in one major sense: i.e., after extolling the virtues of moral rights, he then privileges the US over the European system, because it is more flexible and open to customization of rights. The US resistance to the Berne Convention then vanishes in his argument and we enter the uncharmed territory called “lawyers, courts, and judges” (litigation). Apparently, the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts saw much hay to make while the sun shined on moral rights, storm clouds only ever appearing whenever legislation reached the US Congress to be promptly scuppered or neutered on behalf of industry, but almost always under cover of not permitting international law to interfere with American law. The 1970s were in many ways the historical “fulcrum” for what was to follow. By the 1980s the UK had adopted legislation at least recognizing moral rights as a part of copyright law, and in 1990 the US adopted VARA (Visual Artists Rights Act). Schrödinger’s cat had escaped its “box.” But it also took on quite different forms outside of Europe proper. Australia would adopt its version by 2000, following on as the good Commonwealth country that it is, even if all versions effectively still made droit moral a subcategory of monetary rights by locking it away in ever-shifting statutory law and the ravages of private law. You at least now could hire a lawyer to attempt to protect your moral rights. The general escape route for miscreants and states was that moral rights were subject to litigation, if/when contested. In many cases, each state also set into place their own exceptions to this exception, canceling the more profound elements of what became to be seen more and more as an ethical precept that could be admired at a distance and ignored whenever desired or necessary.
Curiously, or not, when I went to return the large red folios to the shelf where I had found them, I then found that Art & the Law had a much more extensive range than first noticed. To the right of the gap where the folios held the journals to the left and to the right upright, there was an entire range of subsequent editions, of a more conventional bookish size. The first few issues (1974–1975) had been “tabloid” size and fairly primitive in design. Art & the Law had then morphed along the way into The Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts. The journal had been subsumed by Columbia University Law School. “The Journal was until Volume 25 known as the Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts.” A quick search of Hollis, the Harvard University libraries catalogue, showed that this first shift occurred in 1985, with Vol. 24 appearing in 2001 (the last issue before yet another shift and change of title to The Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, dropping the reference to VLA). Whatever the evolutionary path portended, somewhere along the way the terms of engagement had been reversed. It had become Law & the Arts, versus Art & the Law. The lawyers had finally won the battle over who had the right to first mention. Art was now fully subsumed by Law, at least within the emergent field of jurisprudence. 2001 was also roughly the year of the “great copyright robbery,” when digitalization of publishing began to wreak havoc across all rights. It was the time of the emergence of the global octopus squids of academic publishing (Springer, Routledge et al.) and the general bludgeoning of authors under cover of proprietary rights. Moral rights only existed in this time frame as a mythic set of “procedural affects,” to be invoked and ignored. The artistic exception died by yet another one thousand cuts, waiting to be reborn somewhere else and under more discrete auspices.
September 8, 2022
[…]
Day Two in Oxford, September 9, was spent immersed in tales of the French book trade in pre-revolutionary France and at the “outbreak” of the transcendentalist disease known as the artistic exception. It involved all manner of subterfuge by the book trade to evade the diktat of privilege, well after they had more or less embraced privilege due to its value as a royal imprimatur/concession toward monopolizing publishing in Paris. [REDACTED]
[…]
MS CANON GR 27
I then wrapped up work at the Bodleian libraries at the Weston Reading Room investigating a 15th century manuscript of interest to “N” … It involved a cursory examination of the manuscript otherwise known as MS CANON GR 27. She had been unable to examine it in person, and since I knew she wished to know more about it, I offered to “order it up” and report on its general disposition. As it was in Greek, there was no way to comment on its content as such. It was, indeed, a handwritten transcription of an early patristic text, as she had deduced. And, upon sending her images of the handwritten pages, she confirmed that it was by the hand of MG, scribe and scholar, the focus of her studies across over ten years. It took two visits to the Weston Reading Room to document the material “imprimatur” (its ontic presence) — i.e., the provenance and the formal apparatus, including marginalia. It was only on the second day that I noticed a watermark on a single page, and thus confirming that the paper was produced in Venice in 1499, and that the manuscript was most likely prepared in preparation for a printed book by the renowned printer, Aldus Manutius, with whom MG had worked before he fled Italy in semi-disgust at what the humanists were up to.
That fourth day at Oxford was also the day before I was supposed to fly to Spain. The trip never happened because the Spanish suddenly threw up another list of restrictions for passengers from the UK. A booster shot was now required to enter Spain from the UK. It struck me as ridiculous, but I took it as a sign that the trip was not necessary and I should wrap things up in London and Oxford with some modicum of slowness and care. This was all played out over a brief internal dialog around and on September 11 — one day before the scheduled flight and across the next few days. It was unclear if the Spanish authorities were playing games with the UK or not — i.e., post-Brexit tit-for-tat measures meant to inflict chaos in return for chaos. It was also unclear if a rapid antigen test would suffice, and if it would have, I would then have had to travel out to Heathrow to acquire one well in advance of departure. Rushed or harried plans no longer appealed to me. It was time to cut to the chase — to cut out further distractions and properly access the Oxford opportunity, which was truly exceptional in all senses. The simple access to collections of such a stature made all the difference. Finding material by accident, via open stacks, and having the leisure to compose my notes and self after a full day traveling to and from Oxford, with an average of four to five hours reading, was a great gift. I canceled my flight to Spain and “banked” the flight credit for later re-deployment.
I was also somewhat nervously awaiting word of the FBI-CJIS submission made on August 31 via Ljubljana and UPS. I checked the FBI website and found that as of September 11 they were still awaiting the fingerprint card. I had been resisting checking the Slovene postal service tracking record for 10 days, not wanting to know the whereabouts of the package until I needed to know. There was “no” information when I finally did check, other than that it had been posted, and that it entered the UPS international rabbit hole on August 31. It seemed I had no other option than to wait … patiently or impatiently. The excursion to Spain, mostly to meet up with friends and my dear sister “R,” was not in the cards. It was summarily ditched.
Thus, on Day Four of Oxford, September 12 (and the day I otherwise would have flown to Spain), I arrived back at Queen’s Lane café for porridge at exactly 1:11pm, a telltale hour. I had spent the morning in London studying the FBI-CJIS report that had come in the previous afternoon, i.e., the very day I had canceled my flight to Spain, and the very day that I had finally checked the disposition via the FBI site and Slovene postal service tracking.
“All clear …” I just needed to have the apostille added. Finding that might take some time. I checked with a notary service in Mayfair, via email, and they told me it had to be done in the US. I wrote to the US Embassy in Ljubljana and they also told me it had to be done in the US, but that it could be done by mail or courier. The game was afoot … I had actually noted the arrival of the email for the FBI in the late hours of Sunday, September 11. The FBI was working on Sunday … How wonderful. I refused the option (temptation) of immediately opening the link and checking the outcome. I recalled Sherlock Holmes’ penchant for nailing mail to the fireplace mantlepiece and opening it when the spirit moved him. The next morning, I drank tea and smoked in the back garden and considered leaving it be for a while. I weighed up options as to why I might do so. I thought it might rattle me, one way or another and I needed to go back to Oxford, for “N,” and finish the reconnaissance on MS CANON GR 27. My initial report to her had prompted further questions. About an hour later I opened the link to find a PDF that amounted to “attestation” that I did, indeed, exist (which I was not quite sure of) — and, furthermore, that I was not a criminal (which I was actually quite sure of). I had passed the Identity History Report test required by Upravna enota for the student visa. I could now, on Monday, return to Oxford and finish up my research with some sense of impending further drama in pursuit of the apostille. How vigorously I would pursue that was still not clear to me. There was an expensive route and a less expensive route. The time frame for completion was, per usual, and regardless of which method chosen, pure mud. No one had any idea. It might take five to eight weeks or longer, once it reached the State Department. Even the courier route would not particularly help with expediting the process beyond getting it to and from the US more rapidly. I decided to “think about it …”
September 12, 2022
[…]
