Griff's Village

I recently read Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories , a collection of short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, translated by Jay Rubin. Akutagawa is one of Japan's most celebrated writers, but, for most of us in the west, he's most notable for "In a Grove" and "Rashomon," which provided the plot and name, respectively, for one of Akira Kurosawa's best-known movies. I'd be lying if I said that his connection to Kurosawa had nothing to do with my decision to check this book out, but I don't want to imply that Akutagawa is little more than a cinematic footnote: his short stories are some of the best I have ever read. While enjoying this book, I often thought about the language barrier. When you're watching a foreign movie, the picture is, for the most part, unaltered, so much of the artistry (the lighting, set design, costumes, and cinematography, for example) is preserved. Words are different; you can't really see a writer's words through...

I've been interested in the public domain for a long time. When I was an unemployed, carless twenty-something, I liked knowing which works of classic Literature I could find for free online. To this day, there's something very satisfying about downloading P.G. Wodehouse's A Damsel in Distress or Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes from Standard Ebooks and loading them onto my eReader. Some people always get excited about Public Domain Day, but this year's has been one of the biggest because of soon-to-be horror icon Mickey Mouse's new legal status. It's funny to think that Disney, a company who embodies art and commerce in almost equal measure, has lost even a little bit of control over one of the world's most recognizable characters. The same thing happened when Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain a few years back.  It was Walt Disney, and not A.A. Milne, that made the idea of Pooh as a slasher villain so appealing. A lot of ch...