Altruistic (or Nepotistic) Fraud?

The man pictured above, Raphael Golb, is on trial for forgery he allegedly committed in an attempt to validate his father's scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. This article discusses some of the details of the case, including Golb's creation of email accounts in the names of prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholars who disagreed with his father's findings. Golb claims that his father's research was stolen years ago, and that his fraud was an attempt to shed light on someone else's plagiarism, but the story sounds increasingly outlandish as one reads about it. If you felt that someone stole from your father, would you go to any lengths to expose the theft, even to the point of committing crimes yourself? Would you create 70 email accounts in the names of your father's detractors in an attempt to (falsely) restore his scholarly reputation? I hate to be a cynic, but I feel that there's more going on here than simple familial love. It almost seems as though Golb feels he owes his father something, and will even break the law to restore a (perhaps) broken relationship with him. I wonder if this will do it.

Kodak Moment(s)

This video advertises a product that allows the average housewife to easily manipulate family photos. I realize that photographic manipulation has occurred almost as long as photographs have existed, but does anyone else find this creepy? Family photos already tend to be extremely artificial, reducing a group of interesting, individual people to one static image, but isn't there something fun about the captured instant, however imperfect, that is lost once several photos are spliced into one? How long will it be before we airbrush our childrens' pimples out or even hire better-looking children to play them?

Authenticity and the Collector

This morning I came across this item for auction on ebay and, though I have little interest in buying it, spent several minutes wondering about its authenticity. How can a book published in 1995 have "1994" written in it by the author? Then I realized that I didn't really care whether it was authentic or not. I am not a collector, and I see my books' values pragmatically: will the binding hold up? is the text accurate? can I mark in it with impunity? I enjoy a beautiful copy of a novel as much as the next person, and would also like to have a signed copy of my favorite book, but in our age of mechanical reproduction, every book is a "copy," and even the signed ones are hardly one-of-a-kind.

So then, what value does the signature add to the book? Why does the seller referred to above want $200 for a signed copy, and why might it be so important to a buyer to have that copy? Perhaps the first edition, especially the signed first edition, is as close to an "original" as is possible in publishing. The first edition novel is like the band a hipster liked before everyone else heard about it, and its price is indicative, not of its worth, but of the passion the buyer has for the work. But this passion often seems to diminish once the passionate begins to collect. The collector wants that which is closest to unique, if he cannot find something unique, and his use for the item is restricted to re-selling it at a profit or showing it to friends at parties. I don't think Gaddis would want his books to sit unread on shelves, nor to be shown off because they were expensive or exclusive.

On Admiration

From The Recognitions:

"--But if Mister Feddle saw a copy of a play by Ibsen, if he loves The Wild Duck and wishes he had written it, he wants to be Ibsen for just that moment, and dedicate his play to someone who's been kind to him, is that lying? It isn't as bad as people doing work they have no respect for at all. Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of . . . recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn't be sinful to want to have created beauty?"

Language of Falsehood

Recently read in Emerson's Nature:

"The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, the desire of pleasure, the desire of power, the desire of praise,--and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections."

There is something just right about this statement.