#this also counts for Sherlock Holmes and other famous PD works!!!

[walks-the-ages]

Ya know, I thought being a Faction Paradox fan meant it could be hard to find books.

But the things I'm finding while looking up Arsène Lupin books? Which are public domain, with some very rare, very expensive first editions from 1908-onward still floating around?

hoooooooo boy, some of the literal scams I've come across...

... First, there's this monstrosity.

first, you know something is up already when you see the cover:

(functional ID: ) The book itself is yellow, and the entire "cover" is just a medium-sized, plain white rectangle with plain text that reads "Arsene Lupin Versus Herlock Sholmes (1910)". The only bit of color outside the yellow background is a tiny rectangle at the bottom of the white section, that has a simple red rose in it, and at the bottom on the yellow portion, it says Maurice Leblanc and Georgie Morehead; they are the author and english translators respectively.

Not only is this cover incredibly ugly and boring....

They didn't even put the accent on the è in Arsène !

Now, granted, I still don't know the key-combination needed to type out the è (on a regular keyboard, that is; mobile is much easier), but I also literally have a pinned tab leading to the Arsène Lupin wiki so I can literally just copy and paste his name whenever I need to, lol. I'm also not a supposedly wide-spread, professionnel publisher who specializes in reprinting rare books....

speaking of reprints!

This is their reprinting statement in the book.

[ID: plain text on a white background that reads: "Printing Statement: Due to the very old age and scarcity of this book, many of the pages may be hard to read due to the blurring of the original text, possible missing pages, missing text, dark backgrounds and other issues beyond our control. Because this is such an important and rare work, we believe it is best to reproduce this book regardless of its original condition. Thank you for your understanding. end ID]

Now, all this wouldn't be so monstrous.......

Except this is what it looks like, reading the book.

[ID: A photo of the inside of the book, showing an unnumbered page which is mostly blank, with extremely large margins around the top, bottom, and sides of the relatively tiny "inner page" of text, which is originally labeled as page 171.

So, on top of admitting they have having zero quality control for their reprints, they're also not even selecting the correct page or printer size for their "rare reprints!" Literally so much paper is being wasted here.

"Arsène Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes" is 350 pages long in its original 1910 First Edition. That's with text that actually filled up the original page. If they'd at least chosen a smaller page size to fit their clear PDF-print, it would have been fine....ish.

But they didn't, so now this book is 350 pages long, and probably wasting half of those pages on pure blank paper.

Also, they're charging $30-$40 for these, "brand-new" on Amazon; going to their publishing website just leads any search to a generic Amazon page, full of the same extremely blatant ripoffs, including "leather hardcovers" from a print of demand location they can't even be bothered to not use a stock photo that requires them to blur out three different titles on the spine for each different angle.

Oh, and the real kicker?

Here's the exact Archive.org listing they're scraping to reprint for exorbitant amounts of money:

Literally down to the exact title, without an accent.

And this isn't the worst one I've found, either; another "public domain scraper" as I've taken to calling them, has taken this book:

and downloaded the ancient, autogenerated Epub from the Internet Archive, and without any human being looking at that Epub, converted it into a PDF and sent it off to a Print-On-Demand company to make those same generic, leather-bound hardcovers for $30+.

Would you like to know what the ancient, auto-generated epub looks like for this very old, very old scan of a book looks like? The one these scammers are reprinting and selling for an arm and a leg without anyone actually looking at the contents of what they're selling?

As a reference, this is what the original, old scan looks like:

[ID: a black and white image of two pages of text from an old book, the text is cramped, slightly blurry and tilted, and is difficult to read; the scan is from an old enough time that, from the shape of the pages not being physically joined together, that the book had to be manually cut page by page to be scanned. There are artifacts, dots and smudges throughout. end ID]

So, you ready to see what these scammers are selling to paying customers with no warning?

[ID: A screenshot of the Calibre ereader app, showing a page from the auto-generated epub from the old scan described above, showing a message in bold across that top that reads "The text on this page is estimated to be only 39.04% accurate." followed by a paragraph of complete gibberish; numbers, symbols, sanskrit letters, various special characters, etc, with no rhyme or reason. End ID.]

I don't know if this scam listing is still out there, I reported the one I found on Abe books, but they're also probably out there with a million duplicate listings on various websites.

So, yeah. Please,

If you are looking for physical copies of the Public Domain Arsène Lupin books, please make sure you carefully check what you are buying before ordering, especially online.

Make sure the 'è' in Arsène has the accent; make sure there's actual quality control, and for Arsène's sake, make sure what you're buying isn't slapdash gibberish.

If you don't know already, most of the Public Domain books that are in English and are PD in the USA can be found on Project Gutenberg (18-19 are PD in the USA this year if you include the play and its subsequent novelization; Gutenberg has 16 of these (including the play) , and you can read them completely for free, 100% legally:

I highly reccomend having the wiki page for Arsène Lupin opened up as you're reading through the books for the first time, because many of the books released at various times (and in various languages) with multiple different titles, so no two reading guides use the same title and leads to sheer confusion.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1358

if you speak French, you can also read all of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin books, barring 1 that wasn't published until 2012, 75 years after his death, which you can read in french on:

Since USA and French Copyright law are different, if you are in the USA you cannot use any books published after 1928 (except post-humous) for derivative works, as France has a shorter copyright term of 75 years after death (except post-humous), while the USA is based on 95 years after publication, so us poor Lupin fans in the USA have to wait until 2037 before they all are Public Domain :'(

TL;DR: If you're a fan of a series which is Public Domain, you can read them online for free 100% legally; if you're looking to buy phyiscal books and you're shopping online, please take care to check for quality to make sure you're not getting scammed with an extremely poor quality ""book"" which could be complete gibberish, and/or a huge waste of money and paper.

[aion-rsa]

The Riddler: DC Redefines Famous Batman Villain

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Does Year of the Villain mean a big change for Batman’s puzzling nemesis?

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Event comics usually come with a passel of one-off tie ins. Sometimes they’re very good. Sometimes they’re a way of giving someone a try out. Sometimes they’re a way of getting somebody work. These are all good things! But very rarely are they ever impactful on a character or the direction of a line. That may change this week, as Mark Russell and Scott Godlewski bring the Riddler into Year of the Villain with one of the most introspective superhero comics in a while, one that potentially foreshadows a big status quo change for one of Batman’s oldest villains.

The premise of the entire Year of the Villain arc has Apex Lex, a powered-up Lex Luthor, gone full evil again after years spent straddling the line of “dick” and “dick but helping the good guys”, running around the DC Universe offering power ups to the bad guys from every rogue’s gallery. In the pages of Justice League, he cranked up folks like Sinestro, while he’s been popping into other books for help like closing Gotham to the outside world and giving free rein to Bane (Batman), or a substantially boosted cold suit for Captain Cold (The Flash). In The Riddler: Year of the Villain, he gives Edward Nygma something completely different: perspective.

The story is framed by the Riddler’s friendship with King Tut. They start the issue kvetching about their persistent failures to top Batman in any meaningful way. They move to complaining that they haven’t been approached by Luthor yet, then head their separate ways. When Riddler gets home, he finds Luthor in his living room, and Luthor is pretty merciless in his criticism. The next morning, Tut calls Riddler to loop him in on his own profound realization: that they persistently fail because they never work with each other, and the true solution to both their problems is to do a half-baked death trap together.

The Luthor conversation is the crux of the issue. Luthor hands the Riddler nothing - no hyper-powered question staff, no bowler hat that will increase his cleverness tenfold, no giant question mark-shaped bomb planted under Wayne Manor. He just talks to him about Nygma’s own rigidity. The inflexibility of his mind, being lashed to his schtick, is what Luthor hints has been holding the Riddler back. And that inflexibility is preventing the Riddler from growing as a person. It’s kept him from accepting any changes since he was a child fixated on revenge against the bullies tormenting him. He ends the story by telling Nygma “Life is the process of saying goodbye to ourselves.” And the Riddler ends the issue by walking out on King Tut’s death trap.

read more: Justice League, Crisis, and the Future of the DC Universe

This is...not what I think anyone expected from a Year of the Villain book. The best you can usually hope for is a thoughtful one-off. Something akin to what Russell already gave us in Year of the Villain: Sinestro - a clever character piece that leaves the character exactly where he started when the issue picked up. Here, we get smart character work, but we also get more character development than the Riddler has had since...what, Paul Dini on Detective Comics back around Infinite Crisis? The Riddler is iconic, but the character owes almost everything to Frank Gorshin’s portrayal of him on the old television show. He hasn’t had more than a handful of deep dives or status quo shifts in an age.

A literal age - I can count four stories since the Bronze Age ended that really matter, that made a big impact on the Riddler as a character, and that’s a stretch a little bit - one of them came out on the cusp between the Bronze Age and the modern age of comics and could be argued into either category. But for almost every one of them, the impact on other characters was greater.

“Dark Night, Dark City” was Peter Milligan and Kieron Dwyer’s 1990 tale in Batman that had a suddenly very bloodthirsty Riddler pulling jobs around Gotham. It’s a really good Riddler story, but overshadowed by the fact that it’s also where Barbatos, the dark Bat-god who dominated Grant Morrison’s Batman mythology and later spawned Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s dark multiverse, first appeared. Snyder and Capullo also featured the Riddler as the main villain of "Zero Year," their big, 13 issue story about Batman’s first run in with Nygma. It is also the first time we really got to look at the way Batman managed his own mental health, and ends with him almost getting shock therapy. And the War of Jokes and Riddles was a long story that wrapped up Tom King’s first year on Batman by giving Kite Man a heartbreaking origin story and having the Joker (of all people) stop Bruce from killing the Riddler.

read more - Batman: Damned is a Trip Through the Darkest Corners of the DC Universe

The unifying force in all of these stories is that they’re not about Edward Nygma. They’re about someone else reacting to Nygma. And, in the case of “Zero Year” and the “War of Jokes and Riddles,” they both happen in the distant-by-comic-book-time past of Batman.

Really, the only story in the last 30 years worth of comics that really changed what we know about the Riddler was Paul Dini turning him into Sherlock Holmes in Detective Comics. In the wake of the wretched “Hush” and the not-great Infinite Crisis, Dini has Nygma go straight and begin selling his services as a consulting detective to Gotham’s wealthy. It takes the Riddler, keeps his main schtick (proving that he’s smarter and more clever than Batman), but points it in a different direction so we can see it work from another angle and take a little bit more out of it. Edward Nygma, Consulting Detective is the one time before this Year of the Villain issue that anybody really tried to twist the Riddler’s core concept around and peer at it from a different angle in modern comics. For perspective, in those same 30 years that it took to get four meaningful Riddler stories, Gotham City has been destroyed or quarantined from the rest of the country in four stories.

read more: The Secrets of DC's New Superman/Batman Team

Gorshin’s portrayal and the Riddler’s iconic look have been enough to keep him top tier in the popular consciousness, though. That a character can largely survive Jim Carrey and the Question Mark Guy who wanted to give us all free government money sullying his rep and look, respectively, is a testament to his fundamental appeal. The beauty of this issue is that even if it were a fluffy one-off with no potential wider impact, it would still be terrific. How many times do you get to open a comic and yell “OH MY GOD IS THAT KING TUT?” It’s not like he’s the Fluoronic Man or something. A King Tut sighting is a rare blessing, friends! Also, Tom King Batman aside, there’s been a subtle creep of a lighter Batman into comics lately that continues here. We’ve got a Batman happy to toss riddles back at Nygma along with his boots. Batman gets noticeably exasperated by King Tut’s incompetence and even almost jokes with the Gotham PD about how long it’ll take him to beat Tut. “Lair” Magazine is something I hope DC one day manages to publish, even if it’s just a joke. Profound character development aside, this issue was just really fun.

The brilliance of this issue is how it directly interacts with one of the fundamental tenets of modern superhero comics: the illusion of change. Stan Lee said the secret to Marvel storytelling (a theory that has come to apply to the superhero industry as a whole) is “the illusion of change.” The idea that comic book superheroes change over time is actually far truer than it seems on first glance, it’s just the under the radar ones, the characters keeping one arm out of limbo, who are capable of doing the most changing.

It’s possible that this issue is setting the Riddler up for a big change. It shows a willingness to strip Edward Nygma back to his bare, raw, core concept, and it’s one that makes him stand out as a Batman rogue. For years now, we’ve been watching Batman matched against the inexplicable chaos of the Joker, or match power and forethought with Bane, or have really bad anxiety attacks and bone Catwoman. What we’ve seen far less often is Batman be the best detective in comics. We get plenty of Batman pounding the shit out of a parade of bad guys. We don’t see him sussing out motive or means as much. All of the good writers have found a way to make that happen here and there over the last few years, but it always takes a backseat to saving hypertime by throwing three pearls at Rip Hunter. The Riddler gives them an excuse to lead with the detective work.

read more: The Batman Who Laughs and the Culmination of 10 Years of DC Stories

Maybe the Riddler has fallen far enough for this to stick. We know from tweets hoping for an ongoing that Russell thinks so. The Riddler: Year of the Villain works because it forces Nygma to think his way out of his rut and choose to do something different. Hopefully we get to see more of that change play out on the page.

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Feature Jim Dandy

Sep 11, 2019

DC Entertainment

Mark Russell

Batman

from Books https://ift.tt/2Lp4Kyc

[aleesblog]

Mentored by a Madman- a historical note published in Archivos de neuropsychiatria by Francisco Cardoso. June 2017.

 Andrew Lees, a visionary mentored by a madman Andrew Lees, um visionário orientado por um louco Francisco Cardoso1 ABSTRACT Andrew Lees, Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital Queen Square (London, UK), has been recognized as the world’s most highly-cited researcher over the 200-year history of Parkinson’s Disease. Although he remains actively involved in the investigation of movement disorders, Prof. Lees embarked on a literary career that started in 2011 with the publication of a social history of his native Liverpool. His last work is Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment, which is reviewed here. Keywords: Andrew Lees; William Burroughs; Gerald Stern; William Gooddy; Marcel Proust. 

There are descriptions consistent with Parkinson’s disease (PD) dating back many millennia. However, there is consensus that An Essay on the Shaking Palsy by James Parkinson in 1817 marks the recognition of PD as a distinct entity1. Andrew Lees (Figure 1) has been recognized as the world’s most highly-cited researcher, over the history of PD. Lately, he embarked on a literary career and his last work in this area is Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment. It is a memoir, with the author describing not only how he came of age as a physician and investigator, but also the history of some of his most important scienti c contributions.  e  rst-hand elegant account of landmark discoveries in the  eld is invaluable. e title of Lees book is provocative and the reader becomes intrigued as to how William Burroughs (1914-1997) (Figure 2), a destructive outcast who entertained very corrosive views of physicians3, could possibly have mentored a highly-acclaimed  gure of the medical establishment. Nevertheless, Lees associates many events of his formative years and career as an investigator to Burroughs. One should bear in mind that Lees attended medical school in the 1960s when the Beat Generation authors were almost mandatory reading. Paradoxically, Lees implies that, when gripped by  the temptation to quit medical school, he found solace in the depiction of doctors by Burroughs, particularly the abject Doc Benway.  e introduction of apomorphine as a treatment for PD is also related to Burroughs, who himself underwent apomorphine treatment for his heroin addiction2,3. He was per- suaded not to run a clinical trial of LSD in PD, after reading Burroughs’ comments considering it dangerous because of the unpredictable nature of its e ects. Lees’ experiences of self-experimentation with anti-parkinsonian agents are also paralleled to Burroughs’ extensive drug use.  The most amusing of them is his intake of deprenyl, which changed his behaviour in a manner that led his wife to ask him to remain on it inde nitely (the reader is left unaware if he complied with her request). Overall, the imputed intersections between Lees’ career and Burroughs’ works seem less convincing of a genuine mentorship and more suggestive of coincidence or, as both would certainly prefer, synchronicity.  ese allu- sions are indicative of the unconventional nature of Lees and a reiteration of his  delity to the spirit of the 1960s genera- tion.  is is supported by the only instance in the book where Burroughs undeniably mentored Lees: while investigating the therapeutic possibilities of yagé, Lees actually used ayahusca. THE REAL MENTORS e most fascinating aspect of the book2 is a glimpse of the formation of Lees. In this regard, it is necessary to men- tion two of his real mentors in neurology. Professor Gerald Stern (b.1930) (Figure 3), one of his teachers during his training at  e National Hospital Queen Square (NHQS), exerted a powerful in uence over the young Figure 3. Gerald Stern (picture kindly sent by him to the author). Lees. Many of his early publications have Stern as the senior author, and their partnership resulted in the introduction of apomorphine, bromocriptine and deprenyl in the manage- ment of PD4,5,6. In addition to this scienti c aspect, Stern was a model of careful listening to the history of patients, as well as having a very generous attitude towards young collaborators. Dr William Walton Gooddy (1916-2004) (Figure 4), also a consultant at the NHQS, was a man with a remarkable range of intellectual interests: neurology, literature, cosmology, pottery, music, and more. Dr. Gooddy had an idiosyn- cratic teaching style that can be exemplified by the answer he gave the young Lees about the recommended reading to start his neurology career: Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Not surprisingly, “in the highly competi- tive cauldron of Queen Square, his many interests outside medicine often counted against him” 7 Unlike the rebellious Burroughs, Lees has been compliant with his teacher’s recommendations: in Mentored by a Madman there are many quotations from Holmes where Lees explains how the deductive method of Sherlock is a paradigm of neurological reasoning.  The interest in the famous detective was not just a young man’s infatuation: in the   plenary talk of the Brazilian Congress of Neurology in 2016, Lees tackled the relationship between neurology, Sherlock, and another of his heroes, Sir William Gowers. Aside from the recording of Gooddy’s recommendation for reading In Search of Lost Time, there is no other mention of Proust in Mentored by a Madman. One possible explanation for the omission is that Lees had not read Proust. However, he conceded to this reviewer that he actually read the book. The omission is only just discernible, as the book has many Proustian features: narration in the rst person, semi-autobiographical nature, distrust of doc- tors (the only physician to have a sympathetic depiction by Proust is Brissaud) and, in particular, the spiral nature of the plot. In Time Regained, the narrator is found in the library of the Guermantes’ mansion. While awaiting the intermission of a concert, he is able to recall his own past in full detail, being thrown into the opening scenes of his book. Lees’ adventure in the Amazon Forest, described in the last chapter of Mentored by a Madman has a similar atavistic nature. It was a re-enactment of lifelong experiences and reiteration of many of his loves: the Amazon of Spruce, Burroughs, self-experimentation and the quest for a cure for PD. Here, Lees is Proust. In the last chapter of his book, Lees had visions, visual hallucinations, induced by ayahusca. It is a very  tting end for the book that, in reality, describes not a doctor’s mentoring by Burroughs, but the journey of a visionary. Lees is a man who has the vision of medicine as a compassionate blend of science and art, of doing research devoid of spurious inter- ests and unobstructed by pointless bureaucracy, and a relentless search for a cure for PD. Mentored by a Madman is affiliated to the lineage of visionary English literature. Lees is the William Blake of neurology.

References

Parkinson J. An essay on the shaking palsy. London: Whittingham and Rowland for Sherwood, Neely and Jones; 1817.

Lees AJ. Mentored by a madman: the William Burroughs experiment. Devon: Notting Hill; 2016.

Morgan T. Literary outlaw: the life and times of William Burroughs. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; 2012.

Lees AJ, Stern GM. Sustained bromocriptine therapy in previously untreated patients with Parkinson’s disease. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 1981;44(11):1020-3.

5. Stibe CM, Lees AJ, Kempster PA, Stern GM. Subcutaneous apomorphine in parkinsonian on-off oscillations. Lancet. 1988;331(8582):403-6. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(88)91193-2 6. Frankel JP, Kempster PA, Stibe CM, Eatough VM, Nathanson M, Lees AJ et al. A double-blind, controlled study of high-dose L-deprenyl in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Clin Neuropharmacol. 1989;12(5):448-51.

7. Lees A. William Walton Gooddy. BMJ 2005;330(7496):909. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.330.7496.909-a 316 Arq Neuropsiquiatr 2017;75(5):314-316