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[See the other "exchanges" to catch up if you want... this is the 12th paragraph in the back-and-forth.]
Darren Wershler-Henry: If we treat creative products geared toward highlighting how indebted creativity is to reworkings of other cultural products as a trend that’s had its time, we’ll get precisely the culture we deserve – i.e. one with no public domain (with the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Eldred appeal of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act and Mexico considering extending copyright to life-plus 100 years and allowing the government to collect royalties on works in the public domain, we’re that much closer to a continent-wide lockdown). And while I agree in spirit with the notion that poetry’s value is arbitrary (which, for the most part, means it’s valueless), as someone who ran a press for five years, I know all too well that (a) poets are as capable of getting all pissy about contracts as any other kind of writer and (b) that no business is too small to receive a cease-and-desist letter from a multinational hell-bent on maxing out the value of its intellectual property holdings. Besides, with Circulars, I thought that the project wasn’t poetry qua poetry as much as it was expanding an innovative poetic sensibility outward into policy and politics … which means, in my mind at least, championing the values of an open relationship to content. As writers, we need to have the freedom not only to repost and recontextualize the news of the moment, but also to deconstruct, détourne and all of those other French verbs that start with D, without a constant fear of litigation.
Posted by Brian Stefans at July 4, 2003 07:04 PM | TrackBackNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: David at January 18, 2004 08:51 PM