Diary

Stranger than sci-fi

· Science-fiction writers are queueing up to be associated with 9/11 (see Giles Foden in these pages last week). Hot on the heels of speculation that Osama bin Laden might have been influenced by Isaac Asimov's sci-fi novel Foundation (1951) comes a letter from Arthur C. Clarke in New Scientist. Clarke notes that the European Space Agency is sponsoring a project called Spaceguard. "I invented this name," he writes, "for the first chapter of Rendezvous with Rama (1973), which is now optioned for filming. I'm still spooked by the fact that the asteroid impact that triggers the story is dated 11 September."

· The latest volume of Anarchist Studies tackles the vexed issue of anarchist publishing and copyright. "Getting away from copyright is a good anarchist idea," says a spokesperson for Freedom Press, one of the longest established UK anarchist publishers - to paraphrase Proudhon, intellectual property is theft. Most anarchist publishers are anti-copyright, although "it's simply rude", says one, to republish without asking permission. However, pro-copyright anarchists insist that it protects workers' rights. Robert Crumb, for instance, labelled many of his underground comics "anti-copyright", then found he had no case when he took commercial companies to court for using Fritz the Cat and other characters. Similarly, Albert Meltzer, a founder of Black Flag (an "orthodox anarchist magazine"), was left seriously out of pocket when a privately printed pamphlet was photocopied by students and distributed for free. He was anti-"anti-copyright" after that.

· In Rossica, an international review of Russian culture, art historian Valery Turchin looks at insomnia. "For some reason", he writes, "in Russia we find it impossible to go to sleep." Insomnia, it seems, is a "peculiar ailment of the Russian Spirit". In Russian Nights (1844) Prince Odoevsky claimed that at night "the Russians stand on guard" while the west sleeps. Insomnia is a kind of "spiritual ordeal", says Turchin, especially for writers: "insomniac artists are prey to the powerful elemental force of poetic stikhiya, a uniquely Russian concept." His piece is accompanied by illustrations to Dostoevsky's haunting tale "White Nights", as well as quotations from Marina Tsvetaeva's "Insomnia" ("Once asleep - who knows if we'll wake again?") and Boris Pasternak's "The Night" ("Don't sleep, artist, / Don't give in to sleep"). As Turchin points out, the KGB used the "compulsory deprivation" of sleep in interrogations, while many Russians lay awake all night in anticipation of a knock on the door. Strangely, the last thing the critic and aesthete E Gollerbach penned was an essay entitled Insomnia and Sleep. "After that," writes Turchin "came his arrest and death. How very Russian it all is..." IP

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