Remember when France sued everyone who tried to sell sparkling wine as champagne and won? Or when France sued everyone who tried to sell blue cheese as Roquefort, and again won? Unless you were a member of the international jet set aristocracy, you soon found that the menu at the country club had changed, and you were almost in danger of not being able to order foie gras or pinot noir, or even a nice Camembert without the possibility of seeing a disclaimer next to the name and an explanatory footnote at the bottom of the menu. “What’s this?” you might have asked yourself. “All my life I’ve ordered Roquefort dressing on my iceberg wedge, and now these lummocking hillbillies are pretending not to understand me unless I say I want the ‘blue cheese’ dressing? Preposterous.” And your neighbor across the way no doubt commiserated with you, equally offended by the wrongness of it all. Perhaps he nodded his head and said  “And if the wife wants a glass of bubbly, now we have to sit through this song and dance with the sommelier where he inquires ever so politely as to whether ‘Madame would like the sparkling wine from Napa or would she prefer the champagne from Languedoc?’ I’m surprised he doesn’t ask if I want the cava from Spain.”

While you can hardly fault France for wanting to protect its sacred gastronomical heritage, at times trademark protectionism seems a bit overreaching. Wasn’t everyone drinking champagne in The Sun Also Rises, first published in 1926? Granted, it was set in Paris, but I would wager my eyeteeth that the American public (and not just the jaded expats) had one thing and one thing only in mind when they heard the word “champagne”:   bubbly.  The public wasn’t thinking French, American, Spanish, or South American, but only about the alcoholic effervescence which fueled the Roaring ‘20s and made madcap fools of wedding crashers everywhere. Call it what you will, champagne was a noun, not a designation of origin.

Everyone wants their own piece of the pie, but when you have to distinguish between torta and torte, pie and pasty — when you, in fact, have to call a Napoleon a “three-layer-breakfast-pastry,” then you have denatured reality to the point where it is less magnifique than it was and less magnificent than it should be.  Some things simply aren’t the same when you change the name. Cary Grant isn’t Cary Grant when he’s called Archie Leach. Elizabeth Taylor may be happy with Liz but don’t try calling her Beth. And don’t tell me canolli by another name is still canolli – Godfather III doesn’t work if Don Altobello is poisoned by a puff pastry.

Names have power. America was clearly still mad about the blue cheese fiasco some four decades after the fact when the administration singled out Roquefort for a 300% tariff.  We might as well have said “Hey France, if you don’t want our steroid beef, we don’t want your stinkin’ cheese!! How you like them apples!!”

In fact, now that I think of it, maybe that’s exactly what we said.

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One of the quirks of copyright law is that book titles cannot be copyrighted, with an exception if you write a series like Harry Potter and the Copyrighted Sequels. So every cool or amusing title you ever came across while browsing through the bookstore is up for grabs and subject to re-use, and — unlike top domain name owners — being the proud owner of a book title means that you have actually written a book (and not just reserved www.greatwriter.com so that you can flip it for a quick buck later). That being the case, in my altruistic desire to see more people write (good) books, allow me to offer you some of the gems I have stumbled across in my not-too-short lifetime — with the caveat that these are titles you probably don’t actually want to use again.

(1) I Killed Hemingway, in which Pappy Markham writes a tell-all about how Hem stole all his great ideas and thus had to pay the ultimate price. Actually quite good.

(2) The Roaches Have No King, a fantastic novel about a love affair between Ira Fishblatt and his various women, including the overweight, matronly Ruth Grubstein. Told from the perspective of the cockroaches living in his apartment, including one named Rosa Luxemburg.

(3) God Hates Us All. This is of, course, the title of the fictional bestseller written by Hank Moody (cf. David Duchovny) in Californication, which is arguably the best Showtime series ever. (Yes, I said “ever’). When I heard/saw/found out about the name of the book during the first season, I literally wept with despair that the title had been stolen from the available lexicon, even fictionally. And then they went and actually ghostwrote it, and it lost a bit of pizazz for me. Because the tie-in book is just not that good. Fluff, really.

(4) Print the Legend. Another awesome (and newly released) book about the imagined death of Hemingway, by Craig McDonald, who I’d never heard of before I found this gem at my erstwhile local bookstore, Rakestraw Books. I admit this is not the most awesome title in the history of novels, but the cover is really cool, so it gets the “value added” award. And it was really good. Even if you don’t like Hemingway (and think Martha should have blown his head off years before) it was really good.

(5) One Hundred Years of Solitude. Fantastic book. Fantastic title. Better in Spanish in both respects, really, as Cien años de soledad rolls off the tongue almost effortlessly and if you can read castellano then you know how good Márquez really is.

(6) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A classic, but frankly not one of my favorites, as his writing is muddled and very Zen-like. I don’t enjoy having to intuit what writers mean — I prefer to follow along mindlessly absorbing limpid prose until 3:00 a.m., when I only reluctantly put the book down so I won’t ruin it by speed-reading the last 50 pages. Pirsig’s next book, Lila, which was published after a 17 year hiatus, is actually a much better read, and truly affecting. Best line in the book: “Take care of the goodness inside you.”

(7) Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume, and Still Life With Woodpecker. The magnificent trio of Tom Robbins’ novels from my decadent youth. Whose titles don’t merit copyright protection because they are not part of a series in any sense of the word recognized by the intelligentsia at the Copyright Office.

(8) A Confederacy of Dunces. A posthumous masterpiece about big, fat Ignatius Reilly and his love of the round file, among other things. Toole was a Swift scholar, and his protagonist has been compared to Pantagruel, but readers who aren’t charmed or amused by a fat, flatulent, gluttonous, loud, lying, hypocritical, self-deceiving, self-centered blowhard who masturbates to memories of a dog and pretends to profundity are not likely to enjoy this one.

(9) Ham on Rye. Okay, I admit it. I’m cheating here, but only because this was one of my all time favorites when I was in my 20s, and I ended up doing some legal work for Bukowski’s old printing house (Black Sparrow Press). The book design, with the soft cardboard covers and bold graphics, was a real winner at the time, though sadly the jacket does not stand the test of time. My copy is now sun faded and beat, but I still love it like a toddler loves his teddy. Bukowski’s infinitely better-titled book is The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, which suffers from being poetry, but being Bukowski is eminently readable, and includes a few cowboy poems even a city slicker could love. And if you are prejudiced against Bukowski because you had that bad Mickey Rourke movie inflicted on you at some point in your life, pick up a copy of Pulp and read it when you’re decompressing from the mogul runs this winter. Who knew Bukowski could do Philip Marlowe?

(10) Last, but not least, Trouble Is My Business or, alternatively, The Simple Art of Murder, by the king of noir, Raymond Chandler. Nobody does it better, and his whodunits all have titles to kill for.

(11) And finally, to fulfill my obligation to prove that lawyers are not mathematicians, number 11 in this top 10 has to go to my uncle John Paxton’s screenplay for the 1944 thriller Murder, My Sweet, which is still delightful. Kids these days are missing out on the whole black and white thing.

(12) Last one, I swear. That other Raymond, Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Va bene?

And that’s it, I’m Audi 5000 (as Evan Dando used to say). And no, you can’t copyright that either.

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Under current copyright law, if someone stumbled across the missing suitcase of Hemingway’s short stories (described in my post below) and his heirs decided — as they surely would –  to publish them, how long would the copyright last? Since Hemingway died July 2, 1961, does copyright in any newly discovered work by him run for 70 years from the date of his death — i.e., until July 2, 2031? Or would the lost manuscripts from 1922 fall into the public domain as works published abroad by a U.S. citizen prior to 1923?

The answer is:  neither of those. If Hemingway’s lost manuscripts had in fact been “published” in 1922 in the manner in which they ordinarily would have been sold, then they would be in the public domain. However (not to be too didactic), they were lost, and never published, and thus they would still be entitled to copyright protection. But they would actually be entitled to protection until January 1, 2032, as copyrights continue until the end of the year in which they expire.

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Though the tale of what happened to the suitcase and its contents has been the subject of apocryphal rumors for the last eight decades, several years ago two interesting takes on the tale appeared in popular literature. The first, The Hemingway Papers, takes this episode and embellishes it in a winning action-adventure novel. The second, MacDonald Harris’ Hemingway’s Suitcase, takes the tale a step further and purports — within the confines of a story about finding the suitcase — to reproduce five of the missing Hemingway short stories.

Hemingway’s immediate reaction to the loss was just as once might expect — continued melancholia and a lingering sense of bitterness over the loss, which some critics have pointed to as the cause of his breakup with Hadley. In a 1923 letter to Ezra Pound, Hemingway wrote:

I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenalia? I went up to Paris last week to see what was left and found that Hadley had made the job complete by including all carbons, duplicates, etc. All that remains of my complete works are three pencil drafts of a bum poem which was later scrapped, some correspondence between John McClure and me, and some journalistic carbons. You, naturally, would say, “Good” etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood.

Though it is unlikely that they would turn up at this late date, works by Hemingway have a strange way of appearing out of thin air every decade or so. In 2009 a “restored” edition of A Moveable Feast was released which includes additional material that was cut from previous versions;  in 1998 the novel True At First Light — which had been under seal since the early 1970′s — was edited and released by Hemingway’s son Patrick; and in 1986 a much-abridged version of Garden of Eden (which had run to 800-pages in manuscript) was released by Scribner’s to mixed reviews.  Perhaps 2011 will see the discovery of the suitcase in a ramshackle Paris attic that is being converted by a French Legionnaire’s grandson into condos for the new generation of American expats. To be true, the tale would have to be so over-the-top that it would make bad fiction cringe.

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