Word: godwine
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Buried within Gail Godwin's ninth novel, The Good Husband (Ballantine; 468 pages; $22.95), is a wry and potentially wicked marital and academic farce. Imagine two imperious egotists -- one, Magda Danvers, a scholar of "visionary" literature, and the other, Hugo Henry, a successful novelist -- cooped up together at a small, liberally endowed college in the Catskills. Give them both passive spouses. Magda has Francis, 12 years her junior, whom she calls "dummy" and other affectionate epithets. Hugo has Alice, who was once his editor and is now nurse to his formidable self-regard. Surely these worms will eventually turn...
...them at long last does, but comedy has nothing to do with it. Godwin, a best-selling and deservedly admired author, plays her story straight. She not only likes Magda and Hugo, she thinks they are every bit as profound and talented as they...
Maybe you had to be there. But that is what good fiction is supposed to do: convince readers that they are there. For all of Godwin's generosity and narrative skill, The Good Husband is not a very good novel...
...even among the reams of bad poetry, gems are to be found. Mike Godwin, a Washington-based lawyer who posts under the pen name "mnemonic," tells the story of Joe Green, a technical writer at Cray Research who turned a moribund discussion group called rec.arts.poems into a real poetry workshop by mercilessly critiquing the pieces he found there. "Some people got angry and said if he was such a god of poetry, why didn't he publish his poems to the group?" recalls Godwin. "He did, and blew them all away." Green's Well Met in Minnesota, a mock-epic...
Trying to stamp out piracy under the current copyright system may ultimately prove futile. "The drafters of copyright never anticipated a day when everyone could infringe," says Michael Godwin, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Godwin thinks society may be entering a postcopyright era, in which the creators of intellectual property have to find new ways to be compensated for their work. In the future, the real value of a piece of software may not be in the program itself but in the ancillary services that come with it: printed manuals, frequent upgrades and a live person...