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There are stacks of "Harry Potter" books in the store down the street, with the spines on the wrong side, the covers upside down, and the text written backwards and sideways. Breaking all the rules, it's a publisher's nightmare, a mess . . .
. . . unless you read Chinese. And even if you don't, the arrangement is mesmerizing, provocative, if you've never before thought about "seeing" that way. Even if you don't read Chinese, it's tempting to purchase the book.
Like many of the practices and admonishments that make it into the lore, their mere repetition may have given them an unearned credibility. As I browse through some of the portrait galleries on this site, I see lots of poses that follow the "rule", the subjects facing our left so that we can "read" the portrait. And yet I see far more than a few in which the artists apparently didn't know the rule -- portraits of Rosalynn Carter, Gerald Ford, George Bush, of academic and religious and other notables, focusing their gazes on something off to the right side of the setting. Not one of them looks "wrong" for having tweaked the rule.
Perhaps what we should really be trying to decide here is whether red wine or white wine is required with a red-meated fish, if you don't happen to care for wine, or whether a bird in hand is worth two in the bush, if hunting birds isn't why you're here.
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