March 2

Feisty-as-always James Howard Kunstler is spot-on hilarious about the health care summit:

We are left, finally, with a so-called health care system so cruel and unjust that the Devil himself in consultation with the most demonic lobbyists, and perhaps a little input from historical politicians such as Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Heinrich Himmler, and Pol Pot could not construct a worse way of deploying the fruits of modern science. It has gotten to the point for most of us where we dread a visit to the doctor more for the bureaucratic consequences than the health issues themselves.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/03/winter-mind-games.html#more

The very odd Codex Seraphinianus is coming in for renewed attention online:

http://therumpus.net/2010/02/the-most-mysterious-book-now-online/

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200705/?read=article_taylor

http://htmlgiant.com/presses/the-codex-the-hurders-and-me-a-new-book-an-old-book-and-two-years-of-intermittent-emailing/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus

There is a tradition of imaginary zoologies and botanies to which the Codex belongs; Italo Calvino drew a comparison to Leo Lionni's Parallel Botany, and one might also cite Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings, Dougal Dixon's After Man, Wayne Douglas Barlowe's Expedition, and Scott Musgrove's new The Late Fauna of Early North America.

The artists Victor Castillo and Miss Van, currently featured in a joint show at the Merry Karnovsky Galerie in Berlin, also truck (rather spookily) in imaginary creatures:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36253

http://www.mkgallery.com/Exhibitions/StrangeFruit-SheWolves/index.php

Mark Bauerlein rightly sees "administrative creep" taking over the nation's colleges and universities:

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Advice-to-Faculty-Become/21505/

On another battleground, David Alpaugh believes that way too much poetry, much of it beneath mediocre, is being published today. Since his analysis has drawn furious denunciations in the poetry blogosphere, I take it he's on the right track:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/

Although the Burj Khalifa, for all its 2,717 feet, leaves me cold, I find this proposal for an energy-harvesting tower to be enchanting and poetic (as well as potentially quite practical):

http://www.archdaily.com/51164/townshift-competition-proposal-paisajes-emergentes/

This past fall I did a unit on "outsider music" with my sophomore English class, and their favorite artist by a mile was the Chicago-based Wesley Willis, who died too young in 2003 as a result of leukemia. Willis also suffered from schizophrenia and had a medically unhappy life overall, and yet the key creative characteristic that my students seized on was his joyfulness (not to discount the anger also apparent in many of his songs). They actually took to greeting each other "Wesley Willis be with you!" That tickled me no end. The song that got it started for them was "Rock and Roll McDonald's" (I had to let them discover his more outrageous songs, such as the hilarious "My Mother Smokes Crack Rocks," on their own):



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Willis

Among notables born on this date are children's writer Dr. Seuss, novelist/journalist Tom Wolfe, novelists John Irving, Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish language), and Edward Douwes Dekker (Netherlands), crime novelist David Goodis (mentioned here the other day), horror novelist Peter Straub, jazz saxophonist Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, politicians Sam Houston, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Russ Feingold, Russian poet Evgeny Baratynsky, baseball player Mel Ott, composers Bedrich Smetana and Kurt Weill, film director Martin Ritt, pop singer Karen Carpenter, rocker Lou Reed, and actors Daniel Craig, Jon Finch, John Cullum, Desi Arnaz, and the just passed Jennifer Jones.

I'm surprised that Martin Ritt doesn't get more credit for being an auteur and a regionalist. By my count 11 of his 26 features are set in the south or southwest, and he is very consistent in his choice of themes -- horses, labor issues, the African-American experience are high among his interests. He clearly got along famously with certain actors -- Paul Newman worked with him six times, Joanne Woodward four times, Sally Field three times; stars don't do that unless they trust a director. Ritt is an old-fashioned humanist (nothing wrong with that) and although I wouldn't claim him as a great director, I would say he's underrated; he's got a personality, he's not some interchangeable hack.