April 20

Laurie Fendrich ponders human insignificance in the face of forces of nature such as the Icelandic volcanoes:

Long ago, I was persuaded of the truth of evolution. But unlike a lot of people, I'm not a happy camper about it. Add together volcanoes and Darwin, and you arrive at a world where we are nothing but an accident perched precariously on the surface of the planet.  

http://www.chroniclecareers.com/blogPost/The-Terror-of-Volcanoes/23207/

This reminds me of Stephen Crane's magnificent short poem:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

(The total short corpus of Crane's deliberately "unpoetic" poetry, 135 items in all, blew my mind when I was an adolescent and still does so today.)

Jeff Jarvis thinks that our response systems to events like these eruptions is inadequate:

http://thefastertimes.com/mediaandtech/2010/04/18/the-ash-cloud-is-a-profound-crisis-why-arent-we-responding-more-seriously/

Anne Applebaum contemplates how the transportation disruptions created by the ash clouds bring us face to face with what a world without cheap, regular air travel would be like -- a world which, thanks to Peak Oil, we are on the cusp of anyway, so people had probably better get used to it. (It is doubtful that they will do so gracefully, howwever.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/18/AR2010041802725.html 

More literary fakery, and this is quite the scandal: The late popular historian Stephen Ambrose -- and very popular he was, too, a go-to historian for Hollywood types -- is revealed to have faked most of the interviews he claimed to have held with his biography subject, President Dwight David Eisenhower:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/04/26/100426ta_talk_rayner

This revelation comes after a history of other accusations of plagiarism and inaccuracies against Ambrose, which are getting to be par for the course for many writers, alas -- but claiming to have held interviews that you never held takes the misbehavior to a whole different level (PMD, April 9).

Sam Ruddock at Vulpes Libris has written a fine review of Nii Ayikwei Parkes's novel Tail of the Blue Bird, and followed up with an interview with the author:

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/tail-of-the-blue-bird-nii-ayikwei-parkes/

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/author-interview-with-nii-ayikwei-parkes/

Like The Checkout, The Jazz Session offers excellent audio interviews with jazz musicians, in this instance vibraphonist Joe Locke:

http://thejazzsession.com/2010/04/01/the-jazz-session-156-joe-locke/

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

Happy zoological news: Sibree's Dwarf Lemur, a species so obscure that scientists did not even know whether it was extant or extinct, has been re-discovered in Madagascar in a reasonably sizable breeding population:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/dwarf-lemur/

Maritime photographer Bob Chilton shows in a new exhibition that he has a distinctive visual sense for subject-matter that can easily become hackneyed:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37521

http://www.pdnbgallery.com/Site/BobChilton2010info.html

No, this is not a public urinal (although it would make a very attractive one). Rather, it is an arts information pavilion in Madrid:

http://www.archdaily.com/56897/infomab10-kawamura-ganjavian-studio/

Among notables born on this date are novelists Peter S. Beagle, Steve Erickson, Sebastian Faulks, and Henry de Montherlant, science fiction novelist Ian Watson, humorist Josh Billings, poet Pietro Aretino, financial writer Andrew Tobias, jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, Latin jazzman Tito Puente, pop singer Luther Vandross, conductor John Eliot Gardiner, figure skater Toller Cranston, silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, sculptor Daniel Chester French, painter Joan Miro, baseball player Don Mattingly, and actors Jessica Lange, George Takei, Andy Serkis, Veronica Cartwright, Nina Foch, Ryan O'Neal, and Crispin Glover. When you are visiting the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, I can definitely recommend a visit to Daniel Chester French's estate Chesterwood, a pleasing property where you can learn a lot about the creator of the seated Abraham Lincoln sculpture at the Lincoln Memorial. My mother taught me long ago never to pass up a historic home that you were within 50 miles of!