April 6

I have been reading books about cryptozoology since my childhood, primarily because it is fun. Do I believe in the Yeti, the Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster? I'd like to, but especially in the case of the Loch Ness Monster, the fact that so many people have been looking for confirmation for so long without finding any is not reassuring. Still, the "evidence" is always entertaining, even when it turns out to be hoaxing or misinterpretation. I will admit that I was terribly disappointed when the famous St. Augustine "globster" of 1896 turned out to be a mass of whale blubber after all, instead of the remains of an unknown giant octopus of the deep, but them's the breaks.

The cryptozoological world is prone to short-lived excitements, such as this story taking the Internet by storm (hat tip to Bill Crider):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7557799/Oriental-yeti-discovered-in-China.html

Loren Coleman at the excellent cryptozoology blog Cryptomundo believes that the poor animal is merely a palm civet with a bad case of mange:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/chinese-pic/

Hopefully it will be properly treated and cured in a nice zoo. That would be the best outcome.

With baseball season beginning, John Williams at The Second Pass takes a look at baseball books new and old:

http://thesecondpass.com/?p=5286

A historical baseball book that I read last year and really enjoyed is Mike Sowell's The Pitch that Killed, about the 1920 death of shortstop Ray Chapman after being beaned by a Carl Mays pitch. Like all the best sports books of this kind, from Eight Men Out to Seabiscuit, it is first-rate narrative and first-rate social history.

I count on Jai Arjun Singh at Jabberwock to keep me in the loop on the most interesting Indian literature coming out, such as Aatish Taseer's The Temple-goers:

http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2010/04/temple-goers-split-cities-split.html

A goal of mine is to find bloggers in every part of the world who can keep me up-to-date in this way on the cultural goings-on in their "neck of the woods." There are issues of linguistic accessibility, of course, because my reading abilities are currently limited to English and passable French and Spanish, but the search goes on nonetheless.

The Complete Review has posted a fine review of a 1962 Egyptian Arabic novel, Fathy Ghanem's The Man Who Lost His Shadow:

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/egypt/ghanemf.htm

For an informative take on the Arabic world today, David B. Ottoway's lengthy essay for The Wilson Quarterly is highly recommendable:

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=603733

The young German painter Stefan Muller has a vibrant show at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37101

http://www.kunsthalle-baden-baden.de/Ausstellungen/Aktuell.html

I'm not sure I get the press release copy, though:

Müller’s painting is distinguished by a reduced choice of materials, motifs, and colors. He paints on untreated canvas, cotton fabric, or used fabrics such as bed sheets, which he exposes to accidental modification before and during the act of painting. Beer stains, ashes, dust, coffee, or blood often replace the conventional varnish. His palette of materials ranges from acrylic, transparent lacquers, oil, and silicone to markers, pencils, and crayons. He also integrates banal elements such as dirt, tissue paper, confetti, and glitter into his works.

Hmm, that doesn't sound like a "reduced choice" of materials -- nor does this look like a reduced choice of colors:

The 87-year-old Japanese soprano Michiko Hirayama is apparently still more than up to the challenge of performing Giacinto Scelsi's epic song cycle Canti del Capricorno, written for her between 1962 and 1972:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/michiko-hirayama-sings-giacinto-scelsi-.html

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

Another great contemporary composer, the Dutchman Louis Andriessen, is profiled in the New York Times on the occasion of a series of Carnegie Hall concerts highlighting both his own music, and the music that has influenced him:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/arts/music/04louis.html

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

Andriessen, whose father Hendrik was an important composer in his own right, has been a frequent collaborator of yesterday's birthday boy Peter Greenaway.

Levi Stahl, in reading about Ulysses S. Grant, is absorbed by the stories of other Civil War generals as well:

http://ivebeenreadinglately.blogspot.com/2010/04/two-generals.html

Among notables born on this date are philosophers James Mill and Alexander Herzen, aphorist Nicolas Chamfort, painters Raphael, Leonora Carrington, Gustave Moreau, and Hans Richter, photographers Nadar and Harold Edgerton, composer Robert Volkmann, conductor Andre Previn, mezzo-soprano Felicity Palmer, film directors Joseph H. Lewis and Barry Levinson, theater director Tadeusz Kantor, bluesman Blind Mississippi Morris, jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli, singer/songwriter Merle Haggard, poets Erich Muhsam (Germany) and Julien Torma (France), novelists Robert Coates, Veniamin Kaverin (Russia), and Homero Aridjis (Mexico), screenwriter Dudley Nichols, baseball players Mickey Cochrane and Bert Blyleven, biologist James D. Watson, and actors Walter Huston, Billy Dee Williams, Ivan Dixon, Roy Thinnes, Michael Rooker, and Paul Rudd.  Let us honor the kick-ass directing technique of Joseph H. Lewis with this brilliant uninterrupted take from the film noir masterpiece Gun Crazy. The small-town setting is genuine, the dialogue is largely improvised, and the reactions of the bystanders are unfeigned: