On another worrisome front, the Daily Kos ran a good piece on continuing unemployment and economic concerns:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/
Why is it that I feel my departure from the country is well-timed? I shouldn't have to feel that.
I learn from Arabic Literature (in English) and the New York Times that last month, a car bomb in Baghdad destroyed the home of the late Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, killing his wife and son and obliterating a lifetime's collection of culture, including books, paintings, and irreplaceable documents. There are no words. Well, perhaps these words:
There is a line of ancient poetry that every educated Arab can recite. “Stop and let us weep,” it famously begins, “for the beloved and the home.”....Friends say Mr. Jabra incarnated the ideal of his house — a dissident who drew determination from the dispossession of his people, a Christian who celebrated his identity as an Arab, a secular artist who was inspired to link the societies of his birth and his education, and a thinker who found strength to be open to the world through faith in his own culture.
Kevin from Canada writes what I think is the third rave review I have read of Tom Rachman's new novel The Imperfectionists -- clearly a book to put atop the TBR pile:
http://kevinfromcanada.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/the-imperfectionists-by-tom-rachman/
Jason Crane at The Jazz Session interviews soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome, who has concentrated exclusively on that challenging instrument for the past 15 years, and whose new album Blue Soliloquy sounds most impressive in the excerpts that Crane plays:
http://thejazzsession.com/2010/05/20/the-jazz-session-170-sam-newsome/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Newsome
The prose copy of art exhibition press releases often verges on the pretentious and academic in a way that does injustice to the actual visual qualities of the artworks. Case in point, the release for French painter Romain Bernini's first U.S. exhibit, at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art in New york:
Philosophically, Bernini questions the idealized l’idée de l’ état (the idea of the state) creating a bow from Plato to Hegel and Heidegger, the absurdity of a constructed reality with demarcations, unnatural to the human existence. By nature originally nomadic, civilizations have struggled to keep their populations within a certain territory, preventing them from a physical or cultural exodus or averting other populations from penetrating their cultural or economical domain.
Well, OK, I get this and it's not terribly difficult conceptually (some of this sort of prose is far worse, trust me), buy what does dangling Heidegger have to do with engaging me visually? Since Bernini's paintings are plenty good, let's talk about that:
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38152
http://www.priskajuschkafineart.com/exhibitions.php?id=125
RIP: Martin Gardner. Gardner (1914-2010) was an incredible writer and polymath. His annotated versions of the Lewis Carroll classics, which he continued to work on for decades, are absolute models for that sort of effort. His mathematical games books are endlessly stimulating. I devoured everything I could find by Gardner from childhood on; his name on the spine was a guarantee of quality. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011932556_apusobitgardner.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gardner
Among notables born on this date are novelist Per Lagerkvist (Sweden), children's novelist Scott O'Dell, science fiction novelist James Blish, poet Thomas Hood, journalist Margaret Fuller, composer Jean Francaix, pianist Alicia de Larrocha, jazz clarinetist/bandleader Artie Shaw, pop singer Rosemary Clooney, aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, scientist Carolus Linnaeus, physician Franz Anton Mesmer, Jeopardy! contestant Ken Jennings, racehorse Seabiscuit, film directors Reinhard Hauff and Tom Tykwer, and actors Herbert Marshall, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Joan Collins, and Drew Carey. One of my favorite episodes in the original Star Trek series is "City on the Edge of Forever," in which Joan Collins must be sacrificed so that future civilizations might live. When this played in reruns during my high school years, Spock's phrase "Edith Keeler must die" became a password among my group of friends!
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