May 26

Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post eviscerates Rand Paul. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy:

...the general idea....that it's wrong to hold private firms strictly accountable for disasters such as the gulf spill....appears to be something that Paul really believes, since he also dismisses the recent West Virginia mine explosion in which 29 miners were killed. ....Maybe accidents are less likely to happen when appropriate safety standards are established and enforced. This kind of cause-and-effect reasoning is meaningful only to those who live in the real world, however. From all evidence, Paul lives in Libertarian La-La Land, where a purist philosophy leads people to believe in the purest nonsense. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/24/AR2010052402991.html

(Love the subtle effect of "purist" / "purest" in that last sentence -- the sort of fine prose you can expect from a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary.)

When writers and artists go into manifesto mode, even writers and artists whose work I otherwise like, they tend to lose me (although such positions can become historically amusing after enough time passes). I'm not at all tempted to read David Shields's "livre du jour" Reality Hunger, because I just don't care whether Shields thinks the novel is dead; he wouldn't be the first, yet people go on writing the things anyway. I am much more interested to look at John D'Agata's anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay, in which the also "hot" D'Agata pushes his concept of the lyrical essay not particularly beholden to facts, and gathers some offbeat texts in service of his thesis. Yet after reading Alexander Provan's careful but unadmiring critique at n+1, I am far less tempted:

The Lost Origins of the Essay....is rife with made-up quotations, false attributions, and elisions that alter the meaning of the texts in the anthology.... Fabrications abound as D’Agata quotes anonymous critic after unnamed historian, and their cumulative effect is to undermine his credibility—as a writer of nonfiction or fiction or whatever lies between. This is not a matter of flouting convention, or even of disingenuousness, but, I think, of mistaking artfulness for art.
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It is often difficult to shake the feeling that D’Agata is addressing those who have paid a large sum of money to have their creative personas validated. He is both a product of the MFA system and one of its current darlings: he teaches at his alma mater, Iowa, and his essays—and now anthologies—are read widely and praised loudly by students and instructors across the country. In this context, D’Agata’s curiously anachronistic emphasis on the artist-genius and the struggle of literary invention makes sense. If you’re going to shell out $80,000 for a degree that is unlikely to have any lasting impact on your success as a writer, you’ll be pleased to at least have the sanctity of your endeavor to express yourself confirmed, however incoherently.
 
http://nplusonemag.com/information-artist

The blog Eve's Alexandria arouses my interest in the French feminist science fiction novelist Elisabeth Vonarburg and her 1981 novel The Silent City:

http://evesalexandria.typepad.com/eves_alexandria/2010/05/the-malevolent-dream-of-the-cities.html

While David Auerbach at Waggish informs me about the eccentric mathematician Charles Hinton (1863-1907), also a science fiction writer, with a serious investigative interest in the fourth dimension, and a bizarre biography besides:

[Hinton] invented a gun used in baseball batting practice....He married a daughter of logican George Boole, but was forced to leave England after a bigamy conviction. An instructor of mathematics at Princeton (fired) and assistant professor at Minnesota, he served at the Naval Observatory and as patent examiner in Washington. There he died suddenly when asked to give a toast to "female philosophers" at the Society of Philanthropic Inquiry meeting.
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Hinton later introduced a system of coloured cubes by the study of which, he claimed, it was possible to learn to visualise four-dimensional space....Rumours subsequently arose that these cubes had driven more than one hopeful person insane.

http://www.waggish.org/2010/04/01/charles-hinton/

http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/chh/hinton.html

http://higherspace.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/cubic-thought/

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

Rick Moody at The Rumpus makes a strong case for tracking down the music of "an Italian exponent of extended vocal technique named Romina Daniele." His long interview with her goes deep into philosophical territory in a way that I can take more seriously than the art exhibition press releases full of Heidegger and hegemony that I complained of the other day (although Daniele mentions Heidegger too!). "Supremely dense and continental," Moody calls her, as one might expect of someone who titled her second CD The Tragedy of Consciousness. There are a number of moody clips of Daniele which suggest that she could collaborate very fruitfully with a film-maker on a similar wavelength (which she would perhaps be open to; she cites Pasolini as an influence, and wrote her master's thesis on Miles Davis's score for Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows).



Among notables born on this date are novelists Maxwell Bodenheim and Alan Hollinghurst, fantasy writer Robert W. Chambers, diarist Edmond de Goncourt, letter writer Mary Wortley Montagu, photographer Dorothea Lange, composers Moondog and William Bolcom, soprano Teresa Stratas, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, jazz singer Peggy Lee, singer/songwriters Stevie Nicks, Hank Williams Jr., Levon Helm, and Lenny Kravitz, comedian/film director Bobcat Goldthwait, film directors Tarsem Singh and Ole Bornedal (Denmark), cinematographer Burnett Guffey, animator Matt Stone, and actors John Wayne, Norma Talmadge, John Dall, James Arness, Roy Dotrice, Alec McCowen, Genie Francis, Al Jolson, Robert Morley, Jay Silverheels, Paul Lukas, Pam Grier, Peter Cushing, and Helena Bonham Carter. Say what you will about Al Jolson, he was one of the most whole-hearted entertainers ever, and it is that aspect of him which Mandy Patinkin astonishingly channels in this legendary clip from The David Letterman Show. Apologies for the video snow, but who cares; this is great.