tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43908556643788350332024-03-13T09:33:32.311-07:00THE NEARSIGHTED BEACHCOMBERDonovan Hohn's flotsam, jetsam, lagan, &cUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger67125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-53074130039892088752017-07-08T08:11:00.001-07:002017-07-08T08:11:55.206-07:00The 'Troublemaker' Scientist<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
From last summer, the feature I wrote for <i>The New York Times Magazine</i> about Marc Edwards, Flint's water crisis, and the role of science in the public sphere:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="text-align: justify;">N</span><span style="text-align: justify;">ear the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Flint, Mich., there is an old pump house, the walls of which have long served as a kind of communal billboard. The Block, people call it. People paint messages there — birthday wishes, memorials for the dead. In January, after Gov. Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency in response to Flint’s water crisis, a new message appeared, addressed implicitly to Snyder but also to the world: YOU WANT OUR TRUST??? WE WANT VA TECH!!! In the history of political graffiti, “We want Va. Tech” may sound like one of the least stirring demands ever spray-painted on a wall, but in the context of Flint, it was charged with the emotion and meaning of a rallying cry.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="text-align: justify;">By “Va. Tech,” the message’s author meant a Virginia Tech professor of civil and environmental engineering, Marc Edwards. Edwards has spent most of his career studying the aging waterworks of America, publishing the sort of papers that specialists admire and the rest of us ignore, on subjects like “ozone-induced particle destabilization” or the “role of temperature and pH in Cu(OH)₂ solubility.” Explaining his research to laypeople, he sometimes describes it as “the C.S.I. of plumbing.” Edwards is a detective with a research lab and a Ph.D. In 2000, after homeowners in suburban Maryland began reporting “pinhole leaks” in their copper pipes, the water authority there brought in Edwards. In 2002, after receiving a report that water in a Maui neighborhood had mysteriously turned blue and was giving people rashes, Edwards took on the case. </span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="text-align: justify;">Until last year, the most famous case Edwards investigated was the lead contamination of the water supply in the nation’s capital — still the worst such event in modern American history, in magnitude and duration. In Washington, lead levels shot up in 2001, and in some neighborhoods they remained dangerously elevated until 2010. Edwards maintains, and spent years working to prove, that scientific misconduct at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exacerbated the D.C. crisis. A congressional investigation culminated in a 2010 report, titled “A Public Health Tragedy: How Flawed C.D.C. Data and Faulty Assumptions Endangered Children’s Health in the Nation’s Capital.” It confirmed many of his allegations, but the experience was for Edwards a decade-long ordeal that turned him into a reluctant activist — or as he prefers to say, “a troublemaker.”</span></blockquote>
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The rest of the story <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/magazine/flints-water-crisis-and-the-troublemaker-scientist.html?_r=0" target="_blank">here.</a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-86540560138053099732016-08-18T09:53:00.001-07:002016-08-18T09:53:21.875-07:00The Dread Hootenanny<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
From last spring, the review I wrote for the <i>New York TImes Book Review </i>of Annie Dillard's valedictory essay collection, <i>The Abundance, </i>which I've added to the reading list for a graduate nonfiction course I'll be teaching this fall. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Annie
Dillard’s long career as a daredevil nonfiction aerialist began in
October 1972, on a camping trip to the coast of Maine. She tells the
story in the afterword to the 25th-anniversary edition of “Pilgrim at
Tinker Creek.” Twenty-seven years old, somewhere between her home in the
suburban foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Maine’s
Acadia National Park, she’d picked up a “nature book” by a writer whose
previous book she’d admired. His latest effort was a torpid
disappointment. Wondering how fireflies make their light, the author
hadn’t troubled himself to find out. Dillard, who had been troubling
herself and finding things out since childhood, knew the answer to this
entomological mystery: Fireflies possess a pair of substances with
excellent names, luciferin and luciferase, that are crucial to their
conversion of chemical energy to light. Far less explicable to her than
the light of fireflies was the dimming of an author’s once-bright mind.
“What on earth,” Dillard asked herself, “had happened to this man?”
Here, too, she was prepared to hazard an answer: “Decades had happened,
that was all.” She resolved to write about the world before she wearied
of it, or lost her nerve. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now
that decades have happened to her, I wish I could travel back in time
to deliver to that 27-year-old camper on the coast of Maine some
reassuring news: On the page at least, nerve is something she would
never run short of. As evidence, I’d present her with my review copy of
“The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New.” In what feels like a
valedictory collection, Dillard has selected, rearranged and in some
cases retitled and revised 22 of the best essays she’s written over the
last 40 years, curating what amounts to a retrospective exhibit of her
own career. The time for a Dillard retrospective seems right. As Geoff
Dyer notes in his foreword, the sort of “genre-resistant nonfiction”
whose possibilities Dillard began scouting out in the early 1970s is now
a recognized genre enjoying a vogue. Many readers and writers, Dyer
among them, have followed her into those borderlands. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="713" data-total-count="2973">
Dillard
was a pioneer in another sense, daring at age 27 to nominate herself
for membership in the explorers’ club of American letters whose most
famous exemplars — Thoreau, Muir, Abbey — were men. Last year, profiling
her in The Atlantic, Diana Saverin shared a savory quotation from the
journals Dillard kept while struggling to write the book that would
become “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”: “It’s impossible to imagine another
situation where you can’t write a book ’cause you weren’t born with a
penis. Except maybe ‘Life With My Penis.’ ” (If you can almost hear a
rim shot following that punch line, there are good reasons, divulged in
one of the essays included here, “Jokes.”)</div>
</blockquote>
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The rest of the review is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/books/review/the-abundance-by-annie-dillard.html?_r=0" target="_blank">here. </a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-36625022924772034212015-11-13T08:32:00.000-08:002016-03-22T20:45:37.939-07:00In Praise of Pond Scum, Even If It Dismays Dinner Hosts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc4Ps595RVgPBPArGVA36Zadgh_vETQfObgAUCoUd_YkoE2-KAeA1XWUPS5q6OEP2lGDCDEvrlmtY5GvAAjABuRwQDiaxXIK3n7EeOCZBkqEcAhR3w4nhA3XkiXIqDio7wF75NhpFnOnwI/s1600/411ecaea2e1c4d218fd396ba8d8fe543aedc0455.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc4Ps595RVgPBPArGVA36Zadgh_vETQfObgAUCoUd_YkoE2-KAeA1XWUPS5q6OEP2lGDCDEvrlmtY5GvAAjABuRwQDiaxXIK3n7EeOCZBkqEcAhR3w4nhA3XkiXIqDio7wF75NhpFnOnwI/s320/411ecaea2e1c4d218fd396ba8d8fe543aedc0455.jpg" width="320"></a></div>
One of my<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one" target="_blank"> favorite science writers</a>, Kathryn Schulz, published a take-down of Thoreau in <i>The New Yorker</i>. Funny title: "Pond Scum." It's smart and entertaining but also, I think, an unfortunate example of willful misreading that gets Thoreau wrong in pretty much every way. When <i>The New Republic </i>asked if I cared to respond, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/123162/everybody-hates-henry-david-thoreau" target="_blank">I did.</a> An excerpt:<br>
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Perhaps the most curiously contrary charge Schulz levels against Thoreau is <i>incuriosity</i>. Provincial, yes—in his travels. In his reading, he was cosmopolitan. But <i>incurious</i>?
The man was endlessly investigating phenomena both natural and human.
On his provincial travels in Concord but also to Cape Cod and Maine, he
was endlessly interviewing strangers—lumberjacks, <a href="http://thoreau.eserver.org/capecd05.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">oystermen</a>, farmers. He romanticized Native Americans as noble savages, and exoticized them, <a href="http://thoreau.eserver.org/algash10.html#polis" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">representing the broken English of those he met phonetically in ways that now make us cringe,</a>
but unlike most of his contemporaries, he also made a point of meeting
them, interviewing them, traveling with them, and he tried to learn of
and from them on his long walks. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The data he collected at Walden pond is still used by climate scientists, and he sent some <a href="http://botlib.huh.harvard.edu/libraries/Thoreau_container.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">900 different plant specimens</a>
he’d collected, as well as animals, to the Swiss-born Harvard biologist
Louis Agassiz. My own favorite biographical vignette about Thoreau is
this one, from an <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=3NlHEbnP_AYC" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">essay by Guy Davenport</a>:
The Thoreau who befriended Agassiz, Davenport writes, “was a scientist,
the pioneer ecologist, one of the few men in America with whom
[Agassiz] could talk, as on an occasion when the two went exhaustively
into the mating of turtles, to the dismay of their host for dinner,
Emerson.” </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Curiosity is what drew Thoreau to the shipwreck he writes about in <i>Cape Cod</i>,
Exhibit A in Schulz’s indictment. Death was yet another phenomenon he
sought to understand by studying it up close. Quoting one passage out of
the many paragraphs Thoreau devotes to the seaside carnage he
witnessed, Schulz pegs him as a heartless bastard, a sort of
Transcendental sociopath, indifferent to suffering. “On the whole,” that
passage begins, “it was not so impressive a scene as I might have
expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely
place, it would have affected me more.” He’s describing here a paradox
that we’ve all surely experienced: when the sufferings of strangers
multiply, they have a way of growing abstract in our imaginations, as do
the feelings they elicit, hence the numbed indifference casualty
statistics can induce, whereas the suffering of a single individual can
move us easily to outrage or tears. We saw this paradox illustrated last
September by a photo of another drowned refugee who died seeking
sanctuary, Syrian rather than Irish this time, a three-year-old, Aylan
Kurdi, on the Greek island of Kos rather than on Cape Cod. <br>
</blockquote></div><a href="http://donovanhohn.blogspot.com/2015/11/that-hatchet-job-on-thoreau-in-new.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-11027317437931496102014-03-11T21:07:00.001-07:002014-08-12T19:38:18.669-07:00A Constellation Fallen to Earth: Matthew Power<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matthew Power, 1974-2014</td></tr>
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<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">My remembrance of Matt is <a href="http://harpers.org/blog/2014/03/matt-power-headlamp-a-must/" target="_blank">here, on the Harper's web site. </a>The best part of it is here:</span></span></span><br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">"At the open window the equatorial darkness falls like a curtain, and across the creek the mountain of the dumpsite rears black beneath a net of stars. Against the silhouette of the garbage mountain, a faint line of lights works its way upward. They are the homemade headlamps of the night shift tracing their way up the pile. Reaching the top, they spread themselves out, shining their lights on the shifting ground to begin their search. Beneath the wide night sky those tiny human sparks split and rearrange, like a constellation fallen to earth, as if uncertain of what hopeful legend they are meant to invoke." </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span style="color: #37404e;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">-Matthew Power, "The Magic Mountain" (Harper's, 2006)</span></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-1476299116687020572013-12-07T08:28:00.001-08:002013-12-07T08:28:58.166-08:00At Night Through Lighted Windows<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
As a coda to my fiction course at <a href="http://clasweb.clas.wayne.edu/creativewriting" target="_blank">Wayne State</a>, I asked students to post one paragraph they admire to our course web site—a paragraph from any work of fiction, on the syllabus or not. I made myself do the same. Here's the one I chose, from Marilynne Robinson's <i>Housekeeping.</i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I do not think Sylvie was merely reticent. It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows. Sometimes we used to watch trains passing in the dark afternoon, creeping through the blue snow with their windows alight, and full of people eating and arguing and reading newspapers. They could not see us watching, of course, because by five-thirty on a winter day the landscape had disappeared, and they would have seen their own depthless images on the black glass, if they had looked, and not the black trees and the black houses, or the slender black bridge and the dim blue expanse of the lake. Some of them probably did not know what it was the train approached so cautiously. Once, Lucille and I walked beside the train to the shore. There had been a freezing rain that glazed the snow with a crust of ice, and we found that, when the sun went down, the crust was thick enough for us to walk on. So we followed the train at a distance of twenty feet or so, falling now and then because the glazed snow swelled and sank in dunes, and the tops of bushes and fence posts rose out of it in places where we did not expect them to be. But by crawling up, and sliding down, and steadying ourselves against the roofs of sheds and rabbit hutches, we managed to stay just abreast of the window of a young woman with a small head and a small hat and a brightly painted face. She wore pearl-gray gloves that reached almost to her elbows, and hooped bracelets that fell down her arms when she reached up to push a loose wisp of hair underneath her hat. The woman looked at the window very often, clearly absorbed by what she saw, which was not but merely seemed to be Lucille and me scrambling to stay beside her, too breathless to shout. When we came to the shore, where the land fell down and the bridge began to rise, we stopped and watched her window sail slowly away, along the abstract arc of the bridge. "We could walk across the lake," I said. The thought was terrible. "It's too cold," Lucille replied. So she was gone. Yet I remember her neither less nor differently than I remember others I have known better, and indeed I dream of her, and the dream is very like the event itself, except that in the dream the bridge pilings do not tremble so perilously under the weight of the train.</blockquote>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-80811796081669202802013-11-24T17:53:00.001-08:002013-11-24T17:53:43.107-08:00Minor Bummer of the Day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Minor bummer of the day: I filled a big paper Yard&Lawn bag with frost-bitten apples and frosty leaves. Frost-bitten apples weigh more than you'd think. I hoisted it, and bear-hugged it, that bag. Filling it had given me a sense of accomplishment. So had hoisting it. ACE, the bag said, and I thought, ACE. Holding it, however, did not give me a sense of accomplishment. It gave me a slippery sense of dropping it. I staggered forth up the asphalt drive. Twice I had to stop and rest and hoist again, and upon attaining the curb, I let it fall, and when it met the ground, it split, as if the paper had been unzipped, and out spilled frosty innards--apples, leaves. Here ends the minor bummer of the day.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-14939067461879189932013-11-16T18:18:00.000-08:002013-11-16T18:18:30.288-08:00The Gift of Seeing What's There<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">From Robert Hass's "An Oak Grove," which appears in <i>What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World</i>:</span></div>
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of the gifts people who teach can give to students is a sense of complexity,
because desire tends to simplify what it sees. We are usually, left to
ourselves, egrets fishing through our smeared reflections. Another thing
teachers can give them is the gift of seeing what’s there. They can give them
some of the skills of distinction, discrimination, and description and give them
concepts of enormous power to refine and organize their seeing. Seeing what’s
there usually requires patient observation and the acquisition of particular
skills and disciplines—not that those things guarantee our seeing clearly or
freshly. Often in both the arts and the sciences, we see what’s there in a
flash, but it has taken us hours or years of patient labor to get there and then
to name what we have seen. </span><!--EndFragment-->
</span></blockquote>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-26917588129806168772013-10-14T20:47:00.002-07:002013-11-16T18:18:45.448-08:00The Unknowns That Pull at You<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
From Nicholson Baker's short essay "Mowing":<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Finding things out: there is an infinitude of things you don't know, but it's not a very interesting infinitude, because it has no grain. Only some of the unknown things, a much smaller subset, are things that you are aware of not knowing, and then within that subset is a smaller set still—the unknowns that pull at you. Curiosity is a way of ordering and indeed paring down the wildness of the world. Of all the unmown fields, all the subjects I don't know anything about, this one right here is the one I would like to pursue. Why? Because nobody else is, and because it happens to be whole if I pursue this topic, knowing that it is obscure enough that nobody would be foolish enough to duplicate my efforts. I will mow my own lawn, part of it, anyway.</blockquote>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-60111463914414103322013-07-29T15:48:00.000-07:002014-08-07T21:46:34.927-07:00Atatürk, Abridged<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;">
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<i>A sketch I wrote on request for the spring 2013 issue of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship house organ.</i></div>
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<i><br></i></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdV3pGmSJtXO6Y2hSAXMUwcEGLpjATnigUW72vsd3n1CycJHjv7daraa33ov4FDp6TB1W-wq8ePuxDwNp7p1B2ej5bG-YBM3AqKy6NED__Tnx1uYZkLJQaklTXExa3kHF-T672zMRgNGkN/s1600/IMG_3054.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdV3pGmSJtXO6Y2hSAXMUwcEGLpjATnigUW72vsd3n1CycJHjv7daraa33ov4FDp6TB1W-wq8ePuxDwNp7p1B2ej5bG-YBM3AqKy6NED__Tnx1uYZkLJQaklTXExa3kHF-T672zMRgNGkN/s320/IMG_3054.jpg" height="320" width="240"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo credit: Josh Neufeld</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">It was a weekday morning, still early, and when the busload of foreign
journalists arrived, Ceremonial Plaza at the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal
(Atatürk) in Ankara was mostly empty, save for a sprinkling of tourists and a
gaggle of schoolchildren on a patriotic field trip. The emptiness made the
bombastic architecture feel slightly forlorn.</span><br>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Guards in polished helmets and long topcoats with shiny brass buttons stood
sentry on pedestals, still as toy soldiers, one gloved hand propped on a rifle,
the other tucked neatly into the small of the back. The foreign journalists
snapped photographs of them. Overhead the flag of Turkey made a red motion in
the overcast sky.</div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Into the emptiness and
monumental stillness there now came an excited disturbance dressed in black. He
had a black ball cap on. A brown leather satchel was slung over a shoulder. He
carried a pointer with a red ribbon tied to the tip. Black sneakers squeaking
on the marble, he bustled into the midst of the foreign journalists, poking the
sky with his pointer and waggling the red bow. “Come! Come!” he said. “We walk
in a hurry way, because of time.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;"></span><br>
</div></div><a href="http://donovanhohn.blogspot.com/2013/07/ataturk-abridged.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-65478503290307129892013-05-17T05:40:00.003-07:002013-11-16T18:22:49.007-08:00Evan S. Connell: "This over here is a two-thousand-year-old tortilla maker"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Last January, <i>Harper's</i> asked me to eulogize the late novelist and essayist Evan S. Connell (1924–2013):</div>
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<a href="http://www.50ayear.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/mrs-bridge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="http://www.50ayear.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/mrs-bridge.jpg" border="0" class="decoded" src="http://www.50ayear.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/mrs-bridge.jpg" /></a><br />
<div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; font-size: inherit; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 24px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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Last Thursday — January 10, 2013 — news came that one of the most singular careers in American letters had reached its last full stop. <a href="http://harpers.org/author/evansconnell/" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #0033bb; font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; font-size: inherit; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;" title="Evan S. Connell">Evan S. Connell</a> was found in his Santa Fe apartment, dead at the age of 88. He died alone, attended, one presumes, by the “cracked Old Mexican pots and mutilated statuettes” he collected — which is also how he lived and how he wrote: apart from his contemporaries, in the company of antiquities, as if he did not entirely belong to his time.</div>
<div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; font-size: inherit; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 24px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;">
He twice traveled solo around the globe. In his writing, he roamed across continents but also across centuries. Time — its obliterating passage — was his great subject. <em style="font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"></em>It’s there at the very beginning, in the title story of the first book, <em style="font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories</em>, published in 1957, when Connell was thirty-three. The art professor who delivers the eponymous anatomy lesson shows his students a Rembrandt portrait of a young woman: “He told them that some afternoon they would glance up by chance and see her; then they would know the meaning of Time — what it could destroy, what it could not.” We hear that note again in Connell’s debut novel, <em style="font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Mrs. Bridge,</em>published in 1959<em style="font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">. </em>In chapter forty-nine, titled “The Clock,” the novel’s heroine seeks refuge in a stasis she mistakes for permanence: “Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, life itself was eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed.” . . .<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times;"> </span></div>
</blockquote>
[The rest of the eulogy <a href="http://harpers.org/blog/2013/01/remembering-evan-s-connell-1924-2013/" target="_blank">here</a>]<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, over at The Paris Review, Gemma Sieff, who used to edit the book reviews at Harper's, published a commemoration of her own and a sneak preview of her Paris Review interview with Connell, long in the making. The full interview, I understand, will be published this summer. One typically delightful exchange:</div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: adobe-caslon-pro, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;">
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"></span>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><strong>[Sieff:] Mr. Bridge copies out a love letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself, would have been merely to know my own shadow—to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions.” In your poem <em>Notes from a Bottle Found at the Beach in Carmel</em>, you write almost the opposite: “Come with me or stay. I am full of dreams and charged with strange excitement. Although I am not at ease in this world, there is no one who can stop me.”</strong></span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[Connell:] This over here is a two-thousand-year-old tortilla maker.</blockquote>
</span>The rest of the sneak preview is <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/01/15/a-visit-with-evan-s-connell/" target="_blank">here</a>. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-31599448184412480472013-05-16T06:49:00.004-07:002013-05-16T06:49:54.002-07:00"Giant Rubber Duck Found Deflated Under Mysterious Circumstances"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqGtDYMM7Lyj-5_jn1Xqdd5If69_N11tQI-b8ypBUpbzP1petwayt3wHAkOYKU51lW3uRLfd7q8HRM6WxAJV8Qsc5tsQpCAEgd0xU2lNMU6rc2Vki_9Vzhn3Cnx3ifjBz-a0SAFe7xi7pk/s1600/k-bigpic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqGtDYMM7Lyj-5_jn1Xqdd5If69_N11tQI-b8ypBUpbzP1petwayt3wHAkOYKU51lW3uRLfd7q8HRM6WxAJV8Qsc5tsQpCAEgd0xU2lNMU6rc2Vki_9Vzhn3Cnx3ifjBz-a0SAFe7xi7pk/s320/k-bigpic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
I swear to all monsters of god, IT WASN'T ME.<br />
<br />
(<i>Gawker</i> <a href="http://gawker.com/giant-rubber-duck-found-deflated-under-mysterious-circu-506884989" target="_blank">has the details</a>.) </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-69416218144747483822012-09-09T08:17:00.000-07:002012-09-09T08:17:21.082-07:00Gone Fishing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqthI2QsgbLDfweHS01D1uJYkahRW-aCCvWPYN0iEkw7m4PGoOTFx6Dt32QomKiapZe0up-drjzYEseUBGuwsJIy-u0Jh62hOWaXT-la6xjfYSQwfi30vJSs_yLVIGXhyBkCPUorUN9Q4y/s1600/2012-09-03+17.17.04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqthI2QsgbLDfweHS01D1uJYkahRW-aCCvWPYN0iEkw7m4PGoOTFx6Dt32QomKiapZe0up-drjzYEseUBGuwsJIy-u0Jh62hOWaXT-la6xjfYSQwfi30vJSs_yLVIGXhyBkCPUorUN9Q4y/s400/2012-09-03+17.17.04.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Crimson Text'; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">"Because, in order to accomplish the things I must do, I will have to travel a lot in the forthcoming years and face some other adventures. But that can't be helped. I have picked a hellish trade."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Crimson Text'; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">--Isaac Babel, in a letter to his sister, December 20, 1926</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-73244778058151634412012-09-04T08:24:00.000-07:002016-07-23T16:07:01.433-07:00Bath Toy Lost at Sea Found in Brooklyn?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://bwexhibit.commons.gc.cuny.edu/willis-elkins/" target="_blank">Artist and serious beachcomber Willis Elkins</a> sends news of a discovery he made on the morning of August 30, along the shoreline of Kingsborough Community College, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn: A toy frog. And not just any toy frog. There's no doubt about it. That's a Floatee.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKJ4kyJeaMGwrS0uW3QekbeXZa_a0hChboaYGNv_cHwGFM_hNHkQfRQ3E1MvoOKValz0SO7ZwEviANkO2z1W07_6NnejN9m349IikUlr-nFi_G2j9qRGElyDhTFee8e1KHZ8v0SyQmU8wP/s1600/frog_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKJ4kyJeaMGwrS0uW3QekbeXZa_a0hChboaYGNv_cHwGFM_hNHkQfRQ3E1MvoOKValz0SO7ZwEviANkO2z1W07_6NnejN9m349IikUlr-nFi_G2j9qRGElyDhTFee8e1KHZ8v0SyQmU8wP/s400/frog_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Compare for yourself. Here's a package of the toys:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnxTjncdrDo6MHaieqGqkk0IO3Q_c7NQM9ohIS0GqWufC6wZc6acrUG7CZF_C5yMyhQclJhAf7WNpENSrETkRNJVsEr6-Kxic-mF4f-2lVffLsxPJRRYSgn_e1Tlio4a42aC3RTFcAKKzo/s1600/TFY2103-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnxTjncdrDo6MHaieqGqkk0IO3Q_c7NQM9ohIS0GqWufC6wZc6acrUG7CZF_C5yMyhQclJhAf7WNpENSrETkRNJVsEr6-Kxic-mF4f-2lVffLsxPJRRYSgn_e1Tlio4a42aC3RTFcAKKzo/s320/TFY2103-01.jpg" width="248" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGify_0HojPabTQb_viYR90C6tkjWNzfXKyYwaj6r6wgX10-2BfL03pRAxS8sRvdeUu6ih-BWjmUavCtjp0_F-U-eLKLqcUvyIB7SqEhja0hb8OtVTd6snKQjSco2gbNn0u2LRLnFGulfx/s1600/IMG_5460.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGify_0HojPabTQb_viYR90C6tkjWNzfXKyYwaj6r6wgX10-2BfL03pRAxS8sRvdeUu6ih-BWjmUavCtjp0_F-U-eLKLqcUvyIB7SqEhja0hb8OtVTd6snKQjSco2gbNn0u2LRLnFGulfx/s200/IMG_5460.jpeg" width="149" /></a>Elkins writes, "I hardly believed it when I saw it, but instantly recognized the angular shapes I had seen in photos." He adds that it's "in fairly good condition, if we were to believe it to be an original from the infamous container spill some 20 years ago. There are no punctures, serious scratches or wear, and color is consistent throughout." <br />
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So is the frog an original from the infamous container spill? Or is it just a toy that some kid left behind on a trip to the seashore? There's no telling. Could easily be the latter, and as Elkin notes, it is in dubiously good condition. We'll have to put more question marks on the map. A number of correspondents have sent me pictures of stranded toys--for instance, of this duck spotted on Governor's Island (right).<br />
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But Elkins's frog is the first documented discovery of a Floatee on a North Atlantic beach I know of. A tantalizing one. I spent many hours beachcombing the New York City waterfront, and I'd given up all hope of ever finding one of the toys, and here one turns up in Brooklyn. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-89174431898798016552012-07-23T07:27:00.003-07:002012-07-23T07:27:37.904-07:00Mystery of Ocean Currents, BP Spill Edition<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhON67V5M1fLZ-5KmwwHe1xlDjbp9g8yQotEVSrjpYt37i-2gv9Cw3rXGb-tHXcFsKterdYTEle182WwghRpphX3ZVu2Y1-srPNZ3Cx78ibjDo72NFd3AMyXmqCHwE0GOUx8wxiYMjX6-H-/s1600/20110325_0.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;">A team of oceanographers is releasing 300 drifters in the Gulf of Mexico. The aim:</span></a></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">credit: <a href="http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/dhos/models.php" target="_blank">NOAA</a></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans; font-size: 12px;">"In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill it became clear that understanding the various scales of oceanic currents and flows lies at the very heart of being able to improve our understanding and prediction of oil spills," explained Dr. Tamay Ӧzgökmen, University of Miami (UM) Professor and Director of the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbons in the Environment (CARTHE), a project funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI). "In this case we are like detectives uncovering clues and following the 'trail' to find out exactly where pollutants might go."</span></blockquote>
Full story <a href="http://phys.org/news/2012-07-largest-kind-site-deepwater-horizon.html" target="_blank">here</a>. (Via Craig Pittman.)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-23153528208518207202012-07-19T08:59:00.000-07:002012-07-23T06:33:09.642-07:00Home Remedies for Rabies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheRqg2MqSWwXsG4JaCfhKzOK_RjauXimvFZWrRRM-qYNKF1AsPqVbI5wFuOzswmua0J4Flh_iFX3FU0_DAoGdHexTEeXFRm9XhSJlpMJlAEzkKIzb3JhSFSZXVjdyGihiDKJdIHr9yxUFQ/s1600/9780670023738H.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheRqg2MqSWwXsG4JaCfhKzOK_RjauXimvFZWrRRM-qYNKF1AsPqVbI5wFuOzswmua0J4Flh_iFX3FU0_DAoGdHexTEeXFRm9XhSJlpMJlAEzkKIzb3JhSFSZXVjdyGihiDKJdIHr9yxUFQ/s200/9780670023738H.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>
Bill Wasik and his veterinarian wife, Monica Murphy, have published a book, Rabid, that I read and blurbed--enthusiastically--and will recommend again here. N+1 has <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/horror-s-muse" target="_blank">a tasty review.</a> A spoonful:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: ff-meta-serif-web-pro-1, ff-meta-serif-web-pro-2, Palatino, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25px;">Wasik and Murphy’s subject might seem like a deliberately strange one, but they exercise nothing but user-friendly restraint when it comes to historical detail and medical explanation. It’s a rare pleasure to read a nonfiction book by authors who research like academics but write like journalists. They have mined centuries’ worth of primary sources and come bearing only the gems. My favorites were the archaic cures, some of which were reasonable (lancing, cauterization), while others were plain perverted. The <em style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">Sushruta Samhita</em> recommends pouring clarified butter into the infected wound and then drinking it; Pliny the Elder suggests a linen tourniquet soaked with the menstrual fluid of a dog.</span></blockquote>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-19077298676233035522012-07-17T10:04:00.000-07:002012-07-17T10:04:45.368-07:00Professor Diablo's True Review: The Video<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There's now a snazzy video of the performance (music, video, <i>Moby-Duck</i>) that I posted about <a href="http://donovanhohn.blogspot.com/2012/04/professor-diablos-true-review.html" target="_blank">here</a> last April.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/44170123" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/44170123">Professor Diablo’s True Revue I: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/cds">Center for Documentary Studies</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-55492367462563466862012-07-17T09:58:00.000-07:002012-07-17T09:58:28.977-07:00Good-Bye (For Now) to All That<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've neglected this blog since last April mostly because I learned then that I will be heading to Ann Arbor in September on a Knight-Wallace Journalism fellowship, which will give me eight months to begin work on a second book--a project bearing little resemblance to <i>Moby-Duck,</i> at least so far as subject matter goes. (No more seafaring for me. I've had my seaward peep, and now will be trying to peep both eastward and into the past. More on this later--much later.)<br />
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The last few months I've been preoccupied with the logistics of leaving New York. The date of the move swiftly approaches. An Ann Arbor lease has been signed. A truck big as a boat has been reserved. Many boxes have been packed. We've built a ziggurat out of them in the living room. We've been trying to reassure M. & B. about the move by describing the delights awaiting them in their new home. We're in a transition, in other words, and my preoccupations are not the same ones that preoccupied me when I created this blog. They're still fatherly and bookish, but not as watery as they once were.<br />
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There are a few items that have collected in my file of things to post about. I'll try to get to them before September 1. Thereafter, the terms of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship (an eight-month sabbatical for journalists) wisely prohibit publication of any sort, including blogging. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-34836609148747374392012-04-18T13:08:00.001-07:002012-04-18T13:08:05.890-07:00Professor Diablo's True Review<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Next week, at the invitation of <a href="http://www.cdsporch.org/archives/tag/duncan-murrell" target="_blank">Duncan Murrell and Duke's Center for Documentary Studies</a>, I head to North Carolina to join forces with the musician <a href="http://www.djangohaskins.com/" target="_blank">Django Haskins</a> and the media artist <a href="http://www.o-matic.com/" target="_blank">Marina Zurkow</a>. Details from press release below.<br />
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The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (CDS), in cooperation with the Durham's Casbah, is pleased to announce the launch of Professor Diablo’s True Revue, a collaborative performance of writers, musicians, visual artists, and others who make extensive use of documentary fieldwork and research in the creation of their art. The inaugural evening will begin at <strong>7 p.m. on April 24th at Casbah. </strong></div>
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The theme for the first show, <em>Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea</em>, will feature a writer (Donovan Hohn) whose first book is a story about rubber ducks, plastic, and the mysteries of the ocean; a Guggenheim Fellow and media artist (Marina Zurkow) whose latest work in animation and manga explores the agency of petrochemicals and plastics; and a songwriter (<span class="il" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: #ffffcc; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222;">Django</span> Haskins) of exceeding plasticity and range. Future performances of Professor Diablo’s True Revue will explore themes such as love, war, and food, and will feature all new artists, writers, and musicians.</div>
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“We want to expand the audience’s idea of what a ‘documentary’ work can be,” said Duncan Murrell, Writer in Residence at CDS. “And we’re going to do this with artists whose work relies on the immersive research and fieldwork that we champion at the Center. Something that’s more than a reading, more than an opening, more than a night of music— a performance that’s unique and unexpected, and yet seems harmonious and inevitable when it’s done. </div>
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“We hope that we’re beginning something that will have real longevity and become a valued and complementary addition to the growing literary and arts scenes here in Durham and in the Triangle,” Murrell said. “It’s going to be fun.”</div>
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-23769739234516773872012-04-05T14:19:00.002-07:002012-04-10T09:10:13.358-07:00NASA: Animation of Tsunami Debris<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Another visualization from the wizards at NASA, this time illustrating the likely drift of the debris unloosed by Japan's 2011 tsunami. (via <a href="http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/04/tsunami-wreckage-crosses-ocean" target="_blank">Julia Whitty's Blue Marble blog</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0LKAZ6rGUOI" width="540"></iframe><br />
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NASA's Earth Observatory captions:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">This animation shows the output of the Surface Currents from Diagnostic (SCUD) model, an attempt to simulate where and how that debris would disperse. Orange and red shaded areas represent parcels of water with a high probably of containing floating debris. The deeper the red color, the higher the likely concentration. The debris field stretches roughly 5,000 kilometers by 2,000 kilometers across the North Pacific.</span></blockquote>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-17975186133892565122012-03-27T09:34:00.001-07:002012-03-27T18:17:06.944-07:00Perpetual Ocean<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://www.craigpittman.com/" target="_blank">Craig Pittman</a>, author and enviro reporter for the <i>Tampa Bay Times,</i> alerts me to this amazing visualization of the ocean currents, brought to you by the wizards at NASA.<br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-19181277254737868702012-03-20T09:21:00.002-07:002012-03-20T09:21:44.036-07:00On Ebooks and the Economics of Book-Selling in 2012<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
One of my favorite stops on my recent paperback tour was <a href="http://www.portersquarebooks.com/" target="_blank">Porter Square Books</a> in Cambridge, MA. A book-seller there by the name of Josh Cook recently wrote <a href="http://inorderofimportance.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-entirely-too-long-incredibly-wonkish.html" target="_blank">a long blog-post</a> about the economics of book-selling in 2012. I found it illuminating, and I recommend it to readers and authors alike. <div>
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I'll highlight one section. Concerning the costs of e-books, Josh writes:<br /><br /><blockquote>
To be honest, the persistence in the belief that ebooks should cost radically less than books is a little baffling, given that most of the articles that touch on the issue of ebooks point out that <a href="http://www.ipgbook.com/why-ipg-has-not-been-able-to-agree-on-terms-with-amazon-news-32.php">ebooks do not cost significantly less to produce than books</a>. I'll read an article mentioning that the material overhead of production represents about 10% a books' overhead and sure enough someone in the comments field will argue that $9.99 ebooks are a publisher wide conspiracy. But what really baffles me about the persistence of this belief is how it also manages to fly directly in the face of conventional business wisdom. </blockquote>
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No matter what a business does or sells the biggest chunk of its overhead is almost always going to be salaries for employees. This is practically a business axiom. And yet people seem to (or want to) believe that this axiom doesn't apply to ebooks. All of the people who produce an ebook are the same people who produce a book. Same staff, same amount of staff hours, same amount of employee overhead. Why should their prices be radically different? The problem is, of course, (I bet you can guess what I'm going to say) is that early in ebooks Amazon sold ebooks at dramatic, one might even say “predatory,” losses in order to encourage sales of their Kindle and “secure” ebooks market share. They created a price expectation completely disconnected from the actual cost of production. . . .</blockquote>
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The thing is, the ebook price of a book should be able to come down over time. Once the overhead of the author's advance, editors' salaries, administrative assistants, janitors, publicity and the like, have been made back, the material cost difference becomes meaningful. Older ebooks, backlist ebooks, or even ebook editions of very popular books could end up in the price range people seem to want. And we already accept this idea of falling prices of books. The first hardcover edition of a book is more expensive, not just because of the cost of materials, but because it is the first opportunity for a publisher to make back all that people based overhead. When it comes out in paperback, the price difference (often about $10-12) doesn't just come from cheaper materials, but from having less of the initial overhead to cover. A fair ebook price would start out at 10-15% off the least expensive print edition (and most retailers would probably add an additional discount on top of that, given how little overhead they cost book stores), drop with each new cheaper print edition, and then, once the initial investment has been made up, drop a little bit further. In this model, they won't hit $.99, but this isn't a pack of gum we're talking about. This is the product of thousands and thousands of hours of work, that you can enjoy over and over again. For readers who put price first, it really isn't any different than waiting for the paperback or mass market edition, or, if you're really stingy, waiting for copies to enter the used book market, or, if you're really really stingy (or have run out of room in apartment), getting the book for free out of the library.</blockquote>
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-18036546455824441662012-03-15T10:09:00.001-07:002012-03-16T07:34:16.892-07:00Why Read Moby-Dick? Some more answers.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Chad Harbach, <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/fiction/2012/01/interview-novel-art-fielding" target="_blank">interviewed in the New Statesman,</a> fields the question--well.<br>
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<strong style="line-height: 1.22em;">And then there's Herman Melville. The baseball team in <em style="line-height: 1.22em;">The Art of Fielding</em> is named the Harpooners, an allusion to <em style="line-height: 1.22em;">Moby-Dick</em>.</strong><em style="line-height: 1.22em;">Moby-Dick</em> is a book that I read in college and was astounded by. I think it's the most musical novel in the English language - the rhythms and the prose are incredible. It surpasses anything that anyone has ever done.<br>
It's also a very funny book, which no one ever gives it credit for. Before I read it, I'd always heard it spoken of in these stern and forbidding tones, as if you were being scared away from reading it. But then you read it and you find it's both bold and musical.</blockquote>
An earlier attempt of mine to answer a similar question, in an interview with <i>The New Yorker</i>'s Book Bench blog, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/03/the-exchange-donovan-hohn-on-moby-duck.html" target="_blank">here</a>. Another one <a href="http://donovanhohn.blogspot.com/2012/02/frogs-of-australia-end-of-ramble-in.html" target="_blank">here</a>. And here's a sampling of what I said of the novel in the talk I gave earlier this month at UCSB:<br>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; line-height: 150%;">Sometimes when
trying to explain my harebrained quest, I simply blame Herman Melville, whose
novel I’d read an unhealthy number of times. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Garamond; line-height: 28px;">People think
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby-Dick </i>as a difficult book, and
it does have hard words, and long sentences, and it can at times seem
bewildering, or dense. But it’s also funny, raunchy even, and it is full of
marvels, and there’s heart-pounding action. All that, and it also contains
passages that read like something out of a biblical book of wisdom, like Ecclesiastes, passages like this: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is
a woe that is madness.” That’s like some sort of riddle, isn’t it? Or a
Buddhist koan. But turn it around in your head a while.</span></div>
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</div></div><a href="http://donovanhohn.blogspot.com/2012/03/harbach-on-moby-dick.html#more">Read more »</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-86420693743255591652012-03-14T15:39:00.000-07:002012-03-14T18:05:39.896-07:00Dreamy Recollections: The Obliteration Room<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPw_Yab4q3F3MFLX3F-lg7qkAj7usEb7xDtRgF9wvyYcAMwQN2RveDlc1UkytDih5-ksryH6d4VxvR1cObmQQ2tlUKy_dak28nCzawJatFkt8C6NkjbfpDo0wvi-wQssoTiCC4lkCpp0Vm/s1600/DSC_2553.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPw_Yab4q3F3MFLX3F-lg7qkAj7usEb7xDtRgF9wvyYcAMwQN2RveDlc1UkytDih5-ksryH6d4VxvR1cObmQQ2tlUKy_dak28nCzawJatFkt8C6NkjbfpDo0wvi-wQssoTiCC4lkCpp0Vm/s320/DSC_2553.JPG" width="320" /></a>I find that with travel the best parts are the beginning and the end, but the best parts arise from what happens in between. You can't have a beginning or an end without a middle. So at the beginning your brain swims with dreamy anticipations. And at the end your brain swims with dreamy recollections. The recollections and the anticipations never match, but the mismatch is delicious and, if you're lucky and a bit reflective about it, educational. During the journey itself your brain simply swims. Such is my experience.<br />
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Three and some-odd weeks ago, I flew to London, accompanied by family, to help launch <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moby-Duck-True-Story-bath-Toys/dp/1908526009/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331764682&sr=8-1" target="_blank">the good ship <i>Moby-Duck</i> in UK waters</a> (number one title in the category of books about the city of Bath!). Night flight. Some sleep. Boys zonked out on armrests and shoulders. Then the abruptly wakeful arrival. London. There it was, glimpsed from the freeway, blurring past. A rental on a street with the almost too-perfect name of Barlby Gardens. A day of rest, and for me, editing. Then a bus ride to Trafalgar Square, red bus, double decker, the boys and me on the upper deck, right up front, all eyes. A grand day in London that culminated perhaps on the ground floor of the Tate Modern with a trip inside <a href="http://babyccinokids.com/blog/2012/02/20/the-obliteration-room-at-the-tate-modern/" target="_blank">Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room</a>, pictured above.<br />
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Some more dreamy recollections to come, if I can steal the time for them.<br />
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<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-779089283196937252012-03-11T15:58:00.000-07:002012-03-11T15:58:04.029-07:00La historia de los patitos de goma<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Yet another cinematic depiction of the Fable of the Duckies Lost at Sea brought to you by advertisers, this time in Spanish. </div>
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<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390855664378835033.post-29628404531824785052012-03-09T14:35:00.001-08:002012-03-09T14:37:02.440-08:00Going on the Whale: Nantucket!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzTkr0Gizpo8zGL-dayicxNKcePvMIIr0KJFcevW5AWwurZaj-icd51053RUv6bulyxNdvG72YcT1UacxoUuNsmj9cyg438Mi3HSYlRKNoZhV3W1nCTDtpq_RwfZE47Uoz1na8KZsdW6ty/s400/IMG_0292.jpg" width="210" /></div>
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A perfect day for a late-winter ferry ride to Nantucket.<br />
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