Some stuff from the link backlog:
- A profile of author Lewis Hyde, a poet's poet and a Genius Grant recipient now hard at work on a manuscript about the Creative Commons:
In an essay that offers a preview of his book (posted, fittingly, on his Web site), Hyde posits that the history of the commons and of the creative self are, in fact, twin histories. “The citizen called into being by a republic of freehold farms,” he writes, “is close cousin to the writer who built himself that cabin at Walden Pond. But along with such mainstream icons goes a shadow tradition, the one that made Jefferson skeptical of patents, the one that made even Thoreau argue late in life that every ‘town should have … a primitive forest …, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever,’ the one that led the framers of the Constitution to balance ‘exclusive right’ with ‘limited times.’ It is a tradition worth recovering.”
One of two reviews of Roberto Bolaño's mammoth 2666, which I eventually intend to read after I finish getting through The Savage Detectives. That book's slow going not because it's bad, but because it's so good: you want to chew and savor every sentence and make it last as long as humanly possible. - A review of Into the Picture Scroll, a fascinating-sounding film about the way the arts influence each other and interpenetrate. All the more interesting since the picture scroll in question is the story of (who else?) Ushiwakamaru a/k/a the young Yoshitsune, avenging his mother's fate at the hands of the Taira.
- Speaking of Ushiwakamaru, apparently there's a very good sushi place in the city by the same name. I've made a mental note to stop by there.
The long, long out-of-print Listen Up! The Lives Of Quincy Jones is coming back out on DVD. I hung onto my LaserDisc copy for years, in fear that this would never be reissued, but Warner Brothers has seen fit to make us happy people once again. (Minor gripe: the lack of the original, extremely striking poster artwork which was deliberately designed to look like a misprint and also echoes the movie's deliberately jittery visual and editing aesthetics.) - A new theory of mental disorder blames an imbalance of inherited genetic dispositions for many of the things that can go wrong. As with most theories this bold, the truth probably consists of some piece of this rather than the whole, but the conceit alone ought to draw plenty of dialogue. I wonder what Oliver Sacks would think of this.
Oh wow, Oliver Sacks. I have not heard that name in a very long time. I read a book by him, I believe, called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. (I think that was the title.) We read it for an interesting Honors literature class about current issues I was taking in college in which we read one book a week and then wrote a paper on it. That was one of the books, and I think the most memorable one to me, actually. I remember at least half of the bizarre cases in that book--it was simply incredible. Have you read it? If not, you should.
The scariest case in that book, I think, was the poor war veteran/alcoholic who had degenerated to the point that he could not remember anything permanently after the year 1976--he would remember things for maybe an hour or two, and then it would just be gone. Whoa.
Considering all the things Oliver Sacks has seen, he might go for it, at least in part. I mean, is the theory really that bold? We know a lot of mental disorders come from inherited genetic dispositions, right? And we know there's a serious chemical imbalance somewhere. So why not?
~Aly