To Hell Without the Dignity of a Handbasket, Even



I just learned that Vic Chesnutt died today, aged 45: a suicide. In the last few years, I got to know his music well, and I thought him the finest songwriter alive. He was the only musician in whom I still took an ongoing, non-nostalgic interest. I saw him play at the Great American Music Hall less than a month ago: extraordinary, impassioned, a born artist, the real thing.

 In the most obvious way, his death is perfectly believable. Chesnutt was a paraplegic and had been in a wheelchair since he was eighteen. By his own account he had made four previous suicide attempts. His injuries had caused painful and costly medical complications, and, report has it, he could not pay for them. 

In another, more self-centered way, I find it unbelievable. During this year I had need to cling to Chesnutt's music: especially to his second album, West of Rome . Every other music reminded me of something else; not West of Rome . (His finest other albums include Is the Actor Happy? [1995] and A...

I have been catching up on my ultrasonics this morning and met with this abstract, helpfully prefixed to an article on "Vibration of Post-Buckled Homogeneous Circular Plates": The dynamic behavior of an axisymmetric post-buckled circular plate with initial in-plane compression loading is investigated. The static von Karman plate equations are solved numerically for clamped boundary conditions. The static solution is presented for a range of transverse and in-plane loads. Lumped element modeling is used to calculate the mass and compliance of the plate from results of the static solution. The resonant frequency, sensitivity, and maximum linear transverse pressure are calculated for a variety of in-plane loads. These solutions can be used to predict the post-buckled behavior of micromachined plates. Heaven knows it sounds right. But alas, here as elsewhere, gorgeous diction conceals faulty reasoning. We have grown so accustomed to solving clamped boundary conditions numerically...

In today's Daily Californian , page 1, we learn that "Dr. Jane Goodall, despite having worked with chimpanzees in Tanzania for much of her life, still speaks with a soft British accent." This is local color, very nice, but why "still"? Is a soft British accent matter for surprise in an Englishwoman resident for a long time in a former British colony where the official language is English? I can't fathom what sort of accent the journalist was expecting Dr. Goodall to sport. Can it be that, "having worked with chimpanzees in Tanzania for much of her life," she is expected to speak with -- a soft chimpanzee accent? On the back page we have, naturally, Cal's big loss to USC this weekend. My interest in sports is limited entirely to a morbid fascination with post-game interviews, and my attention was captured by quarterback Kevin Riley's explanation of what went wrong: "It's just something you've got to do to win games is put the b...

Who "edits" popular music? I don't mean the preparation of musical scores, but the editing that happens to the popular music we hear, whenever that music is reissued, on compact disc or as a digital file; editing that is done by the commercial entities that have the legal right to issue those recordings. And I also don't mean what an artist or a recording engineer might mean by "editing" -- that is, "shortening" the recording. I am suggesting a parallel between critically editing classic literature and the reissuing of music that originally appeared in a different format. This kind of editing is typically done silently and is under-theorized; while the editing of literary texts is at least sometimes done "transparently" and has a large and contentious body of theorizing behind it. Recordings are not exactly texts (whatever texts are!); but I think the remastering and reissuing of recordings is editing, in the literary-critical sense: all...