The almanac

Today is Thursday, Aug. 11, the 223rd day of 2011 with 142 to follow.

The moon is waxing. The morning stars are Mercury and Saturn. The evening stars are Neptune, Jupiter, Uranus, Venus and Mars.

Those born on this day are under the sign of Leo. They include author Robert Ingersoll in 1833; songwriter Carrie Jacobs Bond ("I Love You Truly") in 1862; art collector Joseph Hirshhorn in 1899; actor Lloyd Nolan in 1902; author Alex Haley in 1921; singer June Hutton in 1920; TV host Mike Douglas in 1925; European socialite Claus von Bulow in 1926 (age 85); actor Arlene Dahl in 1925 (age 86); evangelist Jerry Falwell in 1933; columnist Marilyn vos Savant, listed in the Guinness Book of Records as having the world's highest IQ (reported at 228), in 1946 (age 65); pop singer Eric Carmen, formerly of the Raspberries, in 1949 (age 62); Apple computer co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1950 (age 61); singer/songwriter Joe Jackson in 1954 (age 57); and professional wrestler/actor Hulk Hogan, born Terry Gene Bollea, in 1953 (age 58).

On this date in history:

In 1877, Thomas Edison described the fundamentals of the phonograph to an assistant and instructed him to build the first one.

Also in 1877, American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered the two moons of Mars, which he named Phobos and Deimos.

In 1934, the first group of federal prisoners classified as "most dangerous" arrived at Alcatraz Island, a 22-acre rocky outcrop 1.5 miles offshore in San Francisco Bay.

In 1954, a formal announcement ended the 7-year war in Indochina between France and forces of the communist Viet Minh.

In 1965, riots began in the Watts section of Los Angeles. In six days of violence, 34 people were killed.

In 1984, in an off-air radio voice check picked up by TV cameras, U.S. President Ronald Reagan joked, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in 5 minutes." The Kremlin wasn't amused.

In 1991, a Lebanese militant group the Revolutionary Justice Organization released U.S. hostage Edward Tracy, held captive since October 1986.

In 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton endorsed the "Brady Bill" handgun control measure and signed an executive order banning the import of semiautomatic assault-style handguns.

Also in 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton named U.S. Army Gen. John Shalikashvili to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, succeeding the retiring Gen. Colin Powell.

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Under the Sign of Sontag

These omissions betray the absence of a gritty, indecorous social context — a sense of Sontag existing in the world, not merely staging grand Platonic shadow-plays in the theater of her mind. Much as Illness as Metaphor (1978) was partially structured around her refusal to allude once to her own personal struggle, this book discreetly, indirectly dances around the notion that the subject of every essay proposes a different kind of mirror to the author, a speculative self-portrait.

Against Interpretation (1966) is one of the best popular guidebooks ever written to mid-century modernist taste and its diverse encounters with the sexuality of thought. Styles of Radical Will (1969) is a series of variable skirmishes on some of the exciting, if treacherous, battlefields of the late ’60s. Speaking as someone who used the parenthetical examples of these essays rather like the way an earlier generation used Eliot’s footnotes to The Waste Land — as a central tool in my liberal arts education — I am disappointed in not being able to appropriate Sontag’s recent, more inner-directed essays in quite the same fashion. As an old college friend observed recently, “She doesn’t belong to us anymore.”

Let’s put it differently: the pieces here are all precisely dated — from 1972 to 1980 — without being existentially placed . Like Goethe or Thomas Mann (both frequent reference points), they speak to us from some remote Mount Olympus of the imagination, an exclusive key club whose members are either male misogynist bookworms (Roland Barthes, Elias Canetti, Paul Goodman) or at least their kindred spirits (Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg) — doleful, solitary visionaries shoring their heroic ruins against the fragments of a discontinuous culture.