AUGUST 29, 2015

Song of the Day: Sunset Driver, words and music by Michael Jackson, is an unreleased demo recorded during the "Off the Wall"-"Thriller" period, but never issued. It has that classic groove and vocal by MJ, who was born on this date in 1958. It can only be found on a box set entitled "The Ultimate Collection." Check it out on YouTube. (And check out the new video for a song previously highlighted here, "A Place with No Name.")

AUGUST 14, 2015

Song of the Day: Passin' By, words and music by trumpeter John Daversa, is another sweet track from James Torme's album, "Love for Sale." The trumpet caresses this song, delivered with Torme flair [YouTube link].

AUGUST 13, 2015

Song of the Day: A Better Day Will Come features the words and music of Carl E. K. Johnson and James Torme, son of the late, great jazz singer Mel Torme. I first discovered James when I highlighted his rendition [YouTube link] of Cole Porter's "Love for Sale" (title track from his debut album) in this year's tribute to the Tony Awards. Today is young Torme's 42nd birthday, and I'd like to highlight a few tracks from that fine album both today and tomorrow. I'm prevented from putting some of them up as "Songs of the Day," because they are already on my ever-growing list (for example, his rendition of the MJ classic [YouTube link] "Rock with You," his version of the Joseph Kosma-Johnny Mercer jazz standard [YouTube link] "Autumn Leaves," and his rendition of the Alan Jay Lerner song from the musical "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" [YouTube link], the jazzy "Come Back to Me"). Check out this Torme-penned track, with its melodic line and rhythmic feel [YouTube link]. This song won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest Award for Best Jazz Song in 2009.

AUGUST 12, 2015

Back on 20 July 2004, I published a brief essay, "The First Landing of Ayn Rand in Japan!", exclusive to Notablog, about how I'd helped a friend and colleague of mine, Kayoko Fujimori, Professor at Momoyama Gakuin University (alias, St. Andrew's University) in Osaka, Japan, associated with the Society for the Study of Ayn Rand in Japan, in the clarification of certain idiomatic expressions, ideas, and themes in Ayn Rand's novel, The Fountainhead. The book was published in Japanese back on 8 July 2004, with cover illustration by the well-known Japanese anime illustrator, Nobuyuki Ohnishi.

Subsequent to the appearance of this brief discussion, I was approached by Alexandra Seremina, who translated the piece into Romanian. I wrote about it in a Notablog post, dated 9 April 2012, on the "Multilingual Appeal" of the piece. It was also translated into Polish by Maksim Ivancov.

Now, eleven years after the appearance of the original post, I was approached by Professor Alexander Nikiforov, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Head of the Kazan Technical University (named after AN Tupolev, KNITU-KAI), who wished to translate the piece into Russian. (We even discussed the possibility of getting Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical translated, but that's a long-term project, indeed.) Today, Professor Nikiforov sent me the link for the Russian translation of my essay; check it out here.

For all I know, the popularity of this essay must have something to do with my penchant for posting "Songs of the Day." I guess I'll have to really consider adding the 1984 #1 Dance Hit by Alphaville.

Postscript (15 August 2015): Subsequent to the publication of this Notablog entry, Science Team translated "The First Landing of Ayn Rand in Japan" into Spanish! See here.

AUGUST 07, 2015

It's been awhile since I've reported on the second edition of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, so now that I have a little break in-between editing issues of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (I handed in the December 2015 issue just yesterday!), I figure now is just as good a time as any to give an update.

First, for those of you who don't know much about the second expanded edition of this book, I provide here an index of relevant Notablog posts:

Part 1: The Cover
Part 2: The Cover Story
Part 3: 1995 vs. 2013: What's Different?
Part 4: Preface to the Second Edition
Part 5: Supplying Answers, Raising Questions
Part 6: 12 September 2013, Release Date
Part 7: A Kindle Edition and Revised Revisions

Today's report on the second edition could not be more timely, since, after all, it was literally twenty years ago this month, yes, you read that right: TWENTY YEARS AGO, that the first edition of the book was published by Pennsylvania State University Press. As Carlin Romano puts it in his 2012 book, America The Philosophical:

Nineteen ninety-five also saw the publication of the first scholarly study of Rand published by a respected university press, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State) by Chris Matthew Sciabarra, a political scientist [ed: I actually prefer to call myself a "political theorist" or "social theorist," since I received my Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, and methodology, and New York University, bless them, has a Department of Politics, not a Department of Political Science!] That book spurred debate with its novel claim that Rand, who came to the United States in 1926, is best understood as a thinker whose roots in Russian philosophy and Marxism's dialectical tradition account for the unique syntheses of her later work. Since then, scholarly interest in her has significantly spiked, if not boomed, fanned by the wide theatrical distribution of Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, a 1997 Oscar-nominated documentary approved by the Ayn Rand Institute, and such studies as What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi. The Chronicle of Higher Education, in an overview of Rand's place in academe, reported many more books on Rand's thought on the way (including a study by [the late Allan] Gotthelf), as well as a journal devoted to Randian literary [ed: and philosophical] studies.

I would like to think that my first edition not only rode the wave of that boom, but was at least partially responsible for creating it. (In reality, my work on Rand was the first book-length study published by a university press; I have always given credit to my dearest friends and colleagues, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, co-editors of The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1987), published by the University of Illinois Press; the fact that both of these extraordinary scholars sit on the Board of Advisors of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is no accident. Their encouragement and support of my work has been immeasurable!)

The first edition of Russian Radical was published the same week as another work of mine: Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, which was actually Part I of what would become my "Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy." Russian Radical constituted Part II of that trilogy; in 2000, Part III concluded the study: Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. Taken as an "organic whole," the three books were designed to reclaim a dialectical mode of inquiry as an indispensable tool in the construction of a radical libertarian analytical approach.

Nevertheless, getting back to the second edition of Russian Radical, not many reviews have been published. That's fairly typical of second editions, but the "Dialectics and Liberty" site will be updated periodically to reflect any reviews that appear in online or print form. Thus far, one can take a look at the index of reviews for the second edition, where one will find excerpts and abstracts for two reviews (the first appearing on the site of the Center for a Stateless Society, the other appearing in the July 2015 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies).

My own reply to the review that appears in the current issue of JARS, written by my friend and colleague, Wendy McElroy, will appear in the July 2016 issue of the journal, along with a reply written by Roger E. Bissell. [Ed.: The replies actually did not appear until the December 2017 issue of the journal, having been postponed by a symposium devoted to the work and legacy of Nathaniel Branden.]

In any event, I am happy that I've stuck around long enough to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first two books of my trilogy; I'll be positively ecstatic when I mark the centennial anniversary!