Dibs

In 1995, Twyana Davis gave birth in her Ohio college dorm room, wrapped the baby in plastic bags and stuffed it into a trash bin, presumably hoping that the tiny girl would die. After a passerby rescued the infant and detectives discovered whose it was, Davis told the media that she’d become pregnant while being raped at a party. Regaining custody of the child in 2000, Davis co-wrote a book about her experiences, Sacred Womb: The Twyana Davis Story, and discussed it on Oprah. According to her user-profile at CommonContent.org, presumably composed by Davis herself and posted in April 2004, Davis was “a 27-year-old inspiration and motivational speaker and businesswoman. She is a native of Columbus, Ohio and a graduate from Ohio Dominican University where she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in Visual Communication and Advertising Production with a minor in Art. During her tenure at Ohio Dominican University Miss Davis was bestowed as a National City Scholar. She earned prestige within the community by graduating Suma [sic] Cum Laude. Miss Davis is the co-author of the highly anticipated book Sacred Womb, The Twyana Davis Story. Miss Davis has also dedicated her time to traveling around the country to speak to adults and teen [sic] about teen pregnancy, infant abandonment and self-empowerment and self love. Miss Davis is the Co-Owner of Autumn Publishing and is the former spokeswoman for project cuddle, an organization fighting infant abandonment. She has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Montel Williams Show, 20/20, 48 Hours, The Ricki Lake Show, The BBC, Jane Magazine, and Court TV.” Ten years later, the proud college grad, talk-show guest, mom and author has now confessed that what she told the world back then was a lie. She’s a pedophile! She wasn’t raped; while she was a college student she’d been having a relationship with a twelve-year-old male cousin. Now she’s been convicted of rape herself, sentenced today in Columbus to a long span in prison by a judge who dubbed her a sexual predator, the highest possible sex-offender label. “She admitted to a continuing pattern of sex with that child dating back to the mid-nineties, resulting in the birth of her daughter,” according to OhioNewsNow. She fessed up to even further creepiness: “Davis admitted to sexually abusing two or three other children; one as young as 18 months.” Wait — 18 months? Sentencing her to a minimum of ten years and a maximum of 25 behind bars, “Judge Michael Holbrook told her she has manipulated the system and the last 10 years have been a sham.” Davis told the judge: “I am not trying to manipulate the system in any way. I have to do this for myself and for the Lord and respectfully, in addition to you, your honor, there is a judge we all have to stand before one day.” Welllll — sure. But your point is? Davis’s daughter is now in foster care.

It’s yard-sale and flea-market day, Saturday — so what better time to post about how one of the greatest, rarest and most valuable photography books ever published recently turned up in a Canadian dump and then at a local flea market? “In 1934, the great surrealist photographer Man Ray published a book, Photographies 1920-1934, in Paris,” reports British Columbia’s Victoria Times-Colonist. “But it didn’t sell, and never went into a second printing. Over time, though, it was acclaimed as one of the great photography books [and] the original French edition is exceptionally rare, and very, very expensive. Guess where one was just found? At the Hartland landfill in Saanich.” While depositing some junk of his own, a man noticed a box of discarded books awaiting a trip to the recycling center. Riffling through these, he found the Man Ray volume: “The book contains 104 photos by Man Ray, an American who spent most of his life in Paris. There are portraits of his famous friends, several of his trademark ‘Rayographs’ (non-photos where he pressed images against negative paper to create an eerie image) and iconic photographs like his 1926 shot ‘Noire et Blanche,’ which featured his then-girlfriend Kiki de Montparnasse’s head laid on a table with her eyes closed, holding an African dancing mask. A who’s who of his surrealist friends, including Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara, contributed essays and poetry to the monograph, and Pablo Picasso did a drawing.” The lucky finder brought it to a nearby flea market, where he sold it to Vancouver rare-books dealer Don Stewart — who has now put it up for sale with a hefty price tag: $3,500 CAD ($3,107.25 US). Providing yet more inspiration to pick through people’s trash. Or to never throw books away.

In response to one of the very earliest Dibs! posts — a review of Dan Rockmore’s Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis — Dibs! has recently received an astonishing email from Jiang Chun-Xuan, a mathematician in China who claims to have disproved the legendarily difficult problem. Jiang included in his email a detailed mathematical paper (which you can view online in pdf form here) which purports to conclusively demonstrate that Riemann’s hypothesis is in fact false. Why did Jiang bother to notify a lowly literary blog of his epochal discovery? Therein lies a tale — and here the story starts to get even more mystifying. (If you’re wondering what the Reimann Hypothesis even is, click on the review of the Rockmore book above for an explanation.)

For if the Reimann Hypothesis is in fact proven to be false, the entire field of mathematics would be shaken to its core. So one would imagine that such a discovery would be greeted with great fanfare (or great alarm, depending on which side you’re rooting for). Yet instead, Jiang’s paper met with an echoing silence from the mainstream mathematical community. As a result, he took it upon himself to send out his proof to anyone anywhere who might conceivably be interested — including, oddly, Dibs!.

To the untrained eye, Jiang’s proof seems mighty impressive, filled with incomprehensible equations and confident proclamations. Why then has it been roundly ignored by the gatekeepers of mathematical knowledge? Since the average person does not have the background to judge the quality of Jiang’s work, we must rely on the experts to tell us if he really has succeeded in smashing one of the pillars of modern mathematics. And what do the experts have to say? Zilch. They don’t even answer the doorbell.

One possible explanation for this is that Jiang is so wrong that his “disproof” doesn’t even need debunking. The only clue to this possibility is a discussion at Wikipedia about the Reimann Hypothesis in which a commenter named Winfried Aschauer vigorously dismisses Jiang’s paper as “very strange” and “rubbish,” and that any minutes spent reading the paper was “wasted time.”

But aside from this one naysayer of unknown authority, one cannot find any mathematician or publication online willing to discuss the merits of Jiang’s claim. In frustration, he has allowed the fringe-y “Institute for Basic Research” — an outside-the-mainstream science organization in Florida — to publish his paper, since no one else would.

International biases also come into play, as Jiang is only one of many Chinese scientists over the last few decades who feel their work has been shunned by the West; though there has been some acknowledgement of Chinese discoveries in the last few years, many Chinese scientists must feel as if they are operating in a parallel universe. Could Jiang be ignored by the Western mathematical establishment simply because he is Chinese?

The story ends here, in limbo. We — the unwashed masses — don’t know if the Reimann Hypothesis has been disproven, or instead if an eccentric professor in China is suffering from delusions of grandeur. And if this accursed silence continues much longer, we may never know.

A Chasidic rabbi in New York invoked comic-book superheroes during his Yom Kippur sermon this year. These figures who leap tall buildings in single bounds inspired him as a youth in Britain and, as his new book reveals, they have Jewish roots. Self-described “comic-book rabbi” Simcha Weinstein, the official rabbi of Pratt Institute and the Long Island College Hospital, read comics and played with Batman and Superman action figures as a tot. Later research revealed that “early comic book creators were almost all Jewish,” Weinstein explains, “and, as children of immigrants they spent their lives trying to escape a second-class mentality which had been forced upon them by an often hostile outside world. Their fight for Truth, Justice and the American Way is portrayed by the superheroes they created; such as Superman (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), Captain America (Jack Kirby and Joe Simon), Batman (Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson), the Green Lantern (Martin Nodell), and Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man and X-Men (Stan Lee).” His book Up, Up and Oy Vey! “contends that writer-artists of the classic comics … were influenced by their religious heritage in devising characters and plots.” Raised in a secular home, Weinstein attended film school and worked as a location scout for movies and TV. He became religious and in his twenties enrolled in a Jerusalem yeshiva. He is the founder of the downtown Brooklyn Jewish Student Foundation.

These days, as the lines grow ever fuzzier between truth and fiction, conspiracy and history, it no longer seems to matter whether certain figures actually ever lived. We’ve made movies about them, put them into novels, and it was all such a long time ago that who cares whether they actually rode horses, burped and breathed their last. But the authenticity of King Arthur used to really matter to historians and English majors, and what a relief it was for them when their questions appeared to be answered once and for all by Norma Lorre Goodrich, a California lit professor and “prolific author who discovered King Arthur was an actual person, [and who] has died of natural causes” at age 89, according to UPI on Saturday. “The former literature professor at the University of Southern California and Claremont Colleges discovered King Arthur was born to a royal family and once lived in Scotland. She also determined Guinevere was a Scottish queen and Lancelot was a Scottish king. For her work she and her husband were knighted in 1990…. When she was 5, an aunt gave her a copy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s book, The Idylls of the King, and set her on a literary path.” Goodrich authored many books, including Merlin, The Medieval Myths, Guinivere, Priestesses, Charles Duke of Orleans, The Ways of Love and King Arthur. However, critics — such as Don Fry at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, writing in the Library Journal — protested that Goodrich should not necessarily be trusted, as she in turn trusted untrustworthy sources. “Though Goodrich asserts that hers ‘is the first book to have explored very minutely and in the original languages both the historical and literary material concerning King Arthur,’ numerous Arthurian scholars have written similarly researched books with similar conclusions,” Fry wrote in 1986. “Goodrich assumes ancient authors were accurate, and she has made the following findings: the real Arthur operated ‘between what is now Scotland and what is now England,’ rather than in the South; he died near Douglas; and Avalon was St. Patrick’s Isle, near Man. Her romantic sensibilities skate over the treacherous evidence and find geographic certainties everywhere.” Snap! And after reading her book The Holy Grail, blogger Daniel Jolley at Rambles.net muses: “Goodrich employs a writing style even more idiosyncratic and unwieldy than my own. … I must praise anyone who is able to get an editor to accept passive sentences. Nonetheless, there are sentences that, no matter how many times I read them, do not seem to be sentences at all, just expressions that often make no sense. On a broader level, many passages in the book … do not seem to relate to the topic at hand, namely the Holy Grail. … Good luck.” Double snap!

Hark back to those balmy days of 1980, when Adam and the Ants was an art-school-new-wave band helmed by Adam Ant, real name Stuart Goddard, who drew on his father’s Romany (“gypsy”) heritage when designing his own flamboyant dark-haired stage persona. He had a relationship with Jamie Lee Curtis, and the band broke up in ‘82. But its fans still abound. Lesley Scott and Lee Bowen first “met” in an Antmusic chat room. Bowen asked Scott to marry him this week in a Borders store in Glasgow, Scotland where Ant/Goddard was signing copies of his new autobiography Stand and Deliver, which details the star’s struggles with bipolar disorder. (He threw a brick through a schoolroom window as a child, then menaced some London pub patrons with a fake gun in 2002.) As reported in the Evening Post: “Lee, 35, revealed: ‘I asked [Ant] if it would be okay to pop the question while Lesley was getting her book signed and he said yes. I thought she was going to burst into tears but she managed to hold it together. It was so nice to do something like that in front of our hero.’ Luckily … Lesley said yes and the sweethearts are now busy planning their wedding, and although they haven’t set a date yet they have decided to have an Adam Ant-themed day with chart hit Prince Charming as their first dance…. Lee, an IT manager for British Gas, said: ‘The thing is if it wasn’t for Adam Ant’s music we would never have met at all. He was really nice about the whole thing. I had been thinking about asking her to marry me for a while and it seemed like the right time to do it. We are both big fans. Every November we go to the Adam Ant Convention in London…. We might get instructions on how to do the Prince Charming dance printed on our wedding invites.’” So if he’s 35 now, then in 1980 when A and the As were popular, this fan was — nine? It’s folks like him for whom the washed-up are ever grateful.

After Fantasia Barrino won the 2005 American Idol competition, it was revealed that the dazzling singer was functionally illiterate. Shortly afterward, she became the “author” of an autobiography. And now Barrino’s dad is suing Simon & Schuster, which published Fantasia: Life Is Not A Fairy Tale. According to AP: “Joseph Barrino disputes details in the book, including the idea that he asks his daughter for money when she visits and that his children’s musical careers were more important than their educations. Although Fantasia is listed as the book’s author, her father’s suit claims Fantasia’s grandmother, Addie Collins, was the ghost writer.” As ABC News reported shortly after Fantasia’s big win: “The 21-year-old R&B singer says she’s signed record deals and contracts that she didn’t read and couldn’t understand. But the hardest part, she said, is not being able to read to Zion, her 4-year-old daughter. ‘That hurts really bad,’ she said, adding that she is now learning to read with tutors. In her memoir … which she dictated to a freelance writer, Fantasia also said she was raped in the ninth grade by a classmate. She says the boy was disciplined, but she blamed herself for the attack. She dropped out of high school that year and became an unwed mother at 17.” It’s going to be a mighty uncomfortable day around the Thanksgiving table for the Barrino clan this year.

Award-winning Japanese novelist Bando Masako threw kittens over a cliff. As a result, she might now face prosecution for breaking animal-protection laws in Tahiti, where she lives. In a column she wrote for the Japanese paper Nihon Keizai Shimbun on August 18, the author of horror novels Inugami and Yamahaha expained that she hadn’t spayed her three female pet cats, and after they gave birth she dropped their kittens over a cliff near her home. In the column, she argued that sterilizing adult cats and killing newborn kittens is essentially the same thing. “I chose ‘life’ for the cats I had raised, but chose to kill the kittens in line with my responsibility to society,” she wrote. “Of course I have to take a share in the pain and sadness of killing.” The French penal code, to which residents of Tahiti must adhere, classes killing kittens as a misdemeanor, with a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Possibly, the offender could argue the crime down to a “police offense,” however. As reported by Indymedia, Bando defended her actions in her column: “I’ve been living in Tahiti for eight years. I’ve come to think deeply about ‘life’ including that of animals, and by extension, ‘death.’ ‘Kitten killing’ fits in with this. I expressed my thoughts from the standpoint of what living means for animals.” Thousands of furious calls and emails poured into the Nihon Keizai Shimbun offices. “The French embassy in Japan reportedly was also hindered by inquiries,” Indymedia adds. As tempers are running high this week — Sept. 20-26 is Animal Protection Week in Japan — 48-year-old Bando wrote a defensive followup column, which appeared in the Mainichi newspaper group. In it, she explains that she kills kittens because she is a narcissistic loveless suicidal shell of a human being who likes cats better than people. (Though she does have a soft spot for the scrotum.) Yup. Read for yourself: “I’m not very good with people. I get tense and nervous when I’m around others, and it’s difficult for me to love other human beings. That’s why I keep cats. The love that ordinarily would be directed toward other people is given instead to my pets. This allows me to maintain a world in which there is at least some form of love. It is because of my pets that I’m able to prevent my ‘fountain of love’ from running completely dry. The reason I keep pets, therefore, is purely for self-serving reasons. My cats serve as a mirror for me, for I can see myself through them. When I caress them, I’m caressing myself. And when I took it upon myself to kill newborn kittens, I was essentially killing myself. It was a truly painful and mortifying experience. But unless I do something about the new litter, the kittens will grow up in no time and produce young of their own. The house will become full of cats. I may not be able to feed them all, and the kitchen is sure to become a mess. And yet, I can’t bring myself to get rid of all my cats. People tell me that I should sterilize my cats if I don’t want to be overrun with young kittens…. But this is something I can’t bring myself to do. The scrotum and uterus are the sources of new life. To surgically remove them also means removing life energy and vitality. What if I were forced to undergo a sterilization operation? I may convince myself that this was unavoidable, given my lack of financial assets or ability. But in the bottom of my heart, I know that I don’t want to lose my source of life energy. Another thing that disturbs me about sterilization is that it is something performed on a lesser animal by a higher one. Homosexuals were neutered because they were regarded by Nazi authorities as being inferior humans. Lepers, too, were once sterilized in Japan. If one approves of forced sterilization for animals, one could easily also apply this attitude to other humans. So I harbor suspicions about people who can claim, in good conscience, that pets should be sterilized. The essay I wrote … has been misconstrued in Tahiti as well. The French Polynesian government may prosecute me, but I would ask that they carefully study my actions to determine whether they really constitute cruelty to animals. Without first ascertaining the facts, my prosecution would be tantamount to a suppression of the freedom of speech.” … She invokes everyone’s two favorite self-defense specters: Nazism and freedom of speech. I did it because Nazis were bad and I’m not like them! I’m incapable of breaking laws because I have freedom of speech!

The author of a new book advocating euthanasia is outraged that 45 copies of it have been seized by Customs at Brisbane airport in Australia. Medical doctor Philip Nitschke is a controversial figure in his home country, where he has founded a euthanasia group called Exit. Defying Australia’s anti-euthanasia laws, Nitschke has personally assisted several people in ending their lives and provided how-to advice to many more. He made national headlines in 2002 when a 70-year-old woman named Nancy Crick — whom Nitschke had diagnosed with a recurrence of bowel cancer — took a lethal dose of barbiturates and was dead twenty minutes later in the presence of over a dozen friends and family whom she had gathered for the occasion. It turned out that Crick was not terminally ill at all. According to ABC.net, Nitschke is now comparing the seizure of his book The Peacefull Pill Handbook to “the burning of literature in Germany during the Nazi era.” Can a day not go by when someone doesn’t compare something to Nazis and Hitler? It rather cheapens the actual Holocaust. Nitschke is perhaps best known for devising and providing what he calls an “exit bag” to those who want to die — it’s a simple plastic bag with an elasticized opening, designed to suffocate the wearer.

One of the most prolific sci-fi/horror authors of all time died of cardiopulmonary disease last Friday. Charles Grant, who was born in 1942 and won two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards, had taught public school and served in Vietnam before becoming a full-time writer in 1975. Since then, the New Jersey resident wrote no fewer than seventy novels. Several dozen were published under his real name; the rest were published under pseudonyms including “Simon Lake,” “Felicia Andrews” and “Deborah Lewis.” The books include The Fangs of the Hooded Demon (Tor, 1988) The Seven Spears of the W’dch’ck (Tor, 1988), The Really Ugly Thing From Mars (Ace, 1990), The Reasonably Invisible Man (Ace, 1991), Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire (Ace, 1992), The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (Doubleday, 1978) and A Quiet Night of Fear (Berkley, 1981). His widow, fellow horror author Kathryn Ptacek, writes of Grant’s death — “we had pizza and we were watching the Mets game” — at the above-linked site.