Mark Linkous, whose nom de music, as it were, was Sparklehorse, died over the weekend. The Arlington native is remembered in the New York Times:

But disillusioned with the music business, Mr. Linkous returned to Virginia and reinvented his sound as Sparklehorse, a name that he applied to himself as well as his band.

“We were trying so hard to get signed, and I just quit and came back home and just gave up on all those aspirations of being a rock star,” he said in an interview in 1999. “That’s when I started making good music.”

Although Sparklehorse’s music never had wide commercial success, it found respect among critics and other musicians. Rolling Stone called its 1999 album, “Good Morning Spider,” a “homemade tour de force of psychedelic Appalachian folk slop,” and the third Sparklehorse record, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” released in 2001, had guest appearances by Tom Waits and PJ Harvey.

“Sick of Goodbyes” is off Good Morning Spider.

Frances Osborn Robb, a scholar who has worked on the Encyclopedia of Alabama, writes in to correct some information we included with an image of Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s inauguration.

I read the short information on the color lithograph of Davis’s inauguration. I presently have a book manuscript under review by the University of Alabama Press on the history of photography in Alabama, and I would like to correct the authorship of the original image.

The lithograph is based on a painting by James Massalon made for William C. Howell of Prattville, Alabama. The photographer is not credited, but he was Archibald Crossland McIntyre of Montgomery, who advertised his view and three others on Feb. 19, the day after the event in the Montgomery Messenger. The best surviving print of his photograph is in the Boston Athenaeum. Another is in a family collection in New Hampshire. A copy of the photograph, now in the Alabama Department of Archives and History, was deposited there by the photographer’s niece Toccoa Cozart. McIntyre was not credited with the authorship of this image until 1912, when Dudley H. Miles published the earliest known half-tone of the photograph in the Illustrated History of the Civil War, crediting McIntyre with the original.

Best of luck with the Encyclopedia of Virginia. My husband and I have written several articles for our new Encyclopedia of Alabama, and it seems to be a hit!

Thanks for the information, Frances. Above is the lithograph, with one of the original photographs (courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Alabama) inset.

Just for fun: Go to the New York Times online and punch “George Pickett” into the search engine there. What you’ll find is Encyclopedia Virginia’s entry on the famous Confederate general. The Times has begun to syndicate our content, beginning with Pickett, in their Times Topic series. The goal for the Timesis to have such articles provide background knowledge and context for links to archived Times articles. The benefit to EV is having the Times imprimatur on content that we already knew was scholarly but accessible and just generally top-notch. Here’s an example of an article that covers the entire Civil War. Or here is William McKinley, an article written by folks at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.

IMAGE: George Pickett

Ta-Nehisi Coates, after watching one of David Blight’s free online seminars on slavery and the Civil War, wonders about the economics of bondage. In particular, he asks his readers to explain why Southerners believed, before the war, that slavery would die if it weren’t allowed to expand into new U.S. territories.

My basic read is that it’s a supply and demand problem. If slavery can’t expand, and slaves keep reproducing (as they were in the South) you’ll end up with a glut of slaves in a small area, thus causing the price of slaves to fall. I have two questions. 1.) Does my read sound right? 2.) Why would the falling price of slaves be bad for the South? Wouldn’t that be good, in that it would require even less investment in labor?

For a fascinating lesson in economics and history, read through the comments. Here are some highlights:

He must be talking about the price to slaveowners of keeping slaves. If you have a finite plantation that can only grow X plants, then you only need Y able-bodied slaves at any given time. If your slaves keep reproducing and do so at a faster rate than they die, and you can’t sell them to other plantations because they’re no longer needed, then you could definitely reach the point where you were losing money on your farm . . .

. . . When local markets collapsed, slave owners lost wealth and the ability to access capital (by selling a few slaves). Slaves had to be kept at a slight supply shortage to retain value . . .

. . . Is the basic idea that you need to be able to sell slaves to generate cash if, say, you have a bad crop one year? And if slaves are cheap, you can’t really do that? It almost sounds like they were labor and insurance . . .

. . . To some extent, that’s right. Slaves were both labor and capital. That makes modeling the economics extremely difficult.

But the idea is that you spent $x for a slave, but if the resale value was $(x-n), then you lost money on your investment unless the added value of their labor was greater than $n. If the resale value dropped further, faster, then it was impossible to recoup the lost value through labor . . .

. . . A lot of plantations actually made more money selling slaves than they did selling the crops they produced, particularly in the old Confederacy (Virginia and the Carolinas) that were not particularly suited to growing cotton. (Wise old Ben Franklin even suspected that Jefferson’s opposition to the trans-Atlantic slave trade was motivated by a desire to increase the value of the slaves that were already here, thereby enhancing the wealth of the slaveowners). So it was very important to maintain a growing demand for slaves in order to keep their value up . . .

IMAGE: Slaves Waiting for Sale; Richmond, Virginia, 1861 by the English artist Eyre Crowe. Published in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Menil Foundation, Harvard University Press, 1989), vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 205, fig. 127; original painting is held privately. Reprinted courtesy of www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.

Eleanor Ross Taylor is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for her collection Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008. From our entry:

Taylor’s poetry is most often compared to that of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. “[O]f course I loved Emily Dickinson and read a lot of Emily Dickinson early,” Taylor remarked in 2002 interview with Blackbird, “but the first poet that really made me feel that poetry was contemporary and could relate to me right now, in the way that you know that all those wonderful heroines of poetry and heroes do, was Edna St. Vincent Millay. I read her as a teenager in school and just fell in love with her poems. I think it gave me a feeling of being able to approach current, everyday life.” The southernness of her background makes her tend to rein in her formidable intellect and biting wit with an uneasy deference to form and convention.

The awards will be announced in March.

IMAGE: Eleanor Ross Taylor, by Tom Victor (1999); courtesy of Louisiana State University Press

I love it when the New York Times uses big words like crepuscular, as in the “strange crepuscular tradition” of some black-clad dude visiting Edgar Allan Poe’s graveside every year on his birthday—which was yesterday—bearing three red roses and a bottle of Cognac. The tradition goes back to 1949, apparently.

But the visitor—whose identity, or identities, has never been revealed, despite some claims to the contrary over the years—failed to show up this year for the first time, ending a strange crepuscular tradition and disappointing a crowd of more than 30 people who forfeited a good night’s sleep to witness the visitation.

That’s too bad . . . now back to crepuscular. It means “relating to the twilight,” but its consonants are too jagged and sharp for anything that’s, you know, just pretty. For instance, Thelonious Monk has a great & lovely tune called “Crepuscule with Nellie,” written for his wife. But no one has ever accused Monk of being just pretty. The man’s playing was all sharp edges—making it that much more odd that his middle name was Sphere.

Anyway, Baudelaire dug this sort of ambiguity, too, and he began his poem “Le Crépuscule du soir” with a reference to the “charming, friendly evening of the criminal” (or “Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel”). You can find the rest here, but basically it reads like a stern warning to impatient lovers. For instance, the type of lovers to lose a night’s sleep over some dude with roses & Cognac.

IMAGE: Thelonious Monk, photographed by Robert Bolton at the Atlanta Jazz Festival, May 1966. From the Robert Bolton Collection.

New images of Edgar Allan Poe have surfaced, the Associated Press reports in a rather excitable article that calls the writer “vigorous” and “dashing.”

The more robust Poe is captured in a small watercolor by A.C. Smith, one of just three surviving portraits of the author, which will be shown publicly for the first time Saturday and is expected to fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction.

Poe sits at a desk with pen and paper in hand, seemingly at the height of his creative powers. His upper lip is clean-shaven, though he sports long, bushy sideburns. And there’s the slightest hint of a smile on his face.

“It actually represents Poe as he appeared to his contemporaries — a handsome, sophisticated young man on the rise,” said Cliff Krainik, the owner of the portrait and a Poe scholar. “The daguerreotypes show him in his rather dissipated state, where he has gone through the difficulties of his life.”

Today, by the way, is Poe’s birthday. He was born in 1809, two years to the day after some other Virginian you might have heard of: Robert E. Lee.

PREVIOUSLY: The man in this picture is not Edgar Allan Poe.

IMAGE: A portrait of Edgar Allan Poe released Monday, Jan. 18, 2010, by via Cliff Krainik is seen. The small watercolor by A.C. Smith shows Poe sitting at desk with pen and paper in hand. His famous mustache is missing, and there’s the slightest hint of a smile on his face. The portrait will be unveiled Saturday, Jan. 23, 2010, to the public in Baltimore as part of Poe’s birthday celebration. Krainik, plans to sell the portrait at auction later this year. Auctioneer Wes Cowan expects it to sell for $30,000 to $50,000—and he says that’s a conservative estimate.

Here’s a story of an encyclopedia editor (that’s me) who tries his hand at editing Wikipedia, with mixed results (see Bix Beiderbecke), only to find five dollars at the end! In fact, it’s such an awesome story, it’s picked up by the Los Angeles Times.

Except for the part about five dollars. They left that out.

UPDATE: A response from Wiki.

James Branch Cabell’s novel Jurgen (1919) is reviewed at my new favorite blog-slash-literary website, The Second Pass. The review begins with this evocative epigraph . . .

“I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don’t know why, exactly. The book hurts me—tears me to small pieces—but somehow it sets me free. It says the word that I’ve been trying to pronounce for so long. It tells me everything I am, and have been, and may be, unsparingly. . . . I don’t know why I cry over it so much. It’s too—something-or-other—to stand. I’ve been sitting here tonight, reading it aloud, with the tears streaming down my face . . .”
—Deems Taylor, in a letter to Mary Kennedy, December 12, 1920

. . . before going on to compare Cabell’s characters to “those of Quentin Tarantino, [which] tend to riff most elegantly at the moments of their greatest depravity.” As our entry suggests, Cabell himself could have been a Tarantino character. That is not really captured by the picture above; instead, check out Carl Van Vechten’s creepier portrait.

Let’s take this faux scenario: say you want to see how much the houses in your neighborhood sold or are selling for. You pick up your phone, open up a mobile app like Layar or Wikitude, pull up the local real estate dataset in that application, point the phone’s camera at the buildings around you and the screen is populated with hyperlinked dots you might click on for further information (e.g. price, amenities, etc.).

Well, if you can do this for real estate, why not for the historical events that have occurred and are occurring around us? What if you had historical events pinpointed to specific enough locations to deploy to these applications? Well, we’ve been playing with this idea at Encyclopedia Virginia. We already have a large dataset of geolocated event points that is tied to entries that add to one’s understanding of the events that occurred at those points. Check out these two proofs of concept:

and this one:

Someone asked me recently if I thought this endeavor and use of EV content was a bit overwrought and a waste of time. If you consider the rapid increase in market share that devices like the iPhone, Droid, and the new Nexus One are grabbing, and the potential uses in education and tourism that apps like Layar open up, then I’d have to say this is time well wasted.