Evidence? Paraphrase?

So much History (as in "history books") is paraphrase. If it's done well, it's turned into a gripping (absorptive) tale (I'm finishing up Master of the Senate, Robert Caro's monumental [see?] study of LBJs years as Majority Leader). It's not fictionalizing events, exactly, but it smooths out and sutures over the actors' phenomenological bumps and gaps. That's where I think poetry (or "poetry" as indeterminate, inter-generic space) comes in. Poets don't have to (and can't) get dressed up in a suit to give papers to the AHA.

A colleague of mine holds that "information is the death of art" (or was it "enemy" of art - implying a struggle, which would be more interesting?). Is evidence the same thing as information? Can something be evidence of itself? I should have this figured out by now . . . or do like the Pragmatists and just declare epistemology irrelevant. But evidence alone becomes pure context - in which case, we're back in the Giscombe, Rumble (and Robbe-Grillet) landscape.

Throw me a bone, here . . .