Via Matt Cheney at the Mumpsimus, I learn that Guy Davenport has died. By coincidence, I’ve mentioned Davenport three times on this blog in the last week; he was one of the finest cultural and literary critics of our time. His essays cumulate into a long allusive conversation; digressive, enlightening, quietly humorous. You could warm your hands at them. He had a gift for finding the detail, the miniature axis on which the world turned for Kafka, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, for Picasso, for Louis Agassiz. From his essay, “On Reading” (collected in The Hunter Gracchus):
Students often tell me that an author was ruined for them by a high-school English class; we all know what they mean. Shakespeare was almost closed to me by the world’s dullest teacher, and there are many writers whom I would probably enjoy reading except that they were recommended to me by suspect enthusiasts. I wish I knew how to rectify these aversions. I tell bright students, in conference, how I had to find certain authors on my own who were ruined for me by bad teachers or inept critics. Scott, Kipling, Wells will do to illustrate that only an idiot will take a critic’s word without seeing for oneself. I think I learned quite early that the judgments of my teachers were probably a report of their ignorance. In truth, my education was a systematic misleading. Ruskin was dismissed as a dull, preacherly old fart who wrote purple prose. In a decent society the teacher who led me to believe this would be tried, found guilty, and hanged by the thumbs while being pelted with old eggs and cabbage stalks.
On this count, as on many others, Davenport was gloriously, radiantly, exuberantly innocent. He inspired you to read new books, and re-read old ones differently. He’ll be sorely missed.
Jerry Orbach, star of Law & Order for many seasons, died last night of prostate cancer. Just last week NBC rebroadcast his last episode in the series. Even though he had left the show, he was taking part in the production of the new upcoming spinoff “Law & Order: Trial by Jury”, which will start airing in 2005 with Orbach performing in three episodes.
John Peel is dead at only 65. I can’t believe it. He’s been a part of my life since I was a teenager and used to listen to his late-night show. He’s been responsible for introducing so much music to a British audience (he did much for punk and reggae), he’s been consistently funny in his distinctive dry way, and, of course, he was just about the world’s no. 1 Liverpool fan. Terrible news. More from the BBC .
I lived in New York City for four years, and visited several times a year for many year before and after. I never went into the World Trade Center. The Stock Exchange? Yes. Century 21’s downtown location, to fight over discontinued Helmut Lang skirts? Yes. I never went to Windows on the World and bought a drink. I could have afforded one drink. As in many skyscrapers, there were different elevators that went to different floors, local and express, like a vertical IRT. I never rode in them.
Perhaps it’s because I am afraid of heights? Some people are afraid of heights because they worry that they might fall. I am afraid of heights because I worry that I might jump. Some uncontrolled impulse might leap from my subconscious, fully formed, and send me vaulting over the railing before I realize what I’m doing. I’m sure there was a big barrier up there, though, on the roof. It would have been all right. I’ll never see it now, tourists with cameras, everything riffling in the wind, the city below like a horripliated skin shaken out onto the water, bristling with towers and water tanks.
The twin towers used to be a lodestar, the true north of downtown. When you were getting close to the city on the Metroliner from DC you would see them, looming palely over the fens and stippled wastes of New Jersey. I don’t know why there are no refineries on that side, between the tracks and the river. To your left there are many, incomprehensible cities of pipes and flame-topped pillars, wan in the sunlight. To your right, nothing: swamps poisoned with acrid metals and the distant towers shimmering behind, out of scale. There is nothing now to tell you if you are near or far, only marsh, and the sudden maw of the tunnel, surprising you into the city.
It used to be that when you got drunk and took the subway downtown somewhere and didn’t know what direction you were facing, you could look at the World Trade Center to orient yourself. Stumbling through the revolving door of meshed bars, which always seems on the verge of mangling someone, up the pissy stairs with their irregular black smears of gum, you would come into the cold air and look about for a moment. From somewhere, over your shoulder or dead ahead, you would see them. So much taller than the five-story buildings around you, as if they were an image refracted from another, Brobdingnagian city. There are almost no stars in the sky in New York City, because there is too much ambient light. On a cold night you might see part of Orion, certainly Sirius. Not the pole star, though. New York has got its own stars, blinking on and off like a cluster of baleful planets, red Marses. Used to have. They were there to warn the planes away. They could only fulfill this function under certain circumstances. The raised white glove of an unarmed policeman suffices to stop traffic, usually.
And what about the people who did this? I imagine they were surprised at their own sucess. But why, if they could do this incredible thing, have they not sent nineteen more men out to shoot people at random in malls, in schools? Don’t they know how terrifying that would be? Can they possibly understand us as little as we understand them? Perhaps we are not even the intended audience for this spectacle of destruction, but merely props in it. Perhaps they would lose face by causing any lesser tragedies, paltry massacres that would make them seem weak. If so, then what comes next must be truly awful, something on a grand scale to compete with the steady, shattering thuds of bodies leaping from the flames. I try to think about the people who did this.
I got a dress of mine out of the closet here in Singapore which I hadn’t worn in a long time. It is a beautiful, patterned silk dress from the 1940’s, indescribable scribbles and swirls on brown and green on a pale ash color. When I took it out, I saw that a mud-dauber wasp had built a single breeding cell on the dress. It depended from the tag in the neckline, a sandy, crumbling cone. It filled me with a peculiar horror. Even now it makes a shudder wash down my back to think about it. The larvae were gone or dead; the cone came apart in my fingers, leaving an oval stain. Nothing dangerous. Still, there was something awful about the idea of this mother wasp going to and fro to my closet, dirt in her mandibles, on her mysterious errand. Was she often shut in there when I closed the door? It was irreducibly strange.
I have looked at that picture of Osama Bin Laden many times. He doesn’t look quite right, I mean, not as I would want him to look. Not angry enough. Khomeini was a very satisfactory villian for the American public. Bin Laden? He looks thoughtful. Inward-gazing. I try to imagine thoughts to put there, behind his too-soft eyes. I put my imaginary desert landscapes there: life reduced to its essentials, a single man trudging along the horizon under a bowl of infinite blue. Is this what he wants? The whole world pared down, all taking the same journey into desert as Arabia Felix did, that was once so green? Nothing extraneous, nothing human? Nothing female, certainly. On Cyprus they used to worship Aphrodite in an aniconic form: a cone of volcanic rock, five feet high. You can see it there, in a museum. Even that would be too much for him.
Last year I went to New York for the first time since September 11, 2001. Driving over the 59th Street bridge I looked back at the curiously balanced skyline. It used to be massively weighted at the tip, anchored by those vertical marks. Now it just floated there, behind the car, the buildings of the east side lowering behind the tombstones of that massive graveyard in Queens, serried rank upon rank, until I could see them no more.
Just a few days short of her 92nd birthday, Julia Child died this week. You did not need to be a cooking fanatic to have watched her shows although you may have ended up as one after doing so. And a kitchen is hardly complete without one of her books. I also got quite a bit of exposure to her name while studying at Smith College as she was one of those alums such a school could be very excited about. Hat tip to ms.musings who links to all sorts of interesting sites for more background info. Here’s one nice little interview with Child last year in Ms. Magazine where Child is quoted as saying: “I was a Republican until I got to New York and had to live on $18 a week. It was then that I became a Democrat.”
British socialist journalist Paul Foot, contrarian and campaigner against many miscarriages of the criminal justice system, is dead.
The world’s oldest mountain guide, Ulrich Inderbinen, has died at the age of 103, having climbed the Matterhorn more than 370 times (making his final ascent at the age of 90). The Economist has the story . I’m sure what they write of him is true, but anyone who has read the beginning of Ernest Gellner’s best book — Thought and Change — will feel slightly suspicious. Gellner illustrates the idea of a society living against “an unchanging temporal horizon”, where everything stays the same “like a train crossing a featureless landscape” with the story of the Taugwalders, survivors of the first ascent in 1865.
[Which]…ended in a disaster in which four men perished and three survived. Of the three survivors, one was an Englishman, Whymper, and the two others were local peasants, Taugwalder father and Taugwalder son. The survivors were of course often interrogated about the event, especially as there was a question of the allocation of blame. When Taugwalder-the-son himself became old, and his father was no longer alive, he sometimes became rather confused: he appeared to think that he himself was Taugwalder-the-father at the time of the first ascent in 1865. This confusion has been attributed to senile feeble-mindedness on his part. But quite a different explanation would promptly occur to a social anthropologist.
After all, in the line of Taugwalders there had always been fathers (with beards, etc.) and sons (without beards, etc.). At the time of the adventure, there was an old one, with beard, and a young one, without beard. Much later, an old one — with beard — was interrogated about the episode: naturally, he identified with the old bearded one, the one who was such at the time of the episode. It would have been absurd for him to identify with a young beardless one, for, by now there was another and (for us) “different” young one, and he himself (now) was the “old one”. There had always been an old and a young one, and the old one now was identical with the old one of any other time, for all times are alike. Whether Zermatt life really was timeless in this way in the nineteenth century, I cannot say; but it is not implausible. (T&C pp. 1—2.)
Jacek Kuron, one of the heroes of the postwar eastern Europe and a man of the left , despite and against Stalinism, is dead. There are obits in the New York Times , the Guardian , the Telegraph , The Scotsman , from the BBC , and in many other places.
British philosopher Sir Stuart Hampshire has died at the age of 89. The Telegraph has a very interesting obituary . I’ll add others to this post as they appear: Guardian , Times .
Well, the first thing I want to say is.”Mandate my ass!”
The demise of Ronald Reagan made me dust off my copy of the magnificent Gil Scott-Heron’s B-Movie/R-Ron (double-A-side-single). I’ve not managed to find even the lyrics to Re-Ron anywhere on the web, but B-movie is here (right sidebar) and you can download the music too (with what legality I can’t say).
The poet Thom Gunn has died, and there are obituaries in the NYT , the Times and the Guardian . A friend introduced me to Gunn’s work about twenty years ago and there are some lines from “Elegy” from The Passages of Joy (1982) that have stuck in my mind ever since I first read them:
There will be no turn of the river
where we are all reunited
in a wonderful party
the picnic spread
all the lost found
as in hide and seek.
A sad loss.
John Maynard Smith, pioneer of the application of game theory to evolutionary biology, has died. There are obituaries in the Times , Guardian and Telegraph .
Norris McWhirter, the man responsible for the Guinness Book of Records, and, arguably, the British public obsession with meaningless facts has just died. Read the obituary, which has entirely admirable people saying very nice things about him. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead so I won’t.
I wrote what I wanted to say about Alistair Cooke when he announced, not very long ago, that he didn’t feel he could continue to write his ‘Letter from America’ any more.
Well, (to steal a favourite Cooke sentence-opener), AC died today, so the ‘Letter’ really is done forever, and there’s no hope of a reprise.
Still, I’d note that he BBC has a little page over here where people can leave their tributes to AC; also that I’m sure the old guy would have been tickled pink by the idea that so many Americans would leave messages there indicating that he’d given them a marvellous education about their own country that seemed unobtainable elsewhere.
Over at The Virtual Stoa, Chris Brooke reports that Paul M. Sweezy, author of The Theory of Capitalist Development and editor of the Monthly Review for many decades has died. Chris will be posting links to obituaries as they appear.
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