Obit here.
From the category archives:
Obituary
“110 Stories”:http://www.110stories.us/.
Robin Cook, former Labour Foreign Secretary and prominent critic of the Blair government over Iraq, “has died suddenly at the age of 59”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4127654.stm . His “resignation speech”:http://www.robincook.org.uk/cook/rc_press.asp#article8 over the war will be remembered for a very long time. From that speech delivered on the eve of war:
bq. For four years as Foreign Secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment. Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam’s medium and long-range missiles programmes. Iraq’s military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term—namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.
Giulini’s recording of The Marriage of Figaro was, I think, the first opera CD I ever bought. It remains one of my better choices. He died the other day at 91, and “there’s an obit in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1507333,00.html .
Via “Russell Arben Fox”:http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2005/05/thoughts-on-ricoeur.html I see that Paul Ricouer has died at the age of 92. “Le Monde”:http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3230,36-652552@51-633431,0.html, the”Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml;sessionid=BBIWUSDSJHP2RQFIQMGSM54AVCBQWJVC?xml=/news/2005/05/23/db2301.xml&site=5 and “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5199672-103684,00.html have obituaries. In addition to Ricoeur’s direct philosophical legacy, he had a very substantial indirect influence on the social sciences through Clifford Geertz, whose arguments about culture and its study are informed by Ricoeur’s hermeneutics.
Update: As “Scott McLemee”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/05/24/mclemee points out, it’s already Tuesday, and
bq. nobody in the American media has insulted Ricoeur yet. What’s going on? Have our pundits lost their commitment to mocking European intellectuals and the pointy-headed professors who read them?
Is something wrong? Inquiring minds would like to know.
My dear former colleague Andrew Harrison died last Saturday after suffering a cruel illness for the last three years. Andrew was a wonderful teacher, a kind and generous man and a distinguished thinker in aesthetics. I’ve posted some words about him written by Michael Welbourne to philos-l which you can read “here”:http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0505&L=philos-l&F=&S=&P=18637 . I know that a number of former students read CT. If you are among them and would like to know about funeral arrangements please email me privately.
Jim Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister defeated by Thatcher in 1979 and, amazingly the oldest living former British PM in history, has died at 92. I’m struggling to think of anything nice to say about his tenure as Home Secretary, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or PM. He was a machine politician rather than someone animated by a sense of social justice, and it is noteworthy that “the BBC obituary”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/941478.stm can’t find a single policy achievement worth listing to his credit. His government collapsed in chaos and recrimination and was followed by bitter civil war with Labour. Thanks to him and his ilk we suffered 18 years of Tory misrule. Still, RIP and all that.
Via Matt Cheney at the “Mumpsimus”:http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/01/recent-deaths.html, I learn that Guy Davenport “has died”:http://www.uky.edu/PR/News/050104_guy_davenport.htm. 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_):
bq. 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”:http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1336385,00.html 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”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3955369.stm .
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.
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”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1264355,00.html.
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”:http://www.economist.co.uk/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2787797 . 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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226286983/junius-20 — 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.
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.