Obituary

Noted without comment.

Shelagh Delaney has died aged 71, having written something extraordinary when she was 18. “Guardian obituary”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/nov/21/shelagh-delaney

At 80. Not 77. In Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy Peter Oborne suggests that D’Oliveira may have been the greatest batsman of all time. It is worth remembering that by the age at which Dolly made his test debut, many successful batsmen have retired from the international stage: he did not even play first class cricket till after he had turned 30. Whether or not Oborne is right about that, it is certain that if D’Oliveira had been white then a youtube search would show up footage of him, rather than bringing up an ESPN special about a lesser batsman, in which his name is tagged only because John Vorster preferred having SA expelled from test cricket to having Dolly tour SA with the MCC.
Guardian obit here.
My review of Oborne’s book here. I’ll embed footage of him actually playing if someone can find it. (You can see a little here if you really work at it; in clip 6 the narrator says that John Arlott regarded bringing Dolly to England as the greatest achievement of his life. See this clip of Vorster announcing the cancellation of the tour and make your own judgement).

Oborne has the last word:

Cricket writers often mourn the lost generation of white cricketers such as Graeme Pollock, Mike Proctor or Barry Richards. But at least they got to play some Tests and unrestricted first-class cricket. The penalty that Apartheid inflicted on Eric Petersen, Ben Malamba, Cec Abrahams, Basil D’Oliveira and numerous others was far more absolute. They were denied training, facilities, access to turf wickets and any chance to play for their country at all. Only D’Oliveira escaped to enjoy complete sporting fulfilment, and he got his chance only at the very end of his sporting career, by which time his reflexes had slowed and he was half the brilliant sportsman he had been as a young man in 1950’s South Africa…..It is likely that but for the barbarism of Apartheid D’Oliveira would now be remembered as one of the very greatest cricketers the world has ever seen. By rights he should have imposed his great and singular talent on the cricketing world of the 1950’s, matching himself against the great cricketers of that age: Len Hutton and Denis Compton of England, Everton Weekes, Frank Worrrell and Clive Walcott of the West Indies, Keith Miller and Neil Harvey of Australia.

Steve Jobs has died. He was 56. Here is his 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford.

[click to continue…]

Its been a busy couple of weeks — we were on vacation sort of, and then catching up. It is wonderful to me that Wisconsin 2011 I learned of Sarah-Jane’s death from a bunch of 14 year olds I’d just made a really good dinner for. But I’d rather it weren’t true. Barry Letts, the Brig, and now Sarah Jane, its been a tough couple of years.
Grauniad obit here.
Choice quote: ‘Current producer Steven Moffat said: “Never meet your heroes, wise people say. They weren’t thinking of Lis Sladen.”‘

Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, embodiment of all that was best on the conservative side of the post-war consensus, is dead. Obit here. Because the videos I’ve been posting are bleeding off the main page, here are some links.
Presumably, as they lower the coffin, Benton will fire five rounds rapid.

Daniel Bell has died at the age of ninety one. The New York Times has an obituary, and I’m sure there will be more to follow elsewhere. I heard a story once about Bell being asked what he specialized in. “Generalizations”, he replied. But not the sterile, merely verbal generalizations of something like structural-functionalism, the dominant “grand social theory” of his day. Bell was prepared to sick his neck out. This meant he could get things wrong. I’ll leave his political writings for others to assess. His cultural criticism has not aged well: his sniffy disdain for “aggressive female sexuality”, for instance, or his view that the “new sound” of the Beatles made it “impossible to hear oneself think, and that may indeed have been its intention” are unlikely to play so well today. But we should be so lucky to coin so many phrases that become part of the language — “The End of Ideology”, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism”, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society“. The latter book, in particular, is one of the most impressive pieces of economic sociology written in the twentieth century. It asks a big question about the future, it works out an answer, and gets it mostly right. At the beginning of his academic career Bell was on the periphery of the self-consciously scientific sociology department at Columbia that had Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld at its core. (A little like C. Wright Mills, interestingly enough.) I believe they thought of him more as a journalist and political type, at least initially, given his background at Fortune magazine. Yet a book like The Coming of Post-Industrial Society has more truly scientific spirit about it than Social Theory and Social Structure.

For very personal reasons, depressing as it is, I cannot hear this one without smiling:

As mentioned in comments to a post the other day, Kodachrome is coming to an end on Thursday. The New York Times has a nice article about it. Of course this isn’t the end for film, or even of slide film (there’s still Velvia and a few other options). Kodachrome was always an unusual and capital intensive process. I was struck by the following sentence from the article: “At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome.” That’s a very very small number for the _peak_ . There are probably still many thousands of labs that will develop colour print (C41) film and probably dozens even in the UK that will handle the more common transparency process (E6). Still, RIP.

UPDATE! – “More from NYT”:http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/a-color-saturated-sun-sets-on-kodachrome/ , with pictures!

Sad news.

Following up my Trolley post: I didn’t realize until just now that Philippa Foot died on October 3. So let’s have a separate, more serious thread for anyone with thoughts about that.

For those of us of a certain age, Sunday afternoons were spent watching old films on telly (where on earth were our parents, I wonder?). The best films starred Jack Hawkins or George Formby, but for me the most keenly anticipated were Norman Wisdom’s films. It was only for Wisdom that I noted the time in the Radio Times to be sure to see the whole thing. Looking back, I imagine they all had the same plot, and the same jokes, and the same pratfalls. But who cared? They were all funny, all innocent, all brilliant. Sorry to see him go. But glad that the DVD revolution means I can watch whenever I want. Guardian obit here. Clips, wonderfully arranged, here. Brian Logan’s appreciation.

I have not seen any online obituary yet, and am about to get on a flight to Ireland (so will not be able to update this for 24 hours or so).

Maybe I should have a lie down.