Remembering Andy Jones

I was saddened to hear this afternoon about the death of entertainment journalist Andy Jones, who suffered a fatal heart attack at a press screening of the new Angelina Jolie film A Mighty Heart. I hadn't been in touch with Andy in far too long a time, but I wouldn't be doing the things I do if it weren't for him—at least nowhere near the way I'm doing them. Back in '96, Andy was kind enough to hire me as a freelancer for Spiv, a pop culture site that the folks at Turner were putting together when every media conglomerate decided they needed to have a webzine. Later, when they killed off most of Spiv and kept only the film section, Rough Cut, he made sure that I was tapped to do indie film reviews and cover film festivals in San Francisco. I even got to do an occasional interview with film historians like David Thomson—the site is long gone, but you might be able to find some of that stuff in the Internet Archive if you look hard enough. Anyway, Andy's support enabled me to hone my chops as a reviewer and interviewer, and we used to talk on the phone a lot, and the one time I met him, just as I was leaving the West Coast for New York, he was so much fun that I'm sorry we never got around to doing it again.

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

Telos reports the death of Richard Rorty last Friday. I got engaged with Rorty's ideas when I was the philosophy editor at Amazon.com and reviewed books like Achieving Our Country; I still consider his pragmatism a strong influence on my way of thinking a decade later. Todd Gitlin remembers Rorty as a philosopher who "put his fingers squarely on the central thought dilemmas (or multilemmas) of our time" and "didn't use philosophy as a dodge from politics—sensible liberal social-democratic politics at that."

The photo above comes from a Stanford News article about a 2005 lecture where Rorty slammed mind/body dualism, asking, "Why did this bad idea enter our culture?"

James Brown, 1933-2006

It's worth taking a moment to break from our largely literary focus today, I think. Christmas just isn't the same without James Brown—oh, I've still got my recordings of "Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto," and the incomparable "Hey America (It's Christmas Time)," but knowing that he won't be singing them live for some audience somewhere...and that's before we even begin to get into the rest of what made the Godfather of Soul an icon of what 20th-century America was all about.

She Loathed the Word “Leper”

Olivia Breitha was a happy eighteen-year-old in Hawaii, engaged to be married, when one day in 1934 she had a skin test at a Kauai hospital. She didn’t know what she was being tested for — she was at the hospital for a stomach ailment. But two days later a stranger appeared at her family’s home and bundled her off to a leprosy hospital. She would never see her fiancé again. Three years later, by legal decree, she was sent to the Kalaupapa leper colony on Molokai. There she worked as an orderly at the settlement hospital, caring for patients more disfigured than herself, as Breitha remembered in her 1988 memoir, Olivia: My Life of Exile in Kalaupapa. Signs were posted around the settlement specifying whom and what the patients were allowed to touch. "My gracious, a patient was not even permitted to touch any automobile that a non-patient rode in," Breitha wrote in her book. “They would take your baby away whether you wanted it or not.” Losing all sensitivity to heat or cold, she was in constant pain as her fingers wasted away. New medications halted the progress of the disease, and in 1969 the residents of Kalaupapa were at last legally permitted to leave. Breitha was moved to write the memoir after seeing what she described as an insensitive reference to Hansen’s Disease on the TV show MASH, then fought valiantly to get people to stop saying the word “leper,” which she compared to a racial slur. Earlier this year, she was miffed at journalist John Tayman’s book The Colony . Remember that one? It was about Molokai, but its cover displayed a picture of Italy’s lovely Amalfi coast. According to the Honolulu Advertiser, she accused Tayman of “stealing” from her book. Tayman said he hadn’t. Breitha died two weeks ago at her Hawaiian home. Aloha.

When visiting an orphanage last week in poverty- and AIDS-ravaged Malawi, Madonna handed the starving children copies of her book about mean girls enlightened by a fairy, The English Roses. (A collectors’-edition boxed set including the original and the new sequel, The English Roses: Too Good to Be True, goes on sale next month for $150.) While there, a small boy “won the singer's heart during an hour-long play session after she handed out copies of her book,” as reported at DailyIndia.com. “Madonna was shown a number of pictures of boys at the orphanage but fell for David. She played with him on the floor and took him to the church.” Then she adopted him. Then her publicist told the press that she hadn’t. Then the boy’s father came forth and said she had. Which revealed that the 13-year-old boy isn’t an orphan. Nevertheless, little David “will be very happy in America,” his father said. His birth father, that is. His adoptive and official father is soon to be Guy Ritchie, who didn’t want to adopt anyone, according to DailyIndia.com, and why would DailyIndia.com lie? (“Madonna has finally had her way and adopted an African child, overriding hubby Guy Richie's inhibitions about adoption,” the article says.) But ... America? Does that child’s poor birth-father not know that Madonna is now a fake Briton who talks with a fake British accent that comes and goes like a will-o’-the-wisp? “The singer said she sees England - and not the US - as ‘home,’” according to the BBC. “‘I love England and want to be here and not in America. I see England as my home.’” The Ritchies live on a 1,000-acre estate, Ashcombe, where Madonna keeps a “flock of chickens.” She also goes hunting on the property. For animals. Which she kills. “To me, Ashcombe is a reflection of me and my husband in many ways, because it reflects our willingness to make a commitment," the author-hunter-singer-adopter is quoted as saying. (A commitment to what? Dibs!, too, would like to make a commitment to thousand-acre estates anytime.) It must be so cool to be so famous (for something) that you can just start writing books if you want to and people will care. And write blog postings about it. Screw the meritocracy, screw it!

Gordon Parks, 1912-2006

Gordon Parks died yesterday at the age of 93. Not only as the author of a book on '70s Hollywood, but simply as a lover of great film, I was familiar with Parks's movies, but they were only one facet of his amazing talent. He was a photographer, a novelist, a memoirist, a magazine editor, a composer...just about whatever he needed to be to express himself from moment to moment.

After the early cinematic successes of The Learning Tree and Shaft, Parks ended his big-screen directing career in 1976 after Leadbelly, starring Roger E. Mosley as blues pioneer Heddy Ledbetter, flopped with critics and audiences alike. I tried very hard to track down a copy of the film, which doesn't appear to be available in any video formats, as I was researching my book; I suspect that in many ways it would counter the much more widely-known Bound for Glory biopic of Woody Guthrie and that, like many commercial "failures" from that era, it would have much to offer us upon a second viewing.

Robert Sheckley, 1928-2005

When I was a teenage science fiction fan, avidly catching up with about five decades worth of stories from the Astounding era onward, Robert Sheckley was one of my favorite discoveries. His stories had a wonderfully twisted sense of humor—sci-fi isn't always the easiest genre to pull off satire in, but Sheckley knew how to do it, over and over again. Likewise absurdism: Long before there was Douglas Adams, there was Sheckley. One of my favorite short stories was "Bad Medicine," which just happens to be available from Project Gutenberg; there are a few more stories available as well.

Gavin Lambert, 1924-2005

I liked Gavin Lambert's books so much I interviewed him twice. But as much as I admired the biographies, including last year's book on Natalie Wood, it was novels like Inside Daisy Clover* I really loved. To my mind, Lambert is an underappreciated genius of the Hollywood novel, pretty much making of Los Angeles what Dawn Powell did New York; he sent up flares for later authors such as Bruce Wagner to follow. The novels can be difficult to find, but they're worth ordering online if need be; in addition to Daisy, I'm also partial to The Goodbye People.

*The movie version of which starred Wood and a young Robert Redford. Lambert also wrote the screenplay--not one of his Oscar-nominated efforts, but still quite good for the "backstage Hollywood" sub-genre.

It's Easy to Throw Dirt at a Grave
(Sometimes You Can Even Manage to Look Classy)

I ran into Sarah Weinman at a reading last night--more on that when I get some of these interviews I've taped for an upcoming PW feature transcribed--and we got to talking about the backhanded "appreciation" of Ed McBain in the weekend NYT arts section. To Frank Prial, the question of "why readers keep returning to the 87th Precint" is easily answered: "as much to follow [Detective] Carella's career as to savor the police jargon and the often clever twists in the plots." Fancy that, readers appreciating well-delineated characters! Who would have thought? Of course, that's a highly simplistic spin on Prial's part, as James Grady points out in Slate, Carella may get a lot of time in the spotlight, but it's the entire ensemble that drives the stories. (And, at the risk of repeating myself, the 1972 movie Fuzz makes that abundantly clear.)

The condescension in Prial's piece is fairly palpable, reducing McBain's 87th Precint series to the mental equivalent of comfort food, the primary value of which being to kill time in airports. Sarah and some of her readers counterstrike ably, but perhaps this is merely the beginning of a new trend of ugly truth telling at the Times, and we can look forward to future obituaries that discuss how Kurt Vonnegut stopped being funny in 1973 and Stanley Crouch was a punk. Oh, wait, they probably wouldn't do that to real writers.

Byron Preiss, 1953-2005

Preiss was one of the publishing industry's most highly respected book packagers, and a lifelong fan of both science fiction and comic books (we owe the term "graphic novel" in large part to him). Comics legend Jim Steranko offers a personal remembrance; the message boards include thoughts from several other A-list comics pros. Most recently, Preiss ran iBooks, which was not only bringing a lot of classic SF and mystery back into print but putting out fresh new stories as well.

UPDATE: Evan Dorkin adds his own memories to the conversation.

Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), 1926-2005

The NYT obituary headline credits Evan Hunter rightly credits Evan Hunter with inventing the police procedural, but as it quotes one of his characters, the 87th Precint saga was really just "novels about cops" at its heart. Great novels about cops, I should say; it'd be pretentious to call the series a roman fleuve or to bandy Balzac's name about, so the bottom line is that he created a world, filled it up with a lot of richly detailed characters, and kept at it for the long haul--and if you've never read the series, check the mystery blogs. They'll be better equipped than I to tell you which books make the best entry points. Sarah Weinman leads the way to many writers and fans expressing their thoughts online.

See also the NYT's earlier tribute to McBain five years ago, though you'll have to get past whatever grudge Newgate Callendar, the paper's mystery critic before Marilyn Stasio had against McBain. (And if you decide to go the DVD route, stay far away from the '90s TV-movies starring Dale Midkiff. Just go straight to Fuzz, which may be the closest thing to a Robert Altman picture that Robert Altman didn't actually direct.)

Ernest Lehman, 1915-2005

The headlines may declare Ernest Lehman best known for North by Northwest, but it's The Sweet Smell of Success that will always hold the top place in my heart, because I love this dirty town. Lehman's papers are archived at the University of Texas at Austin--yep, at the same research center that has Mailer and Delillo's papers.

Shelby Foote, 1916-2005

I suspect most of my generation discovered Shelby Foote through Ken Burns, just like I did. The books themselves have always seemed too intimidating--like Proust's novels, his Civil War trilogy is something I've always fantasized about reading but never actually gotten around to opening. One of these days...Foote was born in Mississippi, so the Mississipi Writers Project covers him in detail, including a link to his 1994 Booknotes appearance. BookTV will rebroadcast another Foote interview, this one from 2001, as part of its Fourth of July weekend programming.

Tristan Egolf, 1971-2005

I've only just heard about Tristan Egolf's apparent suicide last weekend. I wish I could say I was more familiar with the author beyond having read and liked much of Lord of the Barnyard a few years back. At the time of his death, Egolf was serializing a new novel about Amish werewolves, Korn Wolf, on a website called Windmills Online.

More Tributes to Bellow Come In

Slate recruits several literati to eulogize Saul Bellow. Clive James gets in one of the best lines: "One of the marks of a great writer is that he is always present when other writers talk shop. Bellow was always there, and always will be." (To which he then adds, "until the age of American cultural imperialism is over;" the snarky sidejab would hurt more if it weren't coming from the recent defender of Anne Heche's cultural stature.) James Atlas' contribution is more about himself than the deceased, but his jockeying for position is nearly matched by bad, bad Stanley Crouch, who starts off by informing us that "Saul Bellow and I corresponded and talked a good deal over the telephone after he had read a book of my essays" (a revelation that no doubt tears at Atlas's heartstrings, given that his piece is all about Bellow's eagerness to get off the phone). Hilton Als hits one of the first down notes, chastising Bellow for his disdainful ignorance of non-white, non-American authors and calling him "limited, in the end, by believing...that he and others like him were the center of a world that eventually passed them by."

In a separate Slate feature, Elisabeth Sifton has fond memories of editing Bellow's books, despite the difficulties it could entail. Carlin Romano (Philadelphia Inquirer) recounts the many prizes Bellow had received during his writing career, but makes the case that "Bellow bestowed more prestige on the prizes he received than they conferred on him." (He also notes, without naming Als specifically, that complaints of Als's nature were common throughout Bellow's life, and though he puts up some defense, it's of the generic "an author is not his characters" variety.) And Jeffrey Meyers (Wall Street Journal) contributes an odd little piece which veers from comparing Bellow to Nabakov to speculating about the weeks he spent living next door to Arthur Miller to the "notorious but hilarious challenge" that has Hilton Als so upset: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?" He adds that "no one has ever answered" the questions, which I suspect is not quite the case. As an example of Bellow's "characteristic wit," Meyers quotes the author's response to a query about cooperating with a proposed biography: "I feel about biography much as I do about buying a burial plot. It will come to that, of course, but I'm not quite ready for it." He conveniently leaves out the existence of the biography James Atlas wrote--a project in which Bellow was, as best as I can make out from the reviews archived online, taking part even as he was telling Meyers he wasn't interested, if not soon after.

Frank Conroy, 1936-2005

The Iowa City Press-Citizen notes the death of Frank Conroy, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The NYT obituary goes on at somewhat greater length, drawing upon Conroy's peers and proteges for a well-rounded portrait. You can also listen to a 2002 interview with Conroy on WBUR's The Connection.

Saul Bellow, 1915-2005

Saul Bellow, the "great American novelist of the 20th century" (David Kipen, SF Chronicle), died yesterday at the age of 89. The NYT obituary offers a full mix of biography and literary appreciation, observing: "His success came neither too early nor too late, and he took it more or less in stride. He never ran out of ideas and he never stopped writing." And as Jonathan Yardley adds, "The void left in the American literary landscape by the death yesterday of Saul Bellow is too large to map or describe."

As is to be expected, the Chicago papers, Tribune and Sun-Times, offer tributes of their own, though the latter dwells a bit overmuch on the hoopla over Ravelstein. It's a sign of Bellow's accomplishment that he was the second living writer (after Welty) to be honored with inclusion in the Library of America; Nicole Krauss reviewed the omnibus edition of his first three novels for The Forward in 2003. (The collection was edited by James Wood, who profiled Bellow a few years earliers, right around the time he was reviewing the biography by James Atlas.)

Some of these links came from The Elegant Variation, which has lots more. Nextbook has some Bellow essays, too.

photo: Jared Leeds/NYT

Robert Creeley, 1926-2005

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

("I Know a Man," from The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975)

Robert Creeley, one of the key members of the Black Mountain school (in both senses of the word), died earlier this week. Dinitia Smith's NYT obituary goes through the facts of Creeley's life while linking them to his role in "transform[ing] postwar American poetry by making it more conversational and emotionally direct," but I'm also partial to a Cortland Review interview from 1998. The Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo has a Creeley page with links to poems, reviews, and other biographical information.

She Came to Bury Sontag...

Let it never be said that you can't find items of literary interest in Page Six, as yesterday's column informs us, "Certain members of the cognoscenti are buzzing about Terry Castle's recent essay in the London Review of Books ridiculing her former friend, the late Susan Sontag." It's hard to see, though, what in the dreary article could actually set anybody's tongues wagging. For one thing, Sontag died months ago, which means that just about everybody with any substantial connection to the author, or significant appreciation of her work, has already weighed in on the subject and moved on. Frankly, one wonders why LRB is running a Sontag piece this late in the game, especially when the best writer they can find is an English professor with a blatant crush who blows up her "an on-again, off-again, semi-friendship, constricted by role-playing and shot through in the end with mutual irritation" to the point where it reminds one of Teddy Wayne's hilarious McSweeney's jape, "Johnson's Life of Boswell."

I will, say, though, that the "role-playing" line took on intriguing connotations when, later in that paragraph, Castle calls herself "[Sontag's] forty-something slave girl." Maybe that's where the alleged buzz is coming from, if it really exists. It certainly isn't from the accounts of Sontag's pretentious and/or outlandish behavior, or the complaints about her refusal to declare herself a lesbian; as noted above, we've been through all that before.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 1929-2005

While most of America's attention is focused on Hunter S. Thompson's suicide--and Rake's Progress does a good enough job collating the memorials that I won't even bother--it's up to two Miami Herald reporters to record the passing of exiled Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante (whose most famous work, Three Trapped Tigers, was brought back into print in this country by Dalkey Archive last year). The Babalu Blog has a statement from Andy Garcia, who is directing his first motion picture from a Cabrera Infante screenplay--the author's first new film in over three decades, following Wonderwall and Vanishing Point (one of my favorites among the existential road movies of the '70s). Another blog, Venepoetics, offers an appreciation as well.

Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005

Hunter S. Thompson's son found his father's body, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot, in his fortified compound in Colorado. Hardly anybody has any details yet, but WaPo offers an obituary that has something to say about gonzo journalism. Until the other papers and newsmagazines catch up, there's always Wikipedia and, I did not realize until now, Thompson's own column for ESPN.com. And, from a 2003 interview with Salon:

"I don't have to apologize for any political judgments I've made. The stuff I wrote in the '60s and '70s was astonishingly accurate. I may have been a little rough on Nixon, but he was rough. You had to do it with him. What you believe has to be worth something. I've never given it a lot of thought: I've never hired people to figure out what I should do about my image. I always work the same way, and talk the same way, and I've been right enough that I stand by my record."

photo: Michael Brands/AP

Eleanor Gould Packard, 1917-2005

Eleanor Gould Packard never had a formal job title at the New Yorker, but it's safe to say that she was a careful reader who looked at just about every article before it was finalized, steering the magazine's writers towards the utmost clarity. A NYT obituary does a fine job of covering the arc of her career, from "a myth that she flyspecked an entire issue and enclosed it with her application" to the revelation that she "never used a computer and deadline pressure could sometimes render her handwritten work moot, especially during Tina Brown's chaotic six years as editor."

Verlyn Klinkenborg, a member of the Times editorial board, contributes his own memories of Miss Gould's corrections on the op-ed page:

"I thought I knew a lot about the English language at the time. I had a Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton, an old-fashioned kind of doctorate with an emphasis on literary history and textual editing. So it came as a surprise to see those proofs. Broader questions had been settled. But it was clear from Miss Gould's annotations--her very direct strictures--that a few details of syntax, usage and logic still needed to be fixed."

Jack L. Chalker, 1944-2005

Veteran science fiction author Jack L. Chalker died last Friday after a prolonged bout with congested heart failure. His wife and teenage son had been providing fans with periodic updates on his official website. Science Fiction Blog has info on memorial arrangements. The Baltimore Sun has an obituary that notes his fannish activities as much if not more than his writing.

Arthur Miller, 1915-2005

Arthur Miller, one of the most widely read playwrights of the late 20th century (as The Crucible became an American junior high school standards), died earlier today. As Marilyn Berger notes in NYT: "Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays and in them often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of his own life." Unfortunately, for some reason the Times website is cutting the story off after the third paragraph, which only takes us to the premiere of Death of a Salesman, but hopefully they'll get that straightened out soon, as the remaining online coverage is as of this writing limited to an AP dispatch and a "death watch" from this morning's New York Post which reminds us that Miller became "an intellectual hero to the American left" after being charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to play along with HUAC. UPDATE: GalleyCat points out the tactlessness of The Book Standard in quoting the bad reviews Miller's fiction got from its sister publication, Kirkus.

photo: Sam Falk/NYT

I Know, I Said No More, But These Are Special

Two late-breaking additions to the memorials for Susan Sontag this week: in New York magazine, Franklin Foer discusses Sontag's "reconciling of her responsibilities as an intellectual and the realities of her rock-stardom," a contradiction that began from the moment "she told the New York intellectuals to open their eyes to the world around them--photography, dance, as well as Pop Art and mass culture." Scott McLemee (American Prospect) takes a different tack in exploring how "the timing of Sontag's death seemed to underscore her peculiar role, over the course of four decades, as 'the last intellectual,' to borrow the title of her essay on Walter Benjamin."

Guy Davenport, 1927-2005

Art Jester of the Lexington Herald-Leader files the local obituary for the former Kentucky English professor and cutting-edge fiction writer. Paula Burba of the Louisville Courier-Journal writes another. So far, the biggies haven't picked up the story yet, but you can learn quite a bit about Davenport's life and work (this site is where I found that photo, by the way).

Two years ago, Davenport eulogized Hugh Kenner.

One Last Sontag Recap, Plus More on Eisner
(A Juxtaposition We Think She Would Have Dug, And Maybe Him, Too)

As the controversy surrounding the Sontag obituaries (with any luck) trails off, Terry Teachout points readers to Andrew Sullivan, who has enough pull to get a, you should pardon the expression, straight answer from NYT ombudsman Daniel Okrent:

"Spurred by challenges and queries from several readers, I looked into the charge that The Times had willfully suppressed information about Susan Sontag's relationship with Annie Leibovitz. My inquiry indicates that the subject was in fact discussed before publication of the Sontag obituary, but that The Times could find no authoritative source who could confirm any details of a relationship."

Sullivan also directs his readers to an interview where Sontag declared she had loved "five women [and] four men" during her lifetime, which would seem to suggest that Patrick Moore was engaging in wishful thinking when he suggested her bisexual identity was a "familiar code" that she deployed to closet herself. Meanwhile, Sheelah Kolhatkar gets the best collection of quotes I've seen from Sontag's circle in an entertaining front-pager for the NY Observer, while Gary Indiana does his bit for the Village Voice.

Meanwhile... Will Eisner's passing brings about tributes from Adam Bernstein in WaPo, Rob Elder in the Chicago Tribune, and Sarah Boxer in NYT, as well as more personal accounts from Mark Evanier (note his decade-spanning portraits of the master at work) and Neil Gaiman.

I Blame Elton John. It's Easy, and It's Fun.

Remember when Susan Sontag's NYT obituary barely mentioned Annie Liebowitz? Patrick Moore sure does, plus a similar omission in the LA Times, and in his LA Times editorial, he's rather perturbed by it all:

Sontag's reticence is surely part of why the two Timeses neglected this part of her life. But she didn't deny these relationships. And given that obituaries typically cite their subjects' important relationships, shouldn't the two best newspapers in the country have reported at least her most recent one, with Leibovitz, as well as her marriage, which ended in 1958?

Unfortunately, while Moore makes a lot of assertions, he doesn't back them up very well. He lists the female lovers chronicled in Sontag's unauthorized bio, for example, then declares, "Sontag's lesbian relationships surely affected her work and our understanding of it." His evidence for this? "Two of Sontag's most famous essays dealt with issues associated with homosexuality." Now, granted, it's not like the Times gave him a lot of space to lay out an argument, but just because Moore says "I believe that her intellectual accomplishments are even more compelling when one understands how her sexuality informed them" doesn't make it so, and knowing who she slept with isn't the same as understanding how her sex life informed her work. For that matter, the idea that she "had vital, loving relationships with some of the most fascinating and creative women of her day" is full of unproven adjectives...

But while we're on the subject of queer identity, let's consider Moore's assertion that "in a 1995 New Yorker profile, Sontag outed herself as bisexual, familiar code for 'gay.'" Now, granted, there are quite notorious examples of public figures who spent years telling the world they were bisexual in order to obscure a more distinctly homosexual preference. Putting those cases aside, the idea that "bisexual" is simply "familiar code" for "gay," rather than an equally valid self-identification, is one of the more tired tropes used by gay public intellectuals. Maybe Sontag really was a "quasi-closeted" lesbian--but it's equally possible that she might have seen herself as somebody who was capable of sexual relationships with men and women but chose, after a youthful marriage, to concentrate her emotional energies into other women. There's a full spectrum of possibilities, and we'll probably never know which truly best describes Sontag's personal life. Casting this as an all-or-nothing issue the way Moore does, however, doesn't necessarily help promote a genuine understanding of her work so much as it enables gay activists to add another celebrity to the team.

Continue reading I Blame Elton John. It's Easy, and It's Fun.

Will Eisner, 1917-2005

photo by Richard Patterson/NYT

Warren Ellis is the first I've seen to report that comics legend Will Eisner has died following a quadruple bypass just before Christmas. Eisner is most famous for creating the masked vigilante character The Spirit, but the full extent of his contributions to the medium encompasses so much more.

The Plot, his graphic novel-length investigation into the origins of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is on Norton's spring schedule. You can learn more about it from interviews Eisner gave last year to the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Talk About a Shanda

Yoram Kaniuk pauses at the death of Susan Sontag to inform us that "it was easy for her to connect to me," and, furthermore, "I became such a fundamental part of her life that, in our meetings together, I could stir within her the longing for something eternal from which she sprung."

One could make any number of ripostes to that, but frankly, one ought not to get into a tactlessness competition with a clear master of the form.

Susan Sontag, 1933-2004

Margalit Fox writes the NYT obituary, which shows a bit more respect for its subject than their backhanded acknowledgment of Jacques Derrida while admitting that "over four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided."

"She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, trendy, iconoclastic, captivating, hollow, rhapsodic, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, abrasive, aloof, attention-seeking, charming, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, mannered, formidable, brilliant, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, challenging, ambivalent, accessible, lofty, erudite, lucid, inscrutable, solipsistic, intellectual, visceral, reasoned, pretentious, portentous, maddening, lyrical, abstract, narrative, acerbic, opportunistic, chilly, effusive, careerist, sober, gimmicky, relevant, passé, facile, illogical, ambivalent, polemical, didactic, tenacious, slippery, celebratory, banal, untenable, doctrinaire, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, aloof, glib, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull."

Interestingly enough, while ex-husband Philip Rieff rates a mention in the closing paragraphs, the name "Annie Leibovitz" doesn't show up at all. No, wait, I'm mistaken: "She was undoubtedly the only writer of her generation...to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad." So that's what the Times is calling it these days. Interesting.

(A reader dropped me a note to point out that the AP did see fit to mention Leibovitz as a "longtime companion," which strikes me as a fair appraisal of their history. Also worth noting: Christopher Hitchens' tribute in Slate.)

Harry Lambert, 1916-2004

Lambert was the comic book artist who co-created the Golden Age Flash, or, as I knew him as a kid, the one with the winged colander on his head:

He mostly drew "funny" comics but as the industry turned towards superheroes, he did a few of them, too. The most notable came in 1940 when editor Sheldon Mayer at the All-American company (later absorbed by DC) was assembling a new book called Flash Comics. Mayer needed someone to draw the title character, a super-speedster devised by writer Gardner Fox. Lampert got the job but was not happy drawing in that style. Little suspecting it was the feature with which his name would be forever linked, he asked off after five stories and Mayer, who knew he had miscast Harry, happily replaced him.

Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004

Derrida was an "abstruse theorist" according to NYT, but I prefer to remember him as a "subsidized thinker," in the terms I once suggested a friend of mine who'd been awarded a fellowship to UC-Irvine use when introducing himself to the deconstructionist legend.

It's a bit of a shame that the Paul de Man scandal nearly overwhelms the Times summary of Derrida's life, but then I suppose it's easier than trying to make sense of deconstruction theory. But then as he himself said, when asked to supply a definition, "It is impossible to respond. I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied."

Donald Justice , 1925-2004

A song went looking for light
And met itself coming back.

The song with nothing to say
Has gone to sleep on my lips.

Donald Justice, a "poet admired for precise beauty," died of pneumonia in an Iowa nursing home last week. He was 78.

Twenty-four years ago, Justice won the Pulitzer for his verse, and he was asked last year if he would serve as the U.S. poet laureate, though he had to decline the honor due to ill health. His death comes just one week before the scheduled publication of Knopf's Collected Poems, a galley of which was sitting next to my desk--and from which I extracted his short poem "Lorcaesques."

Read and hear "Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy." Or read an interview from 1997.

Kate Worley

Last month, indie comics fans were cheered by the news that Kate Worley and Reed Waller would be reuniting for the long-awaited final chapters in the Omaha the Cat Dancer saga (a link which is possibly NSFW if your employer uses text filters), though the news was tempered by the revelation that her initial cancer treatments had been unsuccessful. She died some time last weekend; Mark Evanier and Neil Gaiman discuss her life with varying degrees of intimacy.

William Manchester, 1922-2004

William Manchester, whose multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill is almost as legendary as its subject, died today at the age of 82. Less than two weeks ago, Manchester had approved Paul Reid to complete the third and final volume. Read an excerpt from The Last Lion: Alone, the middle volume, published back in 1988.

Roger W. Straus, Jr., 1917-2004

Read the NYT obituary, written by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt:

He busied himself with every aspect of his business. Despite his reliance on a stable of outstanding editors, he read manuscripts, sat in on editorial and sales meetings, and involved himself in the sale of subsidiary and international rights. In short, he made all the major decisions, both editorial and financial, that went into publishing each book.

Such was the appeal of Mr. Straus's way of doing business that Scott Turow, the author of best-selling legal thrillers, was moved to accept an advance of $200,000 from Farrar, Straus for his first novel, Presumed Innocent, rather than another publisher's $350,000, because Mr. Straus "had published more of the books I admired than any other publishing house."