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ReadySteadyBlog
One of the Guardian Unlimited Books' top 10 literary blogs: "A home-grown treasure ... smart, serious analysis"
All blog entries tagged with 'deaths'
Thursday 18 February 2010
Colin Ward R.I.P.
It has just come to my attention (first via Booksurfer) that the anarchist writer Colin Ward has died. Sad, sad news:
Colin's contribution to anarchism has been invaluable - he founded, edited and often wrote Anarchy magazine for over ten years. In Anarchy, and a whole series of books and hundreds of articles he wrote about the practical application of anarchist ideas to social organisation. and outlined anarchism as a sociological theory. He is probably best known for Anarchy in Action, but every book he wrote provided new insights into the revolutionary potential of the way ordinary people organise and live their lives in the face of enormous odds (more...)
This via the Five Leaves Blog:
The anarchist writer Colin Ward, who died on the night of 11th February, was indirectly responsible for the existence of Five Leaves. We’d met years before, and like several people I later met, I’d been vaguely collecting Colin’s Anarchy (first series), still the best anarchist magazine produced in this country. A small group of us in Nottingham, publishing as Old Hammond Press, brought out a couple of pamphlets by Colin, one on housing, one on William Morris’s ideas of work. But in 1994 I got so fed up waiting for Faber to bring out the paperback of The Allotment: its landscape and culture that I offered to buy the rights. Colin said that as long as his co-writer, David Crouch, was in agreement he’d be pleased if Faber were to hand them over, and if it helped, the co-authors would do without royalties as they were simply pleased to have the book available in paperback.
Well, thousands of copies later Colin never regretted his generosity, and as well being the first book published by Five Leaves (though initially, for the sake of any bibliographers reading, Mushroom Bookshop), for years The Allotment kept the press afloat. We went on to publish Colin’s Arcadia for All (co-written with Dennis Hardy), Talking Anarchy (with David Goodway) and Cotters and Squatters. Colin also wrote the introduction to our edition of The London Years by Rudolf Rocker, who of course he knew. Rocker in turn knew Peter Kropotkin, whose Mutual Aid had such an influence on Colin as a political thinker (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, politics
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Thursday 04 February 2010
Howard Zinn R.I.P.
The American historian, playwright and author of the bestseller A People's History of the United States Howard Zinn has died aged 87. Lots more info via howardzinn.org.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, politics
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Tuesday 02 February 2010
Stanley Middleton celebration
David Belbin (thanks Dave!) tells me:
On May 8th 2010, the University of Nottingham will host a celebration of the life of one of its most widely respected alumni, the novelist Stanley Middleton. The Booker Prize winning author died in July 2009, a week short of his 90th birthday. The celebration will include live music, readings from Stanley’s novels, poems and unpublished letters, together with short talks on his life and work (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, deaths, events
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Monday 01 February 2010
Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger
Genius -- as ever -- from The Onion:
In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, internet
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Monday 04 January 2010
Albert Camus' death
Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, on the 7 November 1913 into a working class family. The Diary Junction Blog today continues:
When he was still very young, during the First World War, his father was killed, and his mother suffered a stroke on hearing the news. Camus won a scholarship and studied at the lycée in Algiers until 1932. Thereafter, he took various jobs, joined the Communist Party, studied at the University of Algiers, and married Simone Hié. He also contracted tuberculosis.
Then, 50 years ago today, at the age of 46, he died in a car accident near Sens, in a place named Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. Wikipedia tells me that "in his coat pocket lay an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train, with his wife and children, but at the last minute accepted his publisher's proposal to travel with him. The driver of the Facel Vega car, Michel Gallimard — his publisher and close friend — was also killed in the accident." In the car was the manuscript for The First Man (Le premier homme) an autobiographical work about his childhood in Algeria and was published in 1995.
More cheery fodder, about other gone-but-not-forgotten authors, can be found in the Guardian's Living in the memory: A celebration of the great writers who died in the past decade.
Welcome to the Teenies. Be assured, we can expect more deaths!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, deaths
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Tuesday 03 November 2009
Claude Levi-Strauss RIP
Via AP:
The Academie Francaise says that Claude Levi-Strauss, an influential French intellectual who was widely considered the father of modern anthropology, has died. He was 100.
Levi-Strauss was widely regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing new concepts concerning common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in primitive and modern societies.
During his 6-decade-long career, he authored many literary and anthropological classics, including "Tristes Tropiques" (1955), "The Savage Mind" (1963) and "The Raw and the Cooked" (1964).
The Academie Francaise said Tuesday that it plans a tribute later in the week.
It did not give the cause of death or say when Levi-Strauss had died.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Tuesday 30 June 2009
Michael Jackson
I'm certainly not the person to write anything insightful on Michael Jackson, but k-punk has stepped up to the plate:
The death of this King - "my brother, the Legendary King Of Pop", as Jermaine Jackson described him in his press conference, as if giving Michael his formal title - recalls not the Diana carcrash, but the sad slump of Elvis from catatonic narcosis into the long good night. Perhaps it was only Elvis who managed to insinuate himself into practically every living human being's body and dreams to the same degree that Jackson did, at the microphysical level of enjoyment as well as at the macro-level of spectacular memeplex. Michael Jackson: a figure so subsumed and consumed by the videodrome that it's scarely possible to think of him as an individual human being at all... because he wasn't of course... becoming videoflesh was the price of immortality, and that meant being dead while still alive, and no-one knew that more than Michael (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, music, philosophy
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Wednesday 28 January 2009
John Updike R.I.P.
You won't need me to tell you I'm sure, but just in case you haven't heard: the novelist and critic John Updike has died at the age of seventy-six of lung cancer.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Tuesday 13 January 2009
Arne Næss R.I.P.
Philosopher Arne Næss (January 27th 1912 - January 12th 2009), who invented the concept of "deep ecology", has died (via The Norway Post, hence the crazy English):
The recognized Norwegian philosopher, author, environmentalist and mountain climber Arne Næss sr has died at the age of nearly 97. He died in his sleep on Monday night, VG reports. Arne Næss sr was born on January 27th 1912, and received his MA degree in 1933, as the youngest ever. Doctor of Philosophy in 1936. He became professor at the University of Oslo at the age of 27... Næss was an advocate of Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of non violence which he developed further (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, philosophy
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Tuesday 13 January 2009
Mick Imlah R.I.P.
Mick Imlah, poetry editor at the TLS, whose own volume of poetry, The Lost Leader, won the 2008 Forward prize for best collection and was shortlisted for this year's TS Eliot prize (won yesterday by Jen Hadfield), has died, aged 52:
The Lost Leader was only the second collection of poetry from Imlah, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in December 2007. His first volume, Birthmarks, was published in 1988 — a full 20 years earlier — to critical acclaim: reviewing it in the Times Literary Supplement, Neil Corcoran described him as "a poet of striking originality and cunning, a genuinely distinctive voice in the murmur and babble of the contemporary". (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, poetry
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Wednesday 07 January 2009
Richard Seaver R.I.P.
Via The New York Times (thanks Steve):
Richard Seaver, an editor, translator and publisher who defied censorship, societal prudishness and conventional literary standards to bring works by rabble-rousing authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade to American readers, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82. (More.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Wednesday 07 January 2009
Inger Christensen R.I.P.
Via Nomadics:
Inger Christensen, considered one of Denmark's greatest authors and long mentioned among probable candidates for a Nobel Literature prize, has died at the age of 73, on Friday, January 2, her publisher said on Monday. Born on Jan 16, 1935 in the western Danish town of Vejle, Christensen published her first collection of poems, Lys (Light) in 1962, followed by Graes (Grass) a year later, Det (It) in 1969, Alfabet (Alphabet) in 1981 and Sommerfugledalen (The Butterfly Valley), which critics have hailed as her masterpiece, 1991 (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Monday 29 December 2008
Harold Pinter R.I.P.
Well, as you'll all have noticed, over the Christmas break Harold Pinter finally, sadly, kicked the bucket. You can google countless obits of the Big Man yourself, but I enjoyed this piece by John Peter from yesterday's Sunday Times:
Harold could be difficult, oh yes. Like so many of his characters, he deployed attack as a means of self-defence and investigation. No other dramatist has understood, let alone dramatised with such frank and shocking understanding, the needs and perils of human relations. Much has been written about his plays as examples of territorial invasion and menacing invaders; but the fact is that in most of the plays the invader is invited in by the occupant in an act of defensive hospitality (more...)
Update: also a nice piece, The Eloquent Silence of Harold Pinter, over at Obit Magazine.
Further update: I note that the Literary Saloon yesterday linked to an idiotic article in the Sunday Times entitled Pinter and the odd literary law of geniuses with crazy politics. Worth saying, I think, that one of the most admirable things about Pinter was his "crazy politics" -- hating war and the nation states that cause them, madness!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Monday 10 November 2008
John Leonard RIP
Literary and cultural critic John Leonard, "an early champion of Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and many other authors, and so consumed and informed by books that Kurt Vonnegut once praised him as 'the smartest man who ever lived,' has died at age 69 (more.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Sunday 14 September 2008
David Foster Wallace RIP
The Associated Press released this just a few hours ago: "David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46." (More ...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Thursday 10 April 2008
E.A. Markham RIP
The poet E.A. Markham sadly died yesterday of a heart attack aged just 69 (more via Baroque in Hackney).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, poetry
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Wednesday 19 March 2008
Jonathan Williams RIP
The 79-year-old "poet, publisher, designer, essayist [and] iconographer", and champion of the avant-garde, Jonathan Williams has died. Our thoughts at this sad time are with his partner of forty years, the poet Thomas Meyer.
Jonathan is remembered by Pierre Joris, Mark Scroggins, Ron Silliman, John Latta and citizen times (links originally collected at wood s lot) -- and also in the obituary in our own comment block by Jeffery Beam.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, poetry
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Monday 18 February 2008
Alain Robbe-Grillet RIP
Alain Robbe-Grillet est mort, il avait 85 ans. The father of the nouveau roman died last night of a heart attack.
Celui que l'on appelait «le pape du Nouveau Roman» est mort dans la nuit du 17 au 18 février, emporté par une crise cardiaque. Né en 1922, Alain Robbe-Grillet avait été ingénieur agronome avant de devenir l'auteur des «Gommes» (1953), de «la Jalousie» (1957) et du «Voyeur» (1955).
Son passé à l'avant-garde n'avait pas empêché son élection à l'Académie française, le 25 mars 2004 - même s'il n'y avait pas encore été officiellement reçu. Son dernier livre, «Un roman sentimental» était paru à l'automne 2007.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: alain robbe-grillet, deaths
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Monday 31 December 2007
Julien Gracq RIP
I should have mentioned this a week or so ago ... the French Surrealist writer Julien Gracq has died:
Julien Gracq, décédé samedi à Angers à l'âge de 97 ans, figurait parmi les très grands écrivains francais, auteur de 19 ouvrages nourris de romantisme allemand, de fantastique et de surréalisme.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, deaths
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Monday 10 December 2007
Karlheinz Stockhausen RIP
Still recovering as I am from my mammoth 'flu attack, I've not been keeping an eye on things as closely as I usually try to do. So, I've only just noticed that German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died, aged of 79, last Friday. Sad news indeed. I was a big fan. (More at NPR.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, music
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Tuesday 25 September 2007
Andre Gorz RIP
The philosopher André Gorz, 84, co-founder of the Nouvel Observateur weekly, has committed suicide together with his wife Dorine. More via AFP.
Wikipedia tells us:
Gorz was a theorist of workers' self-management. Later, he was also concerned with political ecology. His central theme is work: liberation from work, just distribution of work, alienated work, etc. He is also one of the advocates for Guaranteed basic income.
He also was a main theorist in New Left movement,inspired by the young Marx humanism and Alienation discussion and the liberation mankind,seeking a third way between communism and reform capitalism like his mentor, Jean Paul Sartre, but even in the same spirit as the people like C. Wright Mills and the people round him in the New Left Review, and Jurgen Habermas and the Frankfurter School. Gorz called him self an "revolutionary-reformist", a democratic socialist who wanted to see system changing reforms.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, philosophy
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Thursday 23 August 2007
Grace Paley RIP
Such sad news: the American short story writer, poet, and political activist, Grace Paley, died yesterday. As soon as I know more, I'll add to this. (Maud Newton has a nice, personal piece on Grace over on her blog.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Friday 06 July 2007
Good-time George gone for good
George Melly (photograph via the BBC)
There just aren't enough jazz-singing, surrealist, alcoholic, bisexual Scousers in the world. And now, sadly, there is one less: George Melly, born in Liverpool in 1926, died yesterday from the effects of battling lung cancer and vascular dementia. RIP George.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Sunday 10 June 2007
Richard Rorty RIP
The philosopher Richard Rorty died on Friday -- I've not seen anything much about his death, no obituaries as yet, so, for now, this is all I know. More information via Telos; nice appreciation over on Waggish.
Update: There are some useful Rorty links gathered together by Farhang over at continental-philosophy.org.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, philosophy
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Friday 08 June 2007
Michael Hamburger RIP
The great Michael Hamburger (best known for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald) died yesterday, probably due to a heart attack. As soon as I know more, I'll add to this -- wikipedia has more details about the poet, but no details as yet about his death.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, poetry
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Friday 13 April 2007
Vonnegut resources
Worthy of lots of clicks: Edward Champion has got together a great list of web-based Vonnegut resources.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, deaths
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Thursday 12 April 2007
Kurt Vonnegut RIP
The great, anti-war writer Kurt Vonnegut died this Tuesday, 10th April, in New York, at the age of 84, due to brain injuries from a recent fall. The defining moment of his life was the firebombing of Dresden, in Germany, by allied forces in 1945 -- an event he witnessed as a young prisoner of war. His experience was the basis of his best-known work, Slaughterhouse Five which was published at the time of the Vietnam War. More via the BBC.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Friday 23 March 2007
Tanya Reinhart RIP
I've just heard the sad news of Tanya Reinhart's death. This, below, is verbatim from a press release sent by her UK publisher Verso:
Tanya Reinhart has died March 17 2007 in Long Island, New York.
Tanya was a tireless voice against the Israeli state’s oppression of the Palestinian people. In the articles she wrote for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot as well as Counterpunch and Znet, she argued passionately and with an unequalled rigour that Israel should leave the occupied territories.
Her books were similarly sharp and scholarly analyses. She wrote the acclaimed Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948 (2002) of which Edward Said said: “The most devastating critique now available of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinian people.” Last year Verso published her The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 (2006), which detailed the grim logic behind the erection of Israel’s wall but also the hope engendered by the increasing resistance of both Palestinians and Israelis to Sharon and Olmert’s brutality.
Tanya was a Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, her Ph.D having been supervised by Noam Chomsky. She had recently taken a position as Distinguished Global Professor at New York University.
We are shocked and saddened to hear of Tanya’s death. The Palestinian cause has lost a great voice.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, politics
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Wednesday 07 March 2007
Jean Baudrillard RIP
The sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard died this Tuesday in Paris, at 77 years of age. Born on July 20th 1929 in Rheims, a translator of Bertold Brecht, politically near to the Situationists and Guy Debord in the '60s, Baudrillard taught sociology at the University of Nanterre from 1966. More English-language details can be found at the NY Times and the NY Sun; French-language responses include Robert Maggiori's Jean Baudrillard au-delà du réel and Laurent Wolf's Le pourfendeur d'images (via the literary saloon).
I've always enjoyed reading Baudrillard's work. My favourite? Probably a book from 1978 called In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. What I got most clearly from this was the critique of the entirely erroneous idea that the Left could speak for -- or on behalf of -- "the people" in any way:
Written in 1978 and first published in English in 1983, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities was the first postmodern response to the delusional strategies of terrorism. At a time when European terrorists were taking politics into their own hands, Baudrillard was the first to announce that the "critical mass" had stopped being critical of anything. Rather, the "masses" had become a place of absorption and implosion; hence the ending of the possibility of politics as will and representation.
The book marked the end of an era when silent majorities still factored into the democratic political process and were expected to respond positively to revolutionary messages. With the masses no longer "alienated" as Marx had described, but rather indifferent, this phenomenon made revolutionary explosion impossible, says Baudrillard.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, philosophy
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Friday 23 February 2007
Jakov Lind obit.
There is an obiturary of Jakov Lind (born Heinz Jakov Landwirth; 1927-2007) in today's Independent (thanks Tony):
The writer Jakov Lind chronicled the nightmare of Nazi Germany. He once defined himself as one of "the literary unicorns who worked in two languages like Beckett, Nabokov and Conrad", having written dazzlingly original works first in his native German and later in an idiosyncratic English. His collection of short stories Eine Seele aus Holz (Soul of Wood) does indeed place him in that exalted company through its blend of surrealistic humour and narrative power. It should be compulsory reading for anyone seeking insight into the sources of political sadism.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, deaths
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Wednesday 21 February 2007
More on Mai Ghoussoub
The publisher Saqi Books have sent me a press release about Mai Ghoussoub -- I'll quote it in full:
Our dear friend Mai Ghoussoub, artist, author, playwright and founding director of Saqi died suddenly on 17 February 2007 in London.
Mai was born in 1952 in Lebanon. She studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts/Lebanese University and graduated from the American University of Beirut with a BA in French Literature, before moving to London in 1979, where she studied sculpture at Morley College and the Henry Moore Studio. That same year she and her childhood friend, André Gaspard, founded the Al Saqi Bookshop, which has become a beacon of Arab culture in London, occupying 26 Westbourne Grove for the past twenty-eight years. They ventured into publishing in 1983, founding Saqi, and in 1990 started the Arabic publishing house Dar al-Saqi in Beirut. Since the 1980s Mai combined her activities as an artist, writer and publisher: ‘I write for my sculptures and I sculpt for my words.’ Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She wrote numerous articles on culture, gender, aesthetics and the Middle East, and is the author of many books in English, Arabic and French. Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies, including Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women and Lebanon, Lebanon. In 2005 she wrote, directed and performed Texterminators at the Lyric and Dominion theatres in London, the Unity Theatre in Liverpool, and the Marignan Theatre in Beirut. It was described as ‘outstanding theatre’ by Time Out. Most recently, her work was featured in the exhibition Beirut Out of War, which she curated with Ara Azad, Suheil Sleiman and Rana Salaam, at the MAN Museum in Liverpool.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Monday 19 February 2007
Mai Ghoussoub RIP
Mai Ghoussoub of Saqi Books has died suddenly, aged just 45. More when I have it...
Mai was born in Lebanon and received her BA in French literature from the American University of Beirut. She moved to London in 1979 where she later studied sculpture at Morley College. She then worked as an artist, author and publisher with her works being exhibited in many venues in the UK.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Monday 19 February 2007
Jakov Lind RIP
Jakov Lind has died. I have no more information at present, I'm afraid. "Jakov Lind was born in Vienna in 1927. As an eleven-year old boy from a Jewish family, he left Austria after the Anschluss, found temporary refuge in Holland, and succeeded in surviving inside Nazi Germany by assuming a Dutch identity." After a literary apprenticeship in Israel, he made his reputation through works of fiction written in German and later in English. He was probably most famous for Soul of Wood, now sadly out of print.
Ironically, Forward.com's Joshua Cohen published a homage to Jakov just a couple of weeks ago entitled Paying Tribute to a Living Legend:
Lind’s oeuvre spans nearly 20 volumes, which have won him admiration and prizes, both in mainland Europe and in his adopted United Kingdom. Indeed, his reputation once was enormous: Critical acclaim, so often given to comparison, at one time held him as a successor to Franz Kafka; in the German-speaking world he was regarded as the peer, if not master, of Gunter Grass. Soul of Wood, a collection of stories, and the novels Landscape in Concrete and Ergo should have long established Lind’s fame and posterity, and not, perhaps as consequence of the very moral and stylistic complexity that makes them so important, his lamentable present estate.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Wednesday 07 February 2007
Malcolm Bowie obituary
The Independent newspaper have published an obituary of Malcolm Bowie:
Many readers of Bowie will have a special affection for Proust Among the Stars, published in 1998 and awarded the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2001. Although Bowie describes this as an introductory volume, written "in schematic and accessible form", it is, in fact, a distillation of accumulated, long-pondered, critical wisdom about a writer who seemed able to draw out of Bowie what was most precious to him and in him. Here, Bowie is the consummate moraliste and himself an indispensable spiritual companion.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, deaths
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Monday 05 February 2007
Malcolm Bowie RIP
I've just learned of the sad death of the British academic, and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge from 2002 to 2006, Professor Malcolm Bowie. Malcolm (May 5th 1943 - January 28th 2007) was an acclaimed scholar of French literature who wrote several books on Marcel Proust, including the excellent Proust Among the Stars. As yet, I've seen no obituaries and have no further information (if you know more, please leave a comment or email me. Thanks).
Update: There is some information about the funeral ceremony to be held for Michael, this coming Wednesday, at the University of Cambridge website. (Thanks to Dave Lull for this.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Wednesday 31 January 2007
Lacoue-Labarthe obituary
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe gets a nécrologie, written by Jacob Rogozinski, "professeur de philosophie à l'université de Strasbourg," in today's Le Monde:
Le philosophe Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe est mort dans la nuit du 27 au 28 janvier, à l'âge de 66 ans, à Paris, où il était hospitalisé. Ceux qui l'ont connu n'oublieront pas l'intensité de sa présence, de son regard, de son écoute, sa grande générosité, et cette manière qu'il avait de s'exposer sans réserve, comme si l'essentiel était en jeu à chaque fois.
Né le 6 mars 1940 à Tours, il étudie la philosophie à Bordeaux, tout en militant dans une mouvance d'extrême gauche proche des situationnistes.
More on Lacoue over at Theoria: Blog and wood s lot.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, philosophy
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Tuesday 30 January 2007
More on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
The first obituary (that I've seen) of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has just appeared in the French newspaper Liberation:
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe est mort d'insuffisance respiratoire dans la nuit de samedi à dimanche, à l'hôpital Saint-Louis à Paris. Philosophe, germaniste, traducteur et homme de théâtre, professeur d'esthétique à l'université de Strasbourg, il avait 67 ans.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, deaths
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Monday 29 January 2007
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe RIP
Sad, sad news: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has died (on Saturday I think). For the moment, this is all I know:
Chers collègues, chers amis,
Je viens d'apprendre avec une grande émotion le décès de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nous sommes tout unis dans la douleur du deuil.
If any one knows more details, please let me know.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Friday 26 January 2007
Wolfgang Iser RIP
Wolfgang Iser, best known for reader-response theory, died yesterday:
Wolfgang Iser (July 22nd 1926 – January 24th 2007) was a German literary scholar. He was born in Marienberg, Germany. His parents were Paul and Else (Steinbach) Iser. He studied literature in the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen before receiving his PhD in English at Heidelberg by defending the dissertation on the world view of Henry Fielding (1950). A year later he was appointed an instructor at Heidelberg and in 1952 an assistant lecturer at the University of Glasgow, where he started to explore contemporary philosophy and literature, which deepened his interest in inter-cultural exchange.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Friday 26 January 2007
John Taylor Caldwell RIP
I've just learned of the sad death, at the ripe old age of 95, of the veteran Glasgow anarchist, (and comrade and biographer of Guy Aldred), John Taylor Caldwell. John was born on the 14th July 1911 and died a couple of weeks ago on the 12th January.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, politics
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Thursday 25 January 2007
AD Nuttall RIP
Sad news. AD Nuttall died yesterday. Harold Bloom once called Nuttall, "The best living English literary critic." A professor and fellow of New College, Oxford, Tony was the author of a number of books including Dead from the Waist Down (a long review of which, by Julia M. Klein, can be read at The Chronicle), Openings, The Common Sky, A New Mimesis and the forthcoming Shakespeare the Thinker.
Speaking about Dead from the Waist Down, Frank Kermode said:
I have now read A.D. Nuttall’s book with all the pleasure I expected. He is the most learned of literary critics, and his subject here is, appropriately, scholars and scholarship. I do not think I have ever read an account of Middlemarch and Casaubon as fine as this, and the studies of Mark Pattison and the other Casaubon, Isaac, are beautifully executed. The distinction he draws between scholarship and pedantry should be of great interest in the modern graduate school, and his love of Oxford is not mere sentiment but part of his scholarly character. I would recommend this book to all who seriously aspire to good scholarship.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Monday 15 January 2007
Robert Anton Wilson RIP
Robert Anton Wilson (January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) died last Thursday. RAW, famously the author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea, was a "prolific American novelist, fnord, essayist, philosopher, psychologist, futurologist, anarchist, and conspiracy theory researcher."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Thursday 11 January 2007
More on Tillie Olsen
Anne Fernald, who blogs at the wonderful Fernham, and who I'll be interviewing soon in her capacity as the author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader, writes:
Tillie Olsen, a leftist, feminist novelist who was targeted by McCarthy-era smear-tactics and wrote, too, of the struggles of writing while also working and raising children died two weeks shy of her 95th birthday.
Her granddaughter commented on my blog and let me know about a really great tribute planned for this Saturday:
"the family requests that on her birthday, January 14th, people whose lives have been touched by Tillie gather with friends in their homes and public libraries to celebrate her life and to read her work together. We would be comforted to hear from you about your celebrations. Please email us: tillies_family@childpeacebooks.org"
It would be wonderful if people from the feminist blogging and litblogging community could take a few hours out, on this upcoming Martin Luther King Holiday Weekend, to her.
You can visit the family's memorial site here: tillieolsen.net
I would really be excited to think that we all could re-read (or read) I Stand Here Ironing or some other great story and inform the family about it.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, deaths
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Friday 05 January 2007
More on Tillie Olsen
I mentioned the sad passing of Tillie Olsen back on Wednesday, but I know little about the writer herself. Happily, Anne has written a wonderful appreciation of Olsen over at Fernham.
Good friend of RSB, the publisher and writer Anthony Rudolf, contacted me when he heard of Olsen's death. Anthony knew Tillie and had recently written to the TLS championing her work in a letter that they didn't print but I reproduce below:
Two missing titles so astonished me in Claire Harman’s review of Myles Weber’s Consuming Silences – “a study of famously stalled or one-hit writers” -- that I reread the piece to make sure my eyes had not skipped a few sentences. No, I was right first time. I am referring to Tillie Olsen’s wonderful but supposedly unfinished novel Yonnondio: from the Thirties (Faber, 1975) -- the confused manuscripts turned up in the early 1970s and she reworked them nearly forty years after writing the book (1932-1936) -- and to Ralph Ellison’s second novel Juneteenth, also unfinished (he lost years because part of the manuscript was consumed in a fire) and which received a mixed critical reception. For me, Yonnondio is no more unfinished than Schubert’s symphony.
Unfortunately, there are two possibilities concerning these omissions: either Myles Weber did not mention the two books, which raises severe doubts about his research and his conclusions, or Claire Harman herself has failed to mention them. If Weber did not mention them, Harman should have rebuked him, assuming she knew of their existence. If he did mention them, perhaps she was unconsciously seeking to improve the story of silence on the part of two prose fiction writers who, on the strength of their first books, Tell me a Riddle and Invisible Man, count as major figures in American literature. As indeed does Henry Roth, whose late and prodigious flowering after decades of silence – although he wrote essays -- surely muddies the waters of Weber’s thesis more than Harman allows.
As for Ellison, not only did he write a second novel, he also wrote many extraordinary essays. Since when is a writer obliged to write only in one genre? To judge by Harman’s account (or her account of Weber), you would think Ellison did nothing for decades but worry about Invisible Man. In respect (or rather disrespect) of Tillie Olsen, Claire Harman vilifies and ridicules Silences, a classic work about creativity and its associated problems. Finally, Harman (or Harman’s Weber) is simplistic when it comes to Olsen’s class politics, which have to be read and understood alongside the legendary long silence of a great poet, her near contemporary George Oppen.
This is a good opportunity to ask your readers if they can help me concerning the provenance of a brilliant and appropriate phrase Tillie Olsen uses in Silences, namely ‘trespass vision’, as applied to Rebecca Harding’s Life in the Iron Mills, and which she herself puts in quotation marks. This suggests she has borrowed the phrase from another writer, but unusually she does not give a reference.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, deaths
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Wednesday 03 January 2007
Tillie Olsen RIP
Tillie Olsen has died: "activist, feminist and an influential and widely taught fiction writer who narrated and experienced some of the major social conflicts of the 20th century, [Olsen] died Monday night, two weeks before her 95th birthday" (more via The New York Times).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Sunday 03 December 2006
Marjorie Eleanor Shaw RIP
My beloved grandmother died yesterday evening at about 10pm. Today would have been her 97th birthday.
Sleep well, Gran.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, personal
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Friday 20 October 2006
Anna Politkovskaya RIP
Today, I briefly reviewed Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia (over at The Book Depository, where this blog is also cross-posted). (I need to get hold of her A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya and I’ll post a review of her other book about Chechnya, A Dirty War, in the next couple of weeks.) Anna, as you’ll know, was recently murdered because of her work in Chechnya and her opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her UK publisher Random House has a tribute page up. Next year, Profile Books will be publishing an English PEN anthology called Another Sky, which contains her last writing, and Harvill Secker will be publishing Russian Diary. The translation of that latter book arrived with her UK publisher in the week she was killed. For more, you can also read her session at the 2005 Hay festival.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book news, deaths
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Friday 06 October 2006
Oskar Pastior RIP
The Romanian poet Oskar Pastior has died on Wednesday:
Oskar Pastior was born in 1927 in Romania, and grew up in the multi-lingual environment of the Transylvanian town of Sibiu/Hermannstadt speaking the outmoded German of his forefathers. He says that he has this multilingualism to thank not only for the insights it gave him into the possibilities of writing, but above all the associated "relativisation of normative thinking". He was deported in 1945 after the Red Army took control of Romania and spent almost five years in Soviet labour camps. After returning, he managed to complete his university entrance qualifications while doing his military service, and then went on to study. In 1968 he fled to the West, and since 1969 has lived in Berlin. And worked – on the language, with the language. "My seriousness is really rather childlike, akin to the games of kids who've had their fingers burned."
This -- and more on Pastior -- via Nomadics (and at the Literary Saloon).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Tuesday 03 October 2006
Andre Schwarz-Bart RIP
Via TEV:
Guadeloupe Andre Schwarz-Bart, a winner of the Prix Goncourt, has died.
Born of Polish Jewish origins in the eastern French city of Metz on May 23, 1928, Schwarz-Bart gained fame with his novel Le Dernier des Justes, or The Last of the Just, which traced a Jewish family's evolution over many centuries until the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. It won France's prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1959.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Saturday 30 September 2006
David Gemmell RIP
Fantasy writer David Gemmell has died. From his publisher Transworld:
It is with great sadness that we announce that David Gemmell died on Thursday 28 July, at the age of 57. David had quadruple heart bypass surgery two weeks earlier and appeared to making a good recovery, which made the news all the more shocking.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Friday 29 September 2006
Paola Kaufmann RIP
Paola Kaufmann, author of The Sister and the forthcoming The Lake has died suddenly, from a brain tumour, at the age of 37.
This, below, from her publisher Alma Books:
Born in 1969 in Rio Negro, Argentina, Paola achieved great success, not only as a writer, but also as a biologist and scientific researcher. In the short space of five years, she produced three books, The Devil’s Golfcourse (winner of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes Prize), The Sister (winner of the Casa de las Américas Prize) and The Lake (winner of the Planeta Prize for fiction).
It is tragic that a writing career, which had delivered so much in such a short life, could not continue; doubtless Paola would have continued to write books of beauty and insight to be enjoyed by fans the world over. As an author, she was a joy to work with and shall be sadly missed by all here at Alma.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Tuesday 05 September 2006
György Faludy RIP
György Faludy, 96, a poet and translator considered one of Hungary's greatest literary figures of the last century, died Friday in his Budapest home (via LA Times, thanks TEV):
Faludy fled the Nazis and the communists, and his works were banned in his home country for decades. He spent 33 years in exile, first in Europe and later mainly in Toronto, where he obtained citizenship. He returned to Hungary in 1989, shortly after the publication there of his autobiographical novel My Happy Days in Hell. First published in English in 1962, the book was considered a precursor to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's accounts of the Soviet concentration camps. Born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Faludy first gained acclaim in the mid-1930s for his translations of the ballads of 15th century French poet Francois Villon. He left Hungary in 1938 amid rising intolerance against Jews and hostility to his political views. He returned after World War II and was imprisoned in the infamous Recsk labor camp in 1950 on false charges by Hungary's Stalinist regime. In the camps, he organized literature courses to keep the prisoners occupied. Faludy was released in 1953, when the camp was closed after Stalin's death.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Wednesday 30 August 2006
Naguib Mahfouz RIP
Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died in hospital in Cairo aged 94 (via the BBC). His The Cairo Trilogy - Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street, all of which originally appeared in the 1950s - detailed the adventures and misadventures of a Muslim merchant family and were recently reissued by Black Swan.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths
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Serendipoetry
Appointment
He fingers the ends with the care of a vet
handling a new-fledged baby bird.
'How would you like it cut?' he asks.
'Well.' I reply. 'I have a wedding to stop.'
I know I won't go. Just impediments
are for the movies. But I let him snip
through the blade of afternoon light,
layering out the splits, the kinks, the fluff
as thoughtfully as though I had the guts
to shout your name and race you to the bus.
-- Ros Barber
-- View archive
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