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lit obits
4/29/2011
Manning Marable, 1950 - 2011, dies days before publication of his biography of Malcolm X
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African American historian Manning Marable passed away on Friday, April 1 at the age of 60, just days before the publication of his life’s work, a monumental biography about Malcolm X. Two decades in the making, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is described as a reevaluation of Malcolm X’s life which provides new insights into the circumstances of his assassination, as well as raising questions about his autobiography. Manning Marable has been one of the few historians who has had access to the three missing chapters from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" that he says paint a very different picture than the book with Alex Haley and Spike Lee’s film. Marable has also had unprecedented access to Malcolm’s family and documents that shed new light on the involvement of the New York Police, the FBI and possibly
the CIA in Malcolm X’s assassination.
Manning Marable on Malcolm X:
I think that Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical figure produced by Black America in the 20th century. That’s a heavy statement, but I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm came to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual that he shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective. He shared with Marcus Garvey a commitment to building strong black institutions. He shared with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a commitment to peace and the freedom of racialized minorities. He was the first prominent American to attack and to criticize the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, and he came out four-square against the Vietnam War in 1964, long before the vast majority of Americans did. So that Malcolm X represents the cutting edge of a kind of critique of globalization in the 21st century. In fact, Malcolm, if anything, was far ahead of the curve in so many ways. - an excerpt from a 2005 DemocracyNow! interview.
See also Democracy Now!'s Complete Interviews with Manning Marable.
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lit obits
12/1/2010
American scholar Chalmers Johnson, 1931 - 2010
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There are people whose memory fades with time. There are others whose importance only grows. Such a man was Chalmers Johnson
, who died last week. As a CIA analyst, and an influential scholar of east Asia's political economy, he forced a revision both of the Chinese revolution and the Japanese "economic miracle". Johnson went from being a spear-carrier for US global power to an unflinching chronicler of its impending demise. It started with a visit to Okinawa, where a 12-year-old Japanese girl was abducted and raped by two US marines and a sailor in 1995. He found that local hostility to the US military was not the exception, a response to three "bad apples", but the rule. Only late in his career did his impact reach beyond academia, with a trilogy that pathologised America's current role in the world. Blowback, the CIA word for the unintended consequences of actions that are kept secret from the US public, was the first: it was ignored at home when it came out in 2000. Its prime example was the recruiting, arming and putting into combat of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s. 11 September made this book a bestseller, while "blowback" entered the political vocabulary. With 700 declared military bases, and probably 300 secret ones, around the world, Johnson likened his country to the Roman republic as it turned into an empire, which would find itself overstretched, bankrupted and then overrun. The uncomfortable parallel may have some life in it yet. - from In praise of … Chalmers Johnson.
Chalmers Johnson on his "Blowback" trilogy:
In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia -- the area of my academic training -- than on the Middle East."
The Sorrows of Empire was written during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete manifestation of our global hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners as Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization."
In Nemesis, I have tried to present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where our current behavior is likely to lead. Specifically, I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent. The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”
- three excerpts from Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson.
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lit obits
10/25/2010
Fractal Mathmematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, 1924 – 2010
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Benoit B Mandelbrot. Apparently the 'B' stood for 'Benoit B Mandelbrot'
Benoît Mandelbrot has had his name applied to a feature of mathematics that has become part of everyday life, the Mandelbrot set. Beginning in the 1960s, Mandelbrot realized that many real-world phenomena in different branches of science display similar patterns that recur at smaller and smaller scales. These included clouds, snowflakes, coastlines, stock-market fluctuations, brain tissue, music, lingusistics and other phenomena. Mandelbrot modeled these phenomena with objects that he called "fractals." The name refers to a property called fractional dimensionality: fractals are fuzzier than a line but never quite fill a plane. The best known fractal is the Mandelbrot set. It is generated by repeatedly solving a mathematical function and plugging the answer back into it. Popular accounts of chaos theory sometimes present the Mandelbrot set and fractal geometry as a story of indeterminism. Actually, however, it is a story of how simple deterministic relations can produce extraordinarily complex results.
Benoît Mandelbrot died on October 14 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 85. On hearing of his death, mathematician Heinz-Otto Peitgen said "if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences, he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Mandelbrot had "a powerful, original mind that never shied away from innovating and shattering preconceived notions...His work, developed entirely outside mainstream research, led to modern information theory."
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lit obits
10/21/2010
Mohammed Arkoun, Islamic scholar who explored Enlightenment ideals, 1928-2010
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Mohammed Arkoun, one of the most prominent and original scholars in the field of Islamic Studies, died last month at the age of 82.
An aspect of modern Muslim countries that Arkoun constantly drew attention to was the crisis of education. Instead of becoming a means of learning and liberation from superstition, education has become, in most Muslim countries, a means of spreading what he described as "institutionalised ignorance". The spread of such education went hand in hand with the rise of Islamist discourse, even in countries where Islamists are not in power.
Arkoun saw his project as one that goes beyond the confines of the field of Islamic studies. He believed in a critical approach that was also self-critical and hence aware of its own limits. As such, the critical approach becomes a process. Such work is also of a comparative nature – one cannot study Islam outside its monotheistic context and in isolation from Judaism and Christianity. He believed that if scholars in Muslim countries adopted such an approach in practising Islamic studies, they would not only liberate their discipline, but also themselves and, in the process, help liberate their societies.
- from the Guardian obituary.
As he began to consider how one might rethink Islam in the contemporary world, his sophisticated questioning provided a welcome counterpoint to the highly ideological interpretations that dominated debate in both the Muslim world and the non-Muslim West. - from the Institute of Ismaili Studies obituary.
In the final years of his career, Arkoun repeatedly expressed regret that his methodological suggestions often fell on deaf ears among scholars of Islam. But that did not deter him the least. In fact, in the last ten years or so, he actually expanded his horizons from the study of Islamic thought to a critique of all forms of reason and rational thinking, proposing an almost Kantian philosophical recalibration, which he called the 'Emerging Reason Project' and continued to advocate and propagate until the very end. - from Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010): Trailblazer for new approaches to the study of Islam by Carool Kersten.
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lit obits
9/10/2010
Historian and public intellectual Tony Judt, 1948 - 2010
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Considered by many to be a giant in the intellectual world, Tony Judt died last month following a two-year fight with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Judt was in "the great tradition of the spectateur engagé, the politically engaged but independent and critical intellectual" (Timothy Garton Ash - ) "A historian of the very first order,a public intellectual of an old-fashioned kind and — in more ways than one — a very brave man" (Michael Elliott - TIME Magazine). We quote Tony Judt from two recent interviews:
Tony Judt on courage among today’s politicians:
Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened dictatorship than it is in a democracy. However, there is another factor. My generation has been catastrophic. I was born in 1948 so I am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political. There were no wars they had to fight. They did not have to fight in the Vietnam War. They grew up believing that no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences. The result is that whatever the differences of appearance, style and personality, these are people for whom making an unpopular choice is very hard.
Someone once said: ‘But Blair’s choice to go to war in Iraq was unpopular with the majority of the population.’ I agree. But what Blair was doing was going for a different kind of popularity – he wanted to show his strength. To do this he had to do something unpopular, yet something that cost him nothing. Doing something unpopular that may cost you your job is much harder. The last generation in America with such courage was probably the generation of Lyndon Johnson. In a funny kind of way Thatcher, whom I certainly do not like, had courage. However, she fits the description of naive and idealistic; I don’t like her ideals, her naivety was a disaster, but it’s still a fair description. Today it is a criticism to describe a politician as idealistic. This is in a way a new phenomenon and it too is born from the fact that Europe has not been involved in wars that would demand the mobilisation of the whole population for over 60 years now. The last time there was such a sustained period of peace was probably the early Middle Ages. Traditionally leaders rose to power through wars or conquest. We have had six, seven generations of leaders who came to power exclusively by political manoeuvring, which is historically very unusual. It’s like inbreeding: there are no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself. This isn’t an argument in favour of war, just a historical fact.
Tony Judt on what Europe can do to exert pressure on Israel:
Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage. If the EU said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the EU market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.
Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes. If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state. It is the European bad conscience that is part of the problem.
- two excerpts from The Way Things Are and How They Might Be, an interview with Kristina Božic from March 2010 published in the London Review of Books.
Tony Judt on Democracy
Democracy has always been a problem. The truly attractive features of the Western tradition that we accidentally—and it really is accidentally—get the benefit of are the rule of law, liberalism and tolerance, all of which are virtues inherited from predemocratic societies, whether they were based in eighteenth-century Anglo-American aristocratic individualism or nineteenth-century European forms of a type of developed postfeudal legal state. Democracy comes last. Democracy is simply a system of selection of people to rule over you. And it's not accidental that everyone is now a democrat. The Chinese are for democracy. George Bush was for democracy. The Burmese believe in it; they just call it something slightly different. South African whites believed in democracy; they just thought it should be arranged differently for blacks. Democracy is a dangerously empty term, and to the extent that it has substance, and the substance consists of allowing people to select freely how they live, the chance that they will choose to live badly is very high. The question is, What do we do now, in a world where, in the absence of liberal aristocracies, in the absence of social democratic elites whose authority people accept, you have people who genuinely believe, in the majority, that their interest consists of maximizing self-interest at someone else's expense? The answer is, Either you re-educate them in some form of public conversation or we will move toward what the ancient Greeks understood very well, which is that the closest system to democracy is popular authoritarianism. And that's the risk we run. Not a risk of a sort of ultra-individualism in a disaggregated society but of a kind of de facto authoritarianism.
- from Talking With Tony Judt, an interview with Christine Smallwood from May 2010 published in The Nation.
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lit obits
6/25/2010
Writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, 1938 - 2010
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The writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, who has died at the age of 72, made Mexico understandable to Mexicans – or at least helped them laugh about it. He was admired for the intelligence and the intricate ironies of his prose, recognised for his principled support of leftwing causes, and famed for his crumpled appearance and adoration of cats. It is a measure of how popular he was that even the favoured targets of his acerbic wit rushed to include themselves among his admirers upon news of his death. Felipe Calderón, the country's rightwing president, announced: "We Mexicans will miss his critical, reflective and independent vision." - Jo Tuckman, from Carlos Monsiváis obituary
Arguably the sharpest observer of Mexico’s political, social and cultural life in the latter part of the 20th century, Monsivais became a cult figure in his homeland but was mostly unrecognized (and untranslated) abroad. With penetrating prose and humor, Monsivais deconstructed Mexico for Mexicans, often ridiculing the country’s farcical political system, but savoring its original and often quirky cultural heritage.
“He never made concessions. He was an independent journalist, a journalist who gave a voice to many people,” said author Guadalupe Loaeza, a close friend. - from the Guadalaja Rareporter.
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lit obits
6/8/2010
He is totally unreproducible — he was sui generis — Martin Gardner, 1914 - 2010
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Gardner packed his commentary and footnotes on the text with insights into the hidden messages, allusions, word-games, private jokes, puns, parodies, mathematical riddles and assorted literary tricks encrypted in the tales, demonstrating that many of Carroll's jokes were in fact mathematical games.
"In the batty world of Carroll scholarship", declared one critic, "Martin Gardner is the undisputed king." - from the Telegraph obiturary.
"This is really a sad day… because he had such a profound influence on so many of us," Gardner's friend Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" who succeeded Gardner at Scientific American, wrote on the magazine's website. "He is totally unreproducible — he was sui generis — and what's so strange is that so few people today are really aware of what a giant he was in so many fields." - from the Los Angeles Times obituary by Thomas H. Maugh II.
Well, a classic Martin Gardner column would be an essay. He published a lot of puzzles over the years and everybody knows those puzzles; they've become famous. But mainly, he wrote essays. He would take some topic and describe it in a way that related it to other things, related it to the real world, related it to literature and to science and to magic. He was a magician himself, in fact, and in philosophy. And he made all of this come together and made the math seem, you know, more interesting, more important than any teacher ever would be able to...He was philosophically a Mysterian, which is not a word you'll find in many dictionaries. But he defined himself as a Mysterian because he struggled all his life with philosophical questions. His library was full of books heavily annotated in the margins. And he came to the conclusion that life is mysterious, the world is mysterious, and that we have to come to grips with that, and is influenced to the - how he lived his life, how he thought about religion, how he interacted with people. And so it's the sense that the world is a wonderful place and a mysterious place that pervaded everything he did. And so I think that's what you should remember him by.
- Michele Norris from an NPR interview with Dana Richards on the legacy of Martin Gardner.
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lit obits
4/6/2010
Anarchist, poet, publisher and chess-player, John Rety, 1930 - 2010
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I asked him when he first became an anarchist? ‘During the war in Budapest’ he said after many minutes of expressive thought ‘I think I was part of the resistence( aged 9!). I pressed him further ‘ Didn’t you know if you were part of the resistence?’ ‘Well’ he said ‘ I was running around delivering packages to people hiding in ruined buildings so i think i must have been’. Our movement has suffered a sad loss – a very fine, honest, funny, steadfast human being has died. JOHN RETY. - from John Rety has died by Ian Bone.
Open-mindedness and catholic taste do not always go with intense political commitment, but in John’s case they did. His short introduction to Well Versed is one of the wisest short statements you could find about the place of poetry in our time: “A choice of poems cannot be divorced from one’s view of life ... There is real love, there is real anger, there is biting satire, and there is also celebration when it is called for ... [These] poems hint at a new age when the ethics which exist behind closed doors might suddenly, as by quantum leap, take over the public domain.” - from Tribute to a well-versed soul by Harry Eyres.
Anarchist, poet, Hearing Eye publisher and chess-player, John Rety died on February 3 aged 80.
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lit obits
4/4/2010
"Literature was another victim of the war": Miguel Delibes, 1920 - 2010
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"I write what I hear," Miguel Delibes, the Spanish novelist, once said. After winning the country's foremost literary prize when he was just 27, for more than half a century Delibes's hauntingly stark, gritty prose style captured the essence of Spain's rural and provincial life, and earned the writer massive popular and critical acclaim.
The author of 20 novels and over double that number of non-fiction works, Delibes's writing career effectively began with his wholly unexpected victory in the Nadal Prize in 1948 for his first novel, La sombra del ciprés es alargada. At the time a near-penniless journalist in his hometown of Valladolid, Delibes only discovered he had won as he was reading off the evening's dispatches on his newspaper's teleprinter.
"The prize was a unique opportunity; [normally] you couldn't publish anything," Delibes said later. "In the years after the Civil War, Spain had been struck dumb. All the writers had either been killed, exiled or had fallen silent. Literature was another victim of the war."
Slowly but surely, Delibes's unmistakeably concise, bleak writing helped rebuild Spain's literary legacy, both in the novels that appeared with unremitting regularity every two years, and in his five-year editorship of one of Spain's leading provincial newspapers El Norte de Castilla. "Journalism showed me how to put the maximum amount of information into the minimum number of words," Delibes said. As a liberal in Franco's dictatorship, journalism also showed him how to manipulate an apparently simple text so it would get past the censors with minimum interference... - from the obituary of Miguel Delibes by Alasdair Fotheringham published in the Independent.
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lit obits
3/7/2010
Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010
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Barbara Bray, who has died aged 85, was one of the most significant links between British and French literature in the 20th century. She was the principal translator and an early champion of Marguerite Duras, who was her close friend, and also translated the work of Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh and Alain Robbe-Grillet. As a young and influential script editor at the BBC in the 1950s, she fostered the work of many writers including Harold Pinter and, perhaps most importantly, Samuel Beckett, who became her personal and intellectual partner for more than 30 years.
- from the obituary for Barbara Bray published in theGuardian by Andrew Todd.
Barbara Bray, apart from introducing Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett, was also the BBC radio script editor who found and commissioned both men when they began their careers in radio drama, Beckett with All That Fall in January 1957 and Pinter with A Slight Ache in 1959.
Barbara Bray recalls: "the (BBC) Third Programme asked Sam to write them a radio play and though he never worked to commissions he said he would if he could. All That Fall aroused such interest among the general public and among writers that we thought it would be a good idea to introduce the public to Beckett's prose works. While we waited for him to write Embers we selected things from his works and there happened to be an invasion of Irish actors in the London theatre then. So we got people like Pat Magee and Jack McGowran to read bits from the so-called trilogy."
What then was the original reaction of the general public to the works of these two men both destined to become Nobel Prize winners? Barbara Bray explains:
"Pinter's first radio plays were met with remarks concerning the ravings of a lunatic, and similar things were said concerning Samuel Beckett readings, but after the second or third readings people began to get intrigued and began to get an ear for it as you do with music. New music is at first strange to you, then you listen to it a few times and you begin to get the hang of it. We did all Harold's radio plays on the Third Programme. Harold would write many of his plays first for radio, then they would become television plays and then stage plays. The tide was turning when authors realized that if they were going to distinguish themselves, it was going to be as much with their words as with their action."
Barbara Bray was one of the first producers to realize that such a change was taking place as, in the wake of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger (1956), the nature of the relationship between author and public was dramatically being transformed. She remembers: "the focus of drama switched back to the classical Shakespeare period when the word was more important than the action or at least as important as the action and where the stress was largely on the function of words in drama."
- from When Harry Met Sam by Declan McCavana.
Barbara Bray, editor and translator and four time winner of the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation, was born November 24, 1924 and died February 25, 2010.
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