Rolling Obituary Thread: 2021

And that's why you get the biggest advance possible for a book: because you're unlikely to ever see any royalties.

Sorry. RIP Cicely Tyson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dn6Me-IkGA

Cédric Demangeot, French poet, translator and editor, 46. RIP.

@GayleKing caught up with 96-year-old @IAmCicelyTyson to reflect on the defining moments in her life

Seeing her shed her first tear for a sexual assault that happened an entire lifetime ago really got to me.

Amazing woman

longtime temple men's basketball coach john cheney, 88

Jacques Rivette.

Oh no! RIP

He passed away in 2016. I guess today is the 5th anniversary of his death.

I was about to say, isn't he already dead?

I was wondering.

I was trying to think when I last watched Celine and Julie, and it must have been when he actually died.

I started to try to watch Out 1, Noli me tangere on Mubi last night based on reading about it Luc Sante's latest book which I was inspired by JBL to get, but then I chickened out and watched a 90 minute Jacques Becker movie that was about to leave instead.

I saw it at TIFF over a two day span, it has some amazing moments and some scenes that are literally there only to fulfil the pre-decided formalist structure. If you're open to a 13-hour failed experiment, then it's worthwhile.

Out 1: Spectre is a masterpiece, however.

Yeah, not sure how to see that right now.

That's funny, it was the "commercial" version and now it's obscure.

Right

Guitarist Hilton Valentine of The Animals

People who I didn't know were stilll... RIP

Out One: Spectre is available on a blu ray from Arrow that also contains Out 1: Noli me Tangere, it's not obscure at all.

https://arrowfilms.com/product-detail/out-1-blu-ray/FCD1886

L'amour Fou is the fugitive Rivette on home video.

"Out Of Stock"

Out One of Stock

Halfway There: I was probably at that same screening--10 years ago? Unless they've played it since then.

According to a John Harkness writeup in NOW Magazine, it was Feb 2007. I saw Spectre about 1994, also at TIFF.

Sax Legend Grady Gaines (Little Richard's Upsetters)

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/lifestyle/article/Houston-blues-and-R-B-great-Grady-Gaines-dies-15909115.php

(xpost) That sounds about right. I still think about the final shot 14 years later!

Noli Me Tangere is far superior to Spectre! I would never recommend watching Spectre first or instead of Noli Me Tangere.

Definitely watch Noli Me Tangere first - a lot of Spectre's interest comes from the rearrangement of the materials.

The Out 1 set is still available on UK Amazon but I didn't want to risk sic's wrath and link to them.

PC Music artist SOPHIE after an accident in Athens. Only 34. Fuck.

Whaaaaat?!

Jesus fuck

https://mixmag.net/amp/musician-sophie-died

Very sad.

ugh, that sucks.

I've heard maybe one song by SOPHIE but I was already planning on mentioning them in my lecture this week for my course before I saw this (course is Gay Life in the 21st Century; this week's topic is pop music). RIP.

I would love to hear that lecture, tbh.

Very sad about SOPHIE, 34 is no age and it feels like she was only just starting to really make the impact she could have.

Clayton Eshleman, one of the most gifted poetry translators of our times, has died. If you've ever read César Vallejo or Aimé Césaire poems in English, there's a good chance he translated them. Never met him, but the Césaire translations have been indispensable to me as a poet and teacher. Some can be found here: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/aime-cesaire-solar-throat-slashed/

Poetry translation is an absolute devil of a job.

Modular synth legend Wowa Cwejman.

Rupert Webster, who played the beautiful blond boy Bobby Phillips in If... Passed away in December but his death wasn't noted on the 2020 thread. He never returned to acting but lived in Boston and playing in several local bands, amassing a serious collection of guitars in the process:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/dec/07/rupert-webster-obituary

Eshleman was a remarkable poet in his own right, working at the intersection between historical anthropology, psychoanalysis and mythology. I always thought of him as a kind of American Bataille/Artaud/Jouve. RIP – he will be greatly missed.

Pom, I admit that I always admired his work as translator and editor more than his own work in English-- just not my thing. But the other work, and the way he brought different writers together, is incredible. Reading the contents pages of the journals he started and edited over the years is like reading a who's-who of innovative poetry of the past 60 years. Really remarkable life and work.

It's not my preferred poetic mode either tbh, I just thought your post was amusing in its commitment to subjective pickiness, kind of like reading an obit titled 'Terrence Malick, Noted Translator of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes, Has Died' (don't worry, he's still alive, this is just the first example that sprang to mind). Anyway, Eshleman's English renderings of Vallejo are indeed phenomenal, but for equally picky reasons I can't bear to read them.

From what I've heard of Eshleman, he'd probably argue with me about my pickiness while being equally picky and subjective himself— this is the life of a poet, it seems lol.

I mean, another gentleman whom Eshleman is associated with, Jerome Rothenberg, is one of the best editors and language anthropologists of the past century. His own poetry is also not very good— not everyone has to be good at everything!

True, lol. Ron Silliman's reminiscences popped up in my feed this morning, which seems very apropos:

https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2021/01/i-was-just-22-when-clayton-eshelman.html

xp nah Rothenberg's poems are good not bad.

not my thing at all

I don't love his stuff but I think he's good at what he does.

As far as that constellation is concerned, if there's someone whose translations are indeed way better than his poetry in my book, it's Pierre Joris.

agreed!

btw, for pom an anyone else interested, the entire run of the two magazines that Eshleman edited can be found here: http://www.centreforexpandedpoetics.com/library-items?fbclid=IwAR3mvOyC7_dDdADbtxZbKLwym3ltQN4twfxbqq9pi8qWbocglm51irHFX8s

Worth pasting the intro from that site, too, with bolding of my own:

Our archive sets out from Caterpillar and Sulfur, two of the most innovative and important poetry magazines of the twentieth century. Under the discerning editorial guidance of Clayton Eshleman, Caterpillar carried forward the energy of Cid Corman’s Origin (initiated in 1951), combining discrepant vectors in American poetry with work in translation along with visual art, essays, letters, and reviews. The magazine included work by Charles Olson, Nora Jaffe, Dianne Wakowski, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Duncan, Nancy Spero, Kenneth Irby, Carolee Schneeman, Robert Kelly, Lorine Niedecker, César Vallejo, Paul Blackburn, Yashuhiro Yoshioka, Rae Armantrout, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser, among many others.

Eshleman’s editorial commitment to “the whole art” was then revived by Sulfur, published in 46 issues from 1983-2000. Abjuring a narrative of successive movements whose claims displaced those which came before, Sulfur fused traditions stemming from surrealism, ethnopoetics, black arts, and open field poetics with writers associated with Language poetry, the New York School, and deconstructive theory, among many less identifiable currents. The capacious range of the magazine drew together, for example, translations of Blanchot, Jabès, Celan, Césaire, and Labé; essays by archetypal psychologist James Hillman and anthropologist James Clifford, poetry by Susan Howe, Will Alexander, Karen Lessing, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Ron Silliman, Nathaniel Mackey, Jorie Graham, Kusano Shimpei, Gustaf Sobin, Amiri Baraka, and Myung Mi Kim; visual art by Ana Mendieta, Linda Connor, Cecilia Vicuna, and Unica Zurn — to mention only a tiny fraction of its contents. Contributing editors and correspondents included Marjorie Perloff, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Keith Tuma, Allen Weiss, Jed Rasula, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Cortez, John Yau, Marjorie Welish, Jerome Rothenberg, Eliot Weinberger, and managing editor Caryl Eshleman. Sulfur included a regular commentary section in which positions could be articulated, works assessed, and polemics pursued — ensuring that the magazine’s heterogeneity was not merely eclectic but sustained through subtle distinctions, forthright argument, and a critical distance from the stultifying effects of creative writing culture. An anthology of selections from Sulfur was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2016, and can be purchased here. Print copies of individuals issues are available for purchase here.

Together, the sixty-six issues of Caterpillar and Sulfur testify to the breadth of poetic attention and the depth of poiesis in the late twentieth century, and they constitute an incitement to take the whole art in new directions in the twenty-first century. Rather than facilitating navigation by providing excerpted tables of contents, we invite readers to explore these issues as one would by pulling them off a shelf or receiving them in the mail: one by one, with an appetite for contingency and discovery.

Good stuff, thanks!

Re Cicely Tyson: a friend tells me that Sounder is on TCM at 8:00 tonight. I have not seen that since I saw it at a drive-in in 1972, when I was 11.

Allan Burns, screenwriter, co-creator of The Munsters, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Rhoda.