RIP Evan S Connell Jr.

Ned posted on the general RIP thread but I think he merits his own. On ILX, as in the wider world, he had a small but devoted following.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-evan-connell-20130111,0,2088045.story

Feel like the thread should start with some medieval alchymistic prose but don't have time to find or generate any right now.

i'm a fan. i need the collected stories. love mr. bridge and mrs. bridge. couldn't commit to the alchemy book or the custer book. they're probably good though. just a very cool and sorta unusual body of work. essays, novels, short stories, poetry, history. dude had a brain.

i started a rolling dead writer thread on ilb but i'd have to search for it...

not that he doesn't deserve his own thread...he does.

Guy covered a lot of stylistic ground without coming off as a dilettante, but he never cranked out Novels Of Manners or big overstuffed Do U See The System Is Paranoid? stuff so I guess he flies under some of the radar stations.

Nice obit from his hometown: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/01/10/4003882/evan-s-connell-kc-native-and-author.html

I can attest that his Gen. George Armstrong Custer book, Son of the Morning Star, is very good, once you accept his methodology, which collects an amazing number of strands to the story of the battle of Little Big Horn, but refuses to braid them into a tight consecutive narrative, but rather lays them all side-by-side and asks you to make the connections.

His place may nnot be among the highest, but it is firm. RIP, Mr. Connell.

That methodology starts to make sense when you realize that the other likely course would be to go the route of "my theory, which is mine, of what happened on the Greasy Grass, is..."

Have you read any of his book length poems, Aimless?

I have only ever glanced at them long enough to know they exist, but I have not read any of his poems, iirc.

Here are some samples: http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2012/05/evan-s.html

Man, i only got into him this last year, via the Bridge novels (read Diary of a Rapist years ago but it freaked me out too much to have me diving back into his work for quite a while). This sucks.

Still haven't read that one although I have a copy. I guess I could say the same about the Goya book but for a different reason. Thinking about dipping back into The Collected Stories. There is a very recent one called "The Lion" that is a favorite of mine and Rockist Scientist, I believe.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/01/15/a-visit-with-evan-s-connell/

Mr. Bridge copies out a love letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself, would have been merely to know my own shadow—to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions.” In your poem Notes from a Bottle Found at the Beach in Carmel, you write almost the opposite: “Come with me or stay. I am full of dreams and charged with strange excitement. Although I am not at ease in this world, there is no one who can stop me.”

This over here is a two-thousand-year-old tortilla maker.

Biography that came out in October is reviewed favorably in the latest Harper’s.