Rolling Obituary Thread: 2019

Low on the beeb - an ignominious death.

He can have a chat with Uncle Albert in heaven about how PFI's reinvigorated the NHS and how little anybody cares about the deaths of plodding professional pols.

Ted Cullinan, architect, 88.

If you were a fan of the Too Pure label, his son Tom was in Th’ Faith Healers.

Comics journalist Tom Spurgeon

Terry O'Neill

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/nov/17/photographer-of-swinging-60s-terry-oneill-dies-aged-81

... married to Faye Dunaway at one point, that I didn't know.

That’s when I first heard of him!

Tom Lyle, comic artist. Judging by the reaction on Twitter, he seems to be best remembered as a Spider-Man artist, though I knew him from the early Tim Drake Robin stories. RIP.

Michael J. Pollard

https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3595146/r-p-house-1000-corpses-actor-michael-j-pollard-passed-away/

Gahan Wilson

RIP CW

lol horror guys xp

damn, i met Wilson at a college publication event when i was in school. worthy of Charles Addams' company.

this was a couple of weeks back but: https://www.courthousenews.com/widow-of-french-novelist-celine-dies-aged-107/

cool that the article has a file photo of him but not the person who died, or even her name in the first graf

But his reputation was sullied by his collaboration with the Nazis during the occupation of France in World War II, during which he wrote virulently anti-Semitic pamphlets.

oh worm?

French publisher Gallimard sparked controversy last year by announcing plans to reissue a collection of the violently anti-Semitic pamphlets but then shelved the idea in the face of public outrage.

oh okay

if you GIS Lucette Destouches almost all of the pictures have her and/or ol' louis posing with an animal, usually a cat

well at least that's relatable

Wow @ Celine's wife (!) I started reading Journey to the End of the Night a couple weeks ago

he died when i was one year old and i am very old!

(the only celine i've ever read was some extracts in kristeva's book on abjection, trotsky liked his writing but not his politics, he was a popular and diligent doctor in a poor district apparently -- except also a nazi)

I gave money to the fundraiser for Gahan Wilson's assisted living this spring; hope he had a comfortable end.

Journey to the End of the Night is an inarguable classic. So much of its language is hyperbolically oral, like, so overwhelmingly reliant on slang that it could only have been written and composed. I can't imagine what it sounds like in translation.

Nor is it overtly problematic™ like his subsequent writings.

(Beckett loved it, of course.)

I mean surely literal anti-semitic propaganda isn't "problematic" in scare quotes it's, y'know, a scourge

I wasn't just thinking about the pamphlets but fair point nonetheless.

i liked journey to the end of the night but it was definitely a book that i knew would've been a thousand times better in the original (an example that i've read bilingually would be vargas llosa's la ciudad y los perros, which loses of the slangy, demotic spanish in translation, hell even the translated title "the time of the hero" loses something)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/05/fierce-row-over-plans-to-publish-antisemitic-texts-by-french-writer-louis-ferdinand-celine

It seems like most of the controversy wasn’t so much about whether the pamphlets should be published, it was about Gallimard’s imprimatur being associated with the writings. Like this would mean giving the pamphlets some kind of prestige as canonical literature.

I'd say that as historical documents, they should be available in some form or another.

It seems like most of the controversy wasn’t so much about whether the pamphlets should be published

Nah, that was definitely the crux of it.

I'd say that as historical documents, they should be available in some form or another.

― jmm, Friday, November 22, 2019 12:05 PM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, in an archive and scanned, not released for people to spend money on for the enrichment of a publisher and an estate

Tbf it was meant to be a critical edition. The pamphlets themselves are readily available online with no historical framing whatsoever.

Maybe proceeds should go to a de-radicalization organization?

As far as I know, that possibility was never alluded to by the publisher. Which is indeed quite telling.

Is that a thing lots of publishers have done?

Not to my knowledge, but Gallimard could certainly afford it.

I have no way of knowing but JTTEOTN positively sings in translation, it seems more alive than Dostoevsky for example. different language but every translation I've read of Dostoevsky (exactly 2) were stiff as a board. and I know they're very different writers.

idk dry, creaky translations bum me out. Thomas Bernhard works imo, another language but closer to Celine

I think Ralph Mannheim (?) did such a great job with Celine imo, just a great sense of rhythm: “impotent hatred grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories” is a sentence that pops into my head from time to time. Death On Credit is less conventionally well written but maybe better, I read later things and found them a bit of a slog

He had no good words to say about his patients but apparently “could never turn anyone away” even if they couldn’t pay, I don’t think being a basically decent physician makes up for his frothing antisemitism tho

Manheim, yeah this translation is great

having never read either, i oft confuse Celine and Colette, and forget one was male

no slur on manheim but celine wasn't the first fash he translated - his first commission was mein kampf

having never read either, i oft confuse Celine and Colette, and forget one was male

"We listened to the crackling song of the frying pans, a tempest of rancid fat. In the great shapeless desert surrounding the city, the rot in which its false luxury ends, the city shows everyone who wants to look the garbage piles of its enormous posterior. There are factories one avoids when out for a stroll, which emit smells of all sorts, some of them hardly believable. The air roundabout couldn't possibly stink any worse. Nearby a little street carnival molders between two chimneys of unequal height, the wooden horses cost too much for the rickety dribbling children with nosefuls of fingers, who long for them and stand spellbound, sometimes for weeks on end, attracted and replied by their forlorn rundown look and the music. What efforts are made to keep the truth away from these places, but it comes back again and again, to grieve for everybody. Drinking is no help, red wine as thick as ink, nothing helps, the sky in those places never changes, it's a vast lake of suburban smoke, shutting them in."

RIP Michael J.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SxuAOgjnog

That's nice, but it doesn't sound like Voyage au bout de la nuit at all.

xp

'rancid fat' for 'graillon' is nowhere near as colloquial and misses the fact that it's grilled; 'great shapeless desert' is a platitude next to the sheer inventiveness of 'grand abandon mou'; 'one', although technically correct, simply cannot capture the everyday familiarity and mild informality of 'on'; etc.

It's true that this translation sings, and wondrously so. Céline himself claimed that he was transcribing a 'petite musique', but the emphasis, to my mind, is on 'petite' ('la grande musique' being classical music): the Voyage is an epic that unceasingly undercuts its epic character, whereas this Journey comes across as opulent and smugly virtuosic in comparison – 'false luxury' ('le mensonge de son luxe') indeed.

More here on all matters Celine here:

Celine

Last survivor of the Hindenburg disaster dies at age 90
https://apnews.com/76ab386f0f184276a215ee1716dd4ae5

According to Mark Harris, critic and all around insufferable bastard John Simon at the age of 94.

Last night the critic John Simon died. He was 94.

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) November 25, 2019

and it's about time

(wrote well on Bergman tho)