Rolling Obituary Thread: 2021

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.

:( RIp

RIP. Classic for those shows alone but his resume has all kinds of other interesting stuff I just saw.

People Under the Stairs Rapper Double K Dead at 43

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/people-under-the-stairs-rapper-double-k-dead-1121555/

Allan Burns got an Oscar nomination for writing A Little Romance (1979), Diane Lane's film debut, which is very cute though Lawrence Olivier hams it up more than necessary

*Laurence

IMDB trivia says Allan Burns also created the character of Capn Crunch!?

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0122560/bio?item=nt0045118#trivia

cool if true

Hilton Valentine, guitarist of The Animals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgTSfJEf_jM

RIP. Already noted upthread, btw.

cant keep up!

Marc Wilmore, writer on In Living Color and The Simpsons, among others; younger brother of Larry.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/news/marc-wilmore-tv-writer-and-brother-of-comedian-larry-wilmore-dies-at-57

Andrew Brooks, Rutgers professor who led research on the first FDA-approved COVID-19 saliva test: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/us/andrew-brooks-obituary-covid-saliva-test/index.html

SCREECH!

https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/dustin-diamond-dead-saved-by-the-bell-screech-1234897484/

holy shit

he lived in Grafton Wisconsin for a long time. I actually saw him twice at the Family Video but never said anything. wish I had a fun story about him, indeed everything I've heard about him from other folks I know who lived in Grafton is uh...not great

that's a shame. he had such a stereotypically grim former child actor adulthood - substance abuse, bad/unsuccessful standup career, bad/unsuccessful band, he did a porno, he wrote a tell-all book that pissed off the other cast members of Saved by the Bell, he was jailed for stabbing someone in a bar fight etc.

Let he amongst ye who hath never sinned cast the first stoner

I know a few people who saw his standup at various Wisconsin campuses, he was not very good but always pretty eager to meet people and sign stuff at the end

I had no idea he was so young

Elvis Costello's mother.

Indeed, and quite a detailed remembrance

https://www.elviscostello.com/#!/news/299589

Ricky Powell

https://www.complex.com/style/photographer-ricky-powell-dead-at-59

Toooooo young

fucking sucks. RIp ricky

Hal Holbrook, died 23 January and announced today

always a fave of mine, stood next to him once crossing the street in beverly hills, he had a good run

If you want to read a mean, gossipy obituary for a woman whose career was taken down by a mean, gossipy NY Times story 20 years ago:

I wrote our obituary for Jamie Tarses, who died on Monday at 56. As the first woman to run a TV network (ABC), she encountered sexism, weaponized industry gossip and scalding news media scrutiny.https://t.co/z4tWVnkHfK

— Brooks Barnes (@brooksbarnesNYT) February 1, 2021

Captain Tom, noted (redacted) of this parish.

Lol he’s dead now, you can’t libel him

he survived dengue fever, malaria and the onslaught of the imperial japanese army - but was killed by his family!

He's past the statue of limitations

https://image.assets.pressassociation.io/v2/image/production/5c9692d933aaf55b4e99f84da23fdb27Y29udGVudHNlYXJjaCwxNTk0OTc5MTEz/2.54604035.jpg

That was a short knight

oh right, sorry.

HRH Captain Sir Tom "Rodger" Moore, assassin of JFK and MLK, butcher of Nanjing, Lockerbie bomber, chief polluter at BP, Honorary life-president of Al Qaida, founder of NAMBLA, lead-singer of Staind, defiler of the innocents, destroyer of dreams, Donald Trump's real father, garden-walker-arounder, Medal "For the Tapping of the Subsoil and Expansion of the Petrochemical Complex of Western Siberia", Eschator of Munster, Baron Chiswick, Royal Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Fidget Spinner, Extra Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Egg-cracker, Grand Master and First and Principal Knight Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the Braggadocians, Personal Aide-de-Camp to Piers Morgan, Lord High Field Marshall of the United Kingdom, blessed be his name, RIP 🙏 🙏

He outlived host + panel on that Xmas 1983 episode of Blankety Blank, apart from Ruth Madoc and Sabina Franklyn. (To be fair, Beryl Reid was older than him).

are you guys actively trying to make the bosom manor jokes start up again as part of some kind of masochistic kink

I think the Queen automatically gets his Blankety Blank chequebook and pen. I don't make the rules.

I remember really rooting for Hal Holbrook to win an Oscar for Into the Wild; alas, it wasn't meant to happen. I always liked him, solid dude.

It's hit Hoff hard

pic.twitter.com/GxvrCWqV9P

— David Hasselhoff (@DavidHasselhoff) February 2, 2021

Woah

"Now let's go to Malibu and find out what David Hasselhoff thinks of Sir Moore's passing.. to you, David."

had assumed that the blankety blank clip was not online, but here it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4PFNtE5EpA

he looks exactly like a retired army captain in his 60s