obituary
September 12, 2009
- RIP, Larry. If you know this Chicago-born writer's work only through M*A*S*H (the TV- series version), you're missing the full measure of his talent. He wrote films and plays you've no doubt seen and enjoyed immensely, but which most people associate only with the actors or directors who were attached to those projects. Why? Well, you've probably heard the joke: once there was a Hollywood ...
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August 27, 2009
- (continues from Part I: First Responders)This is the obituary that really stuck to Poe's reputation. Even the use of the full name, Edgar Allan Poe, whereas it was Edgar A. Poe in the earlier obituary we looked at, seems to herald a change in his perception, a practice that we might still wish to reverse.The obituary was long, this will be an excerpt.New York Daily Tribune, Rufus Griswold (signed ...
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May 5, 2009
- I received an email this morning from a friend letting me know her father had passed away, suddenly. Liz and I worked together closely for a year, enough time to hear all the sordid details of each other’s childhoods. We had a bond: Louisiana. She was from there and I lived there for eight years. We understood the context of each other's stories, we recognized the family names, knew what the ...
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January 9, 2009
- Dying to read about their lives by Mark JudderyWHEN was the best time to die, if you really wanted to be honoured at your passing? Perhaps it was the 1990s, when the Time & Tide section took up a page of The Australian five days a week. Obscure album cover designers, Disney cartoonists and the founder of Haagen-Dazs ice cream were granted lengthy obituaries alongside any world leaders, movie ...
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January 5, 2009
- During the 1984 Olympics, I came upon two bronze sculptures of nude and headless male and female athletes installed just outside the Los Angeles Coliseum. Even though they stood above me, I was speechless. Sometimes I'm struck dumb coming across beauty when I least expect it--much as I am when going to my car at sunset and noticing the sky is an orange and white parfait, and I just have to ...
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December 8, 2008
- This post was originally published on Freshly Ground on Sunday December 7th 2008:http://freshly-ground.blogspot.com/2008/12/hugh-cook-obituary-published.htmlAfter a couple of false starts, The New Zealand Herald yesterday published the obituary for Fantasy writer Hugh Cook which I wrote for and on behalf of the family.It was only ever so slightly tweaked for brevity, for which I'm grateful. I ...
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September 27, 2008
September 14, 2008
- David Foster Wallace’s dismaying suicide sent me back to “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” his seminal, riotous essay on taking a Caribbean cruise. I had remembered, or thought I did, a sentence in the piece in which Wallace refers to his death as something exquisitely awful to contemplate and sad beyond imagining— or something to that effect. I couldn’t find ...
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June 16, 2008
- I'd like to take a second to mark the passing of a great artist today. Stan Winston, while not what many in the lay community would consider an artist, trading as he did in gore and monstrosity for most of his life, was, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest ever. That's right, EVER.If you don't know, Mr. Winston was the mind and hand responsible for the vicious dinos in the JURASSIC films, ...
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June 1, 2008
- "Rainbow"painting by Judy Jonesc jj 2002 While writing a friends obituary, I realized how much I detest the superficialities of life. A robot can type in dates, places and times, but I cannot. It is the dark nights of the soul in which our true character is shaped. That we try and hide that is the real us.Can I possibly just write my dear friend was born and died on, and survived ...
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