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Obit watch: October 20, 2022.

Thursday, October 20th, 2022

Charley Trippi, football player.

Although he was a football star at a time when many players appeared on both offense and defense, Trippi was especially renowned for doing just about everything but kicking field goals and extra points and snapping the ball.
In his nine years with the Cardinals, he ran for 3,506 yards, threw for 2,547 yards and amassed 1,321 yards in pass receptions — the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame to have exceeded 1,000 yards in each category. He played at left halfback and quarterback, punted and returned punts and kickoffs, and finished out his career at defensive back.
Trippi took Georgia to an unbeaten 1946 season when he was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy behind Army’s Glenn Davis. He received the Maxwell Award, which also honors college football’s leading player.

He was a member of both the College Football Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame. Mr. Trippi was 100 when he passed, and at the time was the oldest living member of both.

Roger Welsch, tractor guy.

Okay, that’s a little misleading. He was also a regular on CBS “Sunday Morning”, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska, founder of the Liars Hall of Fame:

Politicians, he said, were ineligible for induction. “We have a rule that politicians can’t participate, only amateurs,” he told a reporter in 1988.

and a honorary member of the Pawnee, Omaha, and Oglala tribes. And a tractor guy.

His practical interest in tractors, especially antiques, became a fixation in his writing and speaking, and for years he maintained a popular website full of geeky farm-implement arcana. In 1988, The New York Times wrote that Mr. Welsch “is to tractor restoration, and the Allis-Chalmers in particular, what Thoreau was to the lakeside cabin.”
He wrote more than 40 books about love, tractors, dogs and women, including “Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor” (2002) and “Busted Tractors and Rusty Knuckles: Norwegian Torque Wrench Techniques and Other Fine Points of Tractor Restoration” (1997) — a book as funny as its title is droll.

Posted in Books, NFL, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 14, 2022.

Friday, October 14th, 2022

Robbie Coltrane. THR.

He wasn’t someone whose work I have a lot of familiarity with, though I’ve heard good things about “Cracker”. Other credits included some “Blackadder”s, “The Pope Must Diet”, Falstaff in “Henry V”, and “Frasier”.

Dr. Vincent DiMaio, forensic pathologist. He was the chief medical examiner of Bexar County (which covers San Antonio) from 1981 to 2006. In that capacity, he testified for the prosecution against Genene Jones, who was convicted of killing a 15-month-old baby, and may have killed up to 60 other children.

Dr. DiMaio, who had been a medical examiner in Dallas from 1972 to 1981, was later called on to look into allegations that President Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a look-alike whom Soviet officials had trained to assume his identify. Michael Eddowes, a British lawyer and restaurateur, had made the allegations in a 1975 book, “Khrushchev Killed Kennedy,” which he published himself.
After the author persuaded Oswald’s wife, Marina, to have his body exhumed in 1981, Dr. DiMaio was recruited to help examine the remains. But his team quickly debunked the theory, confirming through forensic dentistry that the physical characteristics of the man buried as Oswald matched those on Oswald’s passport and his Marine Corps records.

As a private consultant, he also worked with the authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh and came to the belief that Vincent van Gogh’s death was murder, not suicide. He also testified for the defense in the George Zimmerman trial.

He also wrote four books: Morgue: A Life in Death (with Ron Franscell) was nominated for a “Best Fact Crime” Edgar award. (The NYT says it won, but the Edgar Awards database says The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale was that year’s winner.)

He could bring firsthand experience to his expertise in gunshot wounds: He himself had survived being shot four times by his second wife in a fit of anger. They divorced.

Bernard McGuirk, Don Imus’s producer.

Posted in Books, Law, Movies, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 10, 2022.

Monday, October 10th, 2022

Anton Fier, noted drummer.

His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”
By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.

Peter Robinson, crime writer. (“…DCI Alan Banks, hero of a series of Yorkshire-set novels that spanned 35 years and sold more than 10 million copies.”)

Douglas Kirkland, celebrity photographer.

(Hattip on the previous two to Lawrence.)

Nikki Finke, founder of Deadline.com.

At L.A. Weekly, Finke headed its Deadline Hollywood Daily column from 2002-09. In 2006, she launched Deadline Hollywood Daily, an around-the-clock online version, and became a key source of news surrounding the 2007 WGA strike.
That year, The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter wrote that Finke’s blog had “become a critical forum for Hollywood news and gossip, known for analyzing (in sometimes insulting terms) the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of moguls,” with her reporting on the strike ultimately solidifying “her position as a Hollywood power broker.”

She went on to sell the site to Penske Media for $100 million in 2009.

Speaking to her legacy and that of Deadline‘s in a 10-year anniversary post for the publication, she wrote that the concept behind her original blog — using a URL purchased for “14 bucks and change” — was to get breaking news out faster than she could with her column.
“I didn’t set out to be a disruptor,” she wrote. “Or an internet journalist who created something out of nothing that put the Hollywood trades back on their heels, and today, under Penske Media ownership, is a website worth $100+ million. Or a woman with brass balls, attitude and ruthless hustle who told hard truths about the moguls and who accurately reported scoops first.”

Obit from Deadline.com.

Posted in Books, Media, Music, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Hoplobibliophilia, finishing the catch-up (for now).

Friday, October 7th, 2022

What was that some jerk said about “you know you have a problem when you start buying bibliographies“?

About that…

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

Gun book post tomorrow.

Thursday, October 6th, 2022

Just ran out of time today to get it up. I’m sure some of my readers will be happy I’m skipping a day, but I have a really nice one I want to document…

Posted in Books, Guns | Comments Closed

And yet another dose of hoplobibliophilia.

Tuesday, October 4th, 2022

A while back, great and good FotB (and official trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn introduced me to the work of the Snub Gun Study Group. From there, I learned about Stephen A. Camp.

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Random acts of hoplobibliophilia.

Sunday, October 2nd, 2022

I did manage to make it to the post office yesterday, and picked up some packages that had been waiting for me. All of which contained gun books.

So, continuing our ongoing epic…

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 1, 2022.

Saturday, October 1st, 2022

Joe Bussard. No, you’ve probably never heard of him (unless you read the same books I do): he was an “obsessive collector” of 78 RPM records.

From his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr. Bussard (pronounced boo-SARD) drove the country roads of the South seeking 78s that had been languishing in people’s homes. He was selective about what he brought back to his basement. He loved jazz but detested any jazz recorded after the early 1930s. He loved country music but decreed that nothing good came after 1955. Nashville? He called it “Trashville.” Rock ’n’ roll? A cancer.
“How can you listen to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw when you’ve listened to Jelly Roll Morton?” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001. “It’s like coming out of a mansion and living in a chicken coop.”

…

Mr. Bussard not only collected 78s; he also built a basement studio in his parents’ house in the 1950s to make his own. Under his Fonotone label, he recorded artists like the Possum Holler Boys, a country and rockabilly band, and the Tennessee Mess Arounders, a blues group (he was a member of both), as well as the influential fingerstyle guitarist John Fahey. (He later moved his collection and his studio to the house he shared with his wife and daughter.)

Mr. Bussard was one of the “characters” (so to speak) profiled in Amanda Petrusich’s Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records (affiliate link), a book that I both liked and found depressing.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Drew Ford, of It’s Alive Comics.

A graphic novel publisher that specialised in bringing out-of-print indie comic books back into print, as well as continuing and concluding stories where it could, and generating brand new ones, It’s Alive Press recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to revive the eighties black-and-white comic book series, Fish Police. Drew Ford had struggled with fulfilment issues of late, but there is no doubt he was a major contributor to the American comics industry in honouring its past heroes and bringing deserved attention to projects and people that time had forgotten – or at least not thought about for some time.

Edited to add: I forgot I wanted to include this one. Antonio Inoki.

Inoki entered politics in 1989 after winning a seat in the upper house, one of Japan’s two chambers of parliament, and headed the Sports and Peace Party. He traveled to Iraq in 1990 to win the release of Japanese citizens who were held hostage there.

He was also a professional wrestler.

Inoki brought Japanese pro-wrestling to fame and pioneered mixed martial arts matches between top wrestlers and champions from other combat sports like judo, karate and boxing.

Perhaps most famously, he fought Muhammad Ali in a MMA match in 1976.

The result of the fight, a draw, has long been debated by the press and fans.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Hoplobibliophilia, act 3.

Friday, September 30th, 2022

When Mike the Musicologist and I were running around over the weekend, we swung by the Half-Price Books in Cedar Park. And I found a couple of interesting things for $7.99 (plus tax) each…

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Hoplobibliophilia 18, Cowboys 13.

Wednesday, September 28th, 2022

Continuing my attempt to clean out the backlog…

I don’t think I buy a lot of new expensive gun books. I haven’t bought any of Ian’s, for example: while I am sort of interested in bullpups, French military rifles, and guns of the Chinese warlords, I look at Ian’s prices and say, “I’m not that interested.”

Paying $100+ for a book still gives me the leaping fantods. It has to be something I’m really interested in: either for collector value (like the Samworths) or on a topic I’m interested in (the history of sniping, for example).

So these two represent a departure from my norm. He says that while he considers paying $300 for another book. But in the meantime…

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Posted in Books, Guns, Holsters, Hoplobibilophilia | 2 Comments »

Onward through the hoplobibliophiliac fog.

Monday, September 26th, 2022

Previously:

I believe I had mentioned that a friend of mine in the Association had been tipping me off to gun books online.

I believe I had also mentioned that my tax refund had come in. Plus my bonus payment from my employer is coming this week.

The end result is: I’ve accumulated a bunch more gun books. I have a stack. And I’m way behind in documenting them Lawrence style.

Which is…okay. Except they’re stacking up on the kitchen table, and if I don’t move them in the next few days, I’m going to get griped at. So I thought I’d do a couple a day, maybe every other day, until the backlog is cleared.

No, no, don’t thank me: I run a full service blog here. But I will put in a jump…

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2022.

Friday, September 23rd, 2022

Hilary Mantel, author of historical fiction.

Ms. Mantel was one of Britain’s most decorated novelists. She twice won the Booker Prize, the country’s prestigious literary award, for “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” both of which went on to sell millions of copies. In 2020, she was also longlisted for the same prize for “The Mirror and the Light.”

She was someone I’d heard of, but never read. I didn’t know, until I read the obit, that those three books are a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, and now I kind of want to read them.

Maarten Schmidt, astronomer. He did a lot of work on quasi-stellar radio sources, or “quasars”.

In 1962, two scientists in Australia, Cyril Hazard and John Bolton, finally managed to pinpoint the precise position of one of these, called 3C 273. They shared the data with several researchers, including Dr. Schmidt, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.
Using the enormous 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in rural San Diego County, Dr. Schmidt was able to hone in on what appeared to be a faint blue star. He then plotted its light signature on a graph, showing where its constituent elements appeared in the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared.
What he found was, at first, puzzling. The signatures, or spectral lines, did not resemble those of any known elements. He stared at the graphs for weeks, pacing his living room floor, until he realized: The expected elements were all there, but they had shifted toward the red end of the spectrum — an indication that the object was moving away from Earth, and fast.
And once he knew the speed — 30,000 miles a second — Dr. Schmidt could calculate the object’s distance. His jaw dropped. At about 2.4 billion light years away, 3C 273 was one of the most distant objects in the universe from Earth. That distance meant that it was also unbelievably luminous: If it were placed at the position of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, it would outshine the sun.

…

The question remained: If these objects weren’t stars, what were they? Theories proliferated. Some said they were the fading embers of a giant supernova. Dr. Schmidt and others believed instead that in a quasar, astronomers could see the birth of an entire galaxy, with a black hole at the center pulling together astral gases that, in their friction, generated enormous amounts of energy — an argument developed by Donald Lynden-Bell, a physicist at Cambridge University, in 1969.
If that was true, and if quasars really were several billion light years away, it meant that they were portraits of the universe in its relative infancy, just a few billion years old. In some cases their light originated long before Earth’s solar system was even formed, and offered clues to the evolution of the universe.

Sara Shane, actress. Other credits include the 1950s “Dragnet”, “The Outer Limits”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, and the “I Led 3 Lives” TV series.

The Times has published two obits over the past couple of days for people who weren’t all that famous, but were interesting for reasons.

John Train. He was a co-founder of “The Paris Review”. He was an author: among other things, he wrote three books about “remarkable names of real people”.

And he was also kind of a shadowy power broker:

Yet he was also an operator in high finance and world affairs who, by one researcher’s account, had ties to U.S. secret services. Mr. Train founded and ran a leading financial firm devoted to preserving the money of rich families, and he worked to support the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The multifariousness of his career defies definition, but one quality did underlie his many activities. Mr. Train exemplified the attitudes and values of the exalted class he was born into: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the postwar era. He was globe-bestriding but also self-effacing, erudite but also pragmatic, cosmopolitan but also nationalistic, solemn at one moment and droll the next.

Allan M. Siegal. This is one of those internal NYT obits, but Mr. Siegal was an old-line Times guy, so his obit is of some interest.

Mr. Siegal, who started at The Times as a copy boy in 1960, was widely respected, often revered and sometimes feared in the newsroom. Though never the face of The Times — he worked in relative anonymity — he was something like its collective conscience, an institutionalist watching over a place whose folkways he was often called on to codify.

…

“Readers will believe more of what we do know if we level with them about what we don’t” was one of Mr. Siegal’s favorite injunctions, articulated long before media outlets in the digital era began emphasizing transparency in news gathering and editing.
Another: “Being fair is better than being first.”
Mr. Siegal’s knowledge of grammar, history, geography, nomenclature, culture and cuisine was expansive. But on no subject was he more authoritative than The Times itself.

…

In 2003, in the aftermath of a scandal in which the fabrications of a reporter, Jayson Blair, led to the fall of the newsroom’s top two managers, Mr. Siegal headed an internal committee that reviewed the paper’s ethical and organizational practices.
Among its recommendations was the creation of a new job: standards editor. Mr. Siegal was the first to be named to the position, adding the title to that of assistant managing editor, a post he held from 1987 until his retirement in 2006. At the time, his name had been listed among the paper’s top editors on the masthead, which appeared on the editorial page, more than twice as long as anyone else’s.

…

Mr. Siegal was capable of withering criticism. His post-mortem critiques to subordinate editors and reporters — written in precise penmanship with a green felt-tip pen (known as “greenies” among the staff, they showed up well against black-and-white newsprint, he found) — could be as terse as “Ugh!” “How, please?” “Name names” and “Absurd!”
Once, having demanded that a headline combine several complex elements in a short word count, he found the result wanting: “As if written by pedants from Mars,” he declared.
But his rockets were also astute and instructive, guiding generations of editors and reporters in the finer points of style and tone. And perhaps because he was so demanding, his not-infrequent notes of praise were cherished all the more. “Nice, who?” was his trademark comment when he thought a headline or caption, by an anonymous editor, was especially artful. (The answer, the name of the editor, would appear — to the editor’s great pride — in the next day’s compilation of post-mortems, run off and stapled together by copy machine and distributed throughout the news department.)< Other critiques showed a biting sense of humor. “If this bumpkin spelling is the best we can do,” he once wrote of a subheadline that included a reference to “fois gras” (rather than foie gras), “we should stick to chopped liver.” When a headline allowed that the football coach Mike Ditka “should recover” from a heart attack, Mr. Siegal wrote: “Unless God returns our call, we shouldn’t predict in such cases.”

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Science, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 15, 2022.

Thursday, September 15th, 2022

Mark Miller. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Adam-12”, “The Name of the Game”, and “Harry O”.

Fred Franzia, cheap wine guy.

His most famous acquisition was Charles Shaw, a label with a strong reputation among winemakers that filed for bankruptcy in 1995. In 2002, Mr. Franzia started selling the wine exclusively at Trader Joe’s for $1.99 a bottle (in some cities, it can now cost up to $3.99). The wine became affectionately known as Two-Buck Chuck.
The company says it has sold over 1 billion bottles.

Two Buck Chuck is now $3.99? Thanks, Joe Biden!

(Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist, by Iosif Shkolovsky. Vodka bottles and wine bottles are pretty similar in size, right?)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Mixology, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Good news, bad news.

Wednesday, September 14th, 2022

Good news: per “The Rap Sheet”, Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Victor’s in Minneapolis have re-opened. You may recall they were burned down by rioters in 2020.

Bad news:

The new space is about 20% smaller than the previous location, and as a result Uncle Hugo’s will cut down some categories of used books, including paranormal romance, submarine adventure novels and a lot of true crime books.

Okay. Paranormal romance? Yeah, the heck with that noise. But don’t mess with my true crime or submarine adventure novels, man!

Posted in Bagatelle, Books | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 13, 2022.

Tuesday, September 13th, 2022

An era has ended. Jean-Luc Godard has died at 91: per his legal advisor, he chose assisted suicide in a Swiss clinic due to “multiple disabling pathologies”. Alt link. THR. Variety.

As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr. Godard was one of several iconoclastic writers who helped turn a new publication called Cahiers du Cinéma into a critical force that swept away the old guard of the European art cinema and replaced it with new heroes largely drawn from the ranks of the American commercial cinema — directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.
When his first feature-length film as a director, “Breathless” (“À Bout de Souffle”), was released in 1960, Mr. Godard joined several of his Cahiers colleagues in a movement that the French press soon labeled La Nouvelle Vague — the New Wave.
For Mr. Godard, as well as for New Wave friends and associates like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, the “tradition of quality” represented by the established French cinema was an aesthetic dead end. To them it was strangled by literary influences and empty displays of craftsmanship that had to be vanquished to make room for a new cinema, one that sprang from the personality and predilections of the director.
Although “Breathless” was not the first New Wave film (both Mr. Chabrol’s 1958 “Beau Serge” and Mr. Truffaut’s 1959 “400 Blows” preceded it), it became representative of the movement. Mr. Godard unapologetically juxtaposed plot devices and characters inherited from genre films and emotional material dredged up, in almost diarylike form, from the filmmaker’s personal life.

…

In 2010, Mr. Godard, long at odds with Hollywood, was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, but not without controversy. The award brought into focus long-simmering accusations that Mr. Godard held antisemitic views. He did not attend the ceremony at which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed the honor, and when an interviewer afterward asked him what the award meant to him, he was blunt.
“Nothing,” he said. “If the academy likes to do it, let them do it.”

…

When his parents refused to support him financially, hoping that he would take more responsibility for himself, Mr. Godard began stealing money — from his family members and their friends and even from the office of Cahiers du Cinema. This went on for five years.
He distributed some of the proceeds to fellow filmmakers, lending Rivette enough money to make his film debut with “Paris Belongs to Us.”
“I pinched money to be able to see films and to make films,” he told The Guardian in 2007.
After his mother secured a job for him with a Swiss television outfit, he stole from his employer and, in 1952, landed in jail in Zurich. His father obtained his quick release, but only after Mr. Godard agreed to spend several months in a mental hospital.

…

As the 1960s unfolded, Mr. Godard continued to work at a breakneck pace, turning out sketches for compilation films — including “RoGoPaG” (1963) and “Paris vu Par ” (1965) — alongside features like “Band of Outsiders” (1964), “Une Femme Mariée” (1964), “Pierrot le Fou” (1965) and “Masculin Féminin” (1966).
In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard plucked a character from the French popular cinema, the private detective and secret agent Lemmy Caution, along with the expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine, who had played Caution (or variations on the character) in many films, and dropped him down in a dystopian future ruled by a giant computer.

…

As he grew older, Mr. Godard seemed more intolerant of other film directors. He quarreled bitterly with Truffaut, once his closest friends among the New Wave directors. He was especially scathing toward Steven Spielberg. In the 2001 film “In Praise of Love,” he portrays Spielberg representatives trying to buy the film rights to the memories of a Jewish couple who fought in the French Resistance. Commenting on the film’s sourness, the Times critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2002 that it “completes Mr. Godard’s journey from one of the cinema’s great radicals to one of its crankiest reactionaries.”
Mr. Godard’s personality was as difficult to warm to as many of his films were. Biographers filled paged after page with details of his feuds and schisms. He and his friend Truffaut got into a spat after the release of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” in 1973 and never reconciled before Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984. When a talk show interviewer reunited Mr. Godard and Ms. Karina in 1987, Mr. Godard’s indifferent response to a question about their romance caused Ms. Karina to leave the set.

This goes unmentioned in the obits, but I have to bring it up: “Made In U.S.A.”, about which I have written before. In brief: Goddard adapting a Westlake Parker novel, except he changed it around considerably and didn’t actually pay Westlake, leading to legal action. Pay the writer, you clown!

Lance Mackey. He won the Iditarod four times.

After receiving a diagnosis of throat cancer in 2001 and undergoing major health problems, Lance emerged to dominate the race, winning an unprecedented four straight Iditarod championships, from 2007 through 2010. During that run he also twice won the 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race between Canada and Alaska with only two weeks’ rest between races.

…

But after his string of wins, he was burdened by personal problems, health scares and drug issues that prevented him from ever again reaching the top of the sport.
The treatment for his throat cancer cost him his saliva glands and ultimately disintegrated his teeth. He was then diagnosed with Raynaud’s syndrome, which limits circulation to the hands and feet and is exacerbated by the cold weather that every musher must contend with in the wilds of Alaska.
In the 2015 race, he couldn’t manipulate his fingers to do simple tasks, like putting bootees on his dogs’ paws to protect them from the snow, ice and cold. His brother and fellow competitor Jason Mackey agreed to stay with him at the back of the pack to help him care for the dogs.

…

Mackey and his wife divorced after splitting up in 2011. She had earlier had three children who Mackey embraced as his own, Outside reported. During Mackey’s last Iditarod, in 2020, he raced with his mother’s ashes. He was later disqualified after testing positive for methamphetamine, and he entered rehab on the East Coast.
Months after the 2020 race finished, his partner, Jenne Smith, died in an all-terrain vehicle accident. They had two children.

He was 52. Cancer got him.

Javier Marías, prominent Spanish novelist. I’d never heard of the guy, though his name got mentioned a lot as a Nobel Prize candidate. But he sounds like someone I would have enjoyed drinking with.

Mr. Marías occupied a reputational perch in Spanish culture that would be almost inconceivable for an American author. His novels were greeted like blockbuster summer films, he received practically every prize available to a Spanish writer, and he was regularly considered a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the few awards to elude his grasp. Most critics considered him the greatest living Spanish writer; some said the greatest since Miguel de Cervantes.
He was more than just a famous novelist. Mr. Marías wrote a widely read weekly column in El País, Spain’s leading newspaper, where he set down his thoughts on everything from bike lanes (he hated them) to the Spanish government (which he also detested, regardless of the party in power).
He cultivated a public image as a curmudgeon, but in person he was generous and witty, inviting interviewers for long conversations in his dimly lit study, his fingers tweezering an ever-present cigarette. (One column he wrote in 2006, for The New York Times, castigated Madrid’s antismoking laws as “far more befitting of Franco than a democracy.”)

…

He wore his fame lightly, and joked that such comparisons said less about his talents than they did about a general decline in literary achievement. When “The Infatuations” won the state-run National Novel Prize, one of Spain’s highest literary awards, he rejected the $20,000 in prize money, saying he did not want to be indebted to a government of any kind.
He did maintain one such relationship, though: In 1997 he became king of Redonda, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean. The fictional Kingdom of Redonda is something of a running in-joke among European artists, who occupy the throne and make up most of its peerage. After his predecessor, the author Jon Wynne-Tyson, abdicated in his favor, Mr. Marías took the royal name Xavier I.
Like most modern monarchs, his role was largely ceremonial, his primary duty being to dispense noble titles to other artistic worthies — he named the director Pedro Almodóvar the Duke of Trémula and Mr. Ashbery the Duke of Convexo.
As of press time, a successor to King Xavier I had not been named, though several pretenders claim the throne as theirs.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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