Paul Thomas Anderson said he loved to take character actors and turn them into leading actors, and Philip Baker Hall was a great example. Dead at 90, a good run.
RIP
RIP, Mary G
Some horrible news via Satby, and I am upset to inform you that beloved longtime commenter Mary G has passed. Mary G has been here forever, and was a terribly sweet and kind and funny person. She had suffered from RA for a long time, and passed the other day.
There are a ton of Mary G stories, and I hope you all share them in the comments as well as memories of your interactions with her, but my personal favorite is when she fell in the bathroom without her phone, but had her tablet with her, and she notified people in the comments section that she had fallen and could not get up but could not reach 911. Within minutes, commenters had figured out which emergency services to contact in California, and lit up the switchboard to the point that when the paramedics arrived, they asked her to tell her friends to stop calling 911.
RIP, Mary. You will be missed.
RIP, PJ
PJ O’Rourke died today, and I am sad. He was 74. I discovered his writing in 1991 when in the Army, and I bet I read and re-read Parliament of Whores 20 times over the course of my tour on active duty. There was always a paperback copy in my dufflebag, because he was that funny I could read it over and over and over again. For young right-wingers who weren’t all in to the social bullshit, he was a genius. Witty, charming, self-deprecating, and man could he turn a phrase. I remember reading him one day and he mentioned Parliament of Funk (I think this was in Republican Party Reptile), and I thought to myself “Oh, hey, I’m not the only one who likes P-Funk).
He wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea politically, but he didn’t only write political satire. Some of his stuff for Car and Driver in the 80’s is some of the best shit out there, and still is. PJ became clearly disillusioned with the current GOP, and part of that is because PJ was an asshole, but he wasn’t that kind of asshole.
He did benefit from writing from the right during a period when Republicans only wanted to beat Democrats at the ballot box, not exterminate them from the planet, so he did have that working for him. Even so, you could take every single one of today’s modern right wing “humorists” and you couldn’t cobble together the skill PJ had in one finger.
I will miss him.
RIP, Harry Reid
Harry M. Reid, the Democrat who rose from childhood poverty in the rural Nevada desert to the heights of power in Washington, where he steered the Affordable Care Act to passage as Senate majority leader, died on Tuesday in Henderson, Nev. He was 82.
Mr. Reid had been treated for pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 2018, but lived to see the Las Vegas airport renamed for him earlier this month. His death was confirmed in statements from Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader.
Even by the standards of the political profession, where against-the-odds biographies are common and modest roots an asset, what Mr. Reid overcame was extraordinary. He was raised in almost Dickensian circumstances in tiny Searchlight, Nev.: His home had no indoor plumbing, his father was an alcoholic miner who eventually committed suicide, and his mother helped the family survive by taking in laundry from local brothels.
RIP.
E. O. Wilson, R. I. P.
Edward O. Wilson has died. Carl Zimmer’s obituary at that link is a fine, fair accounting of his extraordinary life and the profound influence he had and still has on ecosystem and evolutionary biology.
Wilson was a complicated man and led a complex intellectual life. He was an exceptional field and experimental researcher, showing that in a molecular age there remained a huge amount to learn about the natural world at the level of the organism and the ecosystem. And he was a hugely important contributor to evolutionary theory, most famously responsible for developing core ideas in sociobiology. I can say this from personal knowledge: among all the brilliant investigators of nature I’ve had the ridiculously good luck to meet, he had the greatest passion for the living world, a seemingly limitless capacity for focus, fascination, and awe in the face of the biosphere.
He was, as Zimmer documents, also someone given to reasoning past his evidence, applying his ideas to human behavior, culture and society in ways that were easily turned into echoes of pernicious biological determinism. Zimmer argues, correctly, I think, that a lot of the criticism of Wilson/sociobiology as eugenics-in-modern-dress misread what Wilson wrote and thought; still, he pushed further into that argument that most remember or acknowledge especially in a now, mostly forgotten book co-written with Charles Lumsden. ISTM it’s fair to say that in his key ideas he found a hammer, and for a considerable while, nearly everything in the living world looked like a nail.
And (again, as Zimmer notes) Wilson was a ferocious academic battler–of necessity during the sociobiology wars of the late 70s and the early 80s, and by inclination before and after. Je was an ambitious man who achieved an enormous amount and screwed up in sometimes major ways along that journey.
But taken all in all he was a profoundly rich and important thinker and researcher who spent a lot of time trying to do as much good as possible in the world, especially in defense of biodiversity and a planet capable of supporting not just us but the extraordinary wealth of living things with which we share this rock.
I have just a couple of personal remembrances. Here’s the one that always makes me smile:
The first time I interviewed him was in 1983 or 4, when I was a very and unjustly confident young reporter, wanting to talk to him about his ideas about the coevolution of genes and culture (that now mostly forgotten book). He invited me to meet him for lunch in his lab–he’d bring the food. So I came up from New York and made my way to Oxford St. in Cambridge. He met me at the door and we sat down at a mostly cleared lab bench in the first of several connected rooms where he studied his beloved ants. He handed me a sandwich and we started to talk. I was three or four bites into my tuna sandwich when I focused on the tube running just below eye level between us, running from one terrarium to another at either end of the bench. There was some motion there. I focused for a second, missing what Wilson said for a sentence or two. He followed my eyes to the parade of insects marching along the tube, and told me the species (now long forgotten). I grinned in acknowledgement, and then had to choke back a laugh…
…as I realized that I was having lunch with perhaps the one person in the country who brought his own ants to a picnic.
He got the full mileage out of his four-score-and-ten. We should all do as well.
And with that: thread, open, be this can.
Image: Albert Bierstadt, Tropical landscape with fishing boats in the bay, undated, before 1902.
Our fragile circle, breached
Valued commenter Raven introduced me to this Irving Townsend poem about the loss of a beloved pet:
“We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached.
Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way.
We cherish memory as the only certain immortality,
never fully understanding the necessary plan.”
I find it comforting today.
Daisy Mayhem Margaret Kennedy, 2008 – 2021
The first thing to know about Daisy is that she was a boxer dog who had the heart of a lion. She was a sweet and gentle girl, but she was also a fierce and proactive protector of her pack. She was our beloved companion for almost 14 years.
RIP, Norm MacDonald
Dead at 61 after privately fighting cancer for nearly a decade.
Absolutely one of my favorite comedians of all time (I was just talking about him on here the other day), up there with Patrice O’Neill, and this one hurts really bad. There was no one who had his delivery, deadpan, offbeat timing, and quirky sense of humor. There are so many routines he did that just make me laugh out loud even on the umpteenth viewing, and his guest hosting and simply being a guest on a talk show made everything better. I’ll leave you with two of my favorite recent pieces. First, Uncle Bert and his fight with bowel cancer (which was delivered while Norm himself secretly had cancer):
And then, one of a typical long, winding standup about Janice:
It’s the little things about him that I loved the most- like saying “half a hour” instead of half an hour. Or live tweeting golf hours after it happened.
Fucking Joe Rogan and Dane Cook and Carlos Mencia will probably live to be 100.