the_archfiend | Entries tagged with cultural icons

Obituaries have been few and far between for one of my favorite mystery writers - no, one of my favorite writers, period - since his passing a few days ago, but he considered his career as a novelist more of a side-job in comparison to his work as a legal advocate for abused and exploited children. To Vachss, this wasn't merely a career - it was a personal, lifelong call to arms. And he kept up at it until the time of his death.

A bibliography of his published fiction can be found here, but the article on him at Encyclopedia.com is the one that does him proper justice. The only thing I corrected was his year of death, which hadn't been updated. His CV shown below shows how much drive and energy he had, but more importantly, it shows exactly who he was in life.

VACHSS, Andrew (Henry) 1942-2021 (Andrew H. Vachss)

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced "Vax"; born October 19, 1942, in New York, NY; son of Bernard and Geraldine (Mattus) Vachss; married; wife's name, Alice (an attorney and writer). Education: Case Western Reserve University, B.A., 1965; New England School of Law, J.D. (magna cum laude), 1975.

CAREER: U.S. Public Health Service in Ohio, field interviewer and investigator for Task Force on Eradication of Syphilis, 1965-66; Department of Social Services, New York, NY, began as caseworker, became unit supervisor of multi-problem ghetto casework team, 1966-69; Community Development Foundation, Norwalk, CT, field coordinator in Biafra, 1969, urban coordinator, 1970; Calumet Community Congress, Lake County, IN, organizer and coordinator, 1970-71; Uptown Community Organization, Chicago, IL, director, 1971; Libra, Inc., Cambridge, MA, director, 1971; Medfield-Norfolk Prison Project, Medfield, MA, deputy director, 1971-72; Department of Youth Services, Boston, MA, project director and director of Intensive Treatment Unit (ANDROS II), both 1972-73; Crime Control Coordinator's Office, Yonkers, NY, planner and analyst, 1974-75; attorney in private practice, 1976—. Director of Advocacy Associates in New York and New Jersey, 1973-75; director of New York City Juvenile Justice Planning Project, 1975—. Adjunct professor at College of New Resources, 1980-81; lecturer at Child Welfare League of America, Columbia University School of Social Work, Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality, Dominion Hospital, Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, Law Guardian Training Program—New York State Ninth Judicial District, Mississippi Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, National Association of Counsel for Children, National Children's Advocacy Center, New Hampshire Department of Corrections, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, St. Luke's Hospital Child Protection Center, U.S. Campaign to End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT), and others.

MEMBER: PEN American Center, Writers Guild of America, ChildTrauma Academy, Protect PAC.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow of John Hay Whitney Foundation, 1976-77; Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, and Falcon Award, Maltese Falcon Society (Japan), both 1988, both for Strega; Deutschen Krimi Preis, 1989, for Flood; Raymond Chandler Award, Giurìa a Noir in Festival (Courmayeur, Italy), 2000, for body of work; Harvey J. Houck, Jr., Award from Justice for Children, for national child advocacy.

Just another reason why 2020 is practically the Abyss of recent history, especially in the United States.

This is going to be hard for me to write.

Ed Brayton's Dispatches from the Culture Wars has long been a favorite skeptical blog of mine, since it featured a wonderful combination of incisive analysis, strong opinion and outright snark. It's bounced around from when I first ran into it on Scienceblogs, but Ed has always kept the same degree of quality and intelligence in all of its incarnations up until now.

Unfortunately, serious health problems dropped his output to the point where he couldn't post nearly as often as he liked.

And then I read something that just ruined my night.

Ed has decided to apply for hospice care, since his medical condition has deteriorated to the point that palliative care instead of yet more trips to the hospital and yet more stays in rehab facilities would just make more sense.

I understand his decision and respect it.

That doesn't make it any easier to accept.

As somebody who has a blog that has nowhere near the following that he does, it's like a giant sinkhole appeared and ate the place where I live. He was one of those bloggers who kept swinging for the fences even when a number of completely spurious lawsuits from some of his targets started coming in to try to shut him up. They didn't, but you know how idiots are when you point out their stupidity. They just keep plugging away even though all that proves is that they're still idiots.

Unfortunately, being shut down by your own medical problems is something entirely different.

Ed is, in my mind, irreplaceable, just as any great blogger is. I'm sure he'll keep up at it until he no longer can, but the end is the end, regardless of that. And that's what's so difficult to stomach about it.

Adios, Pete. The Buzzcocks were easily one of my favorite first-generation punk bands growing up, capable of combining melodic sensibilities and chainsaw guitars to produce memorable songs by the truckload. And as he would've wanted it, I'll remember the music above all else.

Harlan could be an incredibly prickly, combative individual - almost to the point of self-parody at times, especially when some of the fights were ones he probably shouldn't have picked - but he was also one of the SF authors who kept my interest in the genre going during my teenage years, and his short fiction (which was almost all of his output, since he wrote only a handful of novels) was easily some of the best I've ever read.

Dozois was considered a giant of science fiction just in terms of his editing work, but this further elaborates how much of a giant:

He had a long career as an author and was one of the most influential editors the field has seen, publishing Year’s Best anthologies for more than 35 years, serving as the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction from 1984-2004, and editing or co-editing several original anthologies with Jack Dann, George R.R. Martin, and others.

He served as reprint editor for Clarkesworld Magazine and reviewed short fiction for Locus Magazine. A week before his death, Dozois received the Solstice Award from SFWA.

Dozois began publishing in 1966 when his story “The Empty Man” appeared in If magazine. His first novel, Nightmare Blue, co-written with George Alec Effinger, was published in 1975. In 1977, he took over editing Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year from Lester del Rey and began editing original anthologies with Dann in 1980. In the 1970s, he worked as an assistant on several magazines, including If,Galaxy, and World of Tomorrow. He took over as editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine from Shawna McCarthy in 1984.

Although he published less short fiction after taking over the editorial reins of Asimov’s, he did continue to publish new works as well as his own collections. He only published one solo novel, Strangers, but after he resigned from Asimov’s, he published the novel Hunter’s Run, co-written with Martin and Daniel Abraham.

He was the editor Guest of Honor at the Millennium Philcon, the 59th World Science Fiction Convention and in conjunction with his appearance, Old Earth Books published Being Gardner Dozois, a book length interview conducted by Michael Swanwick.

Dozois and co-editor George R.R. Martin received the World Fantasy Award for their anthology Dangerous Women. Dozois and Jonathan Strahan received the Ditmar Award for the anthology The New Space Opera, Dozois won the Readercon Award for his book Slow Dancing Through Time and the Sidewise Award for the short story “Counterfactual.” He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011 and received the Skylark Award in 2016.

Hawking's passing wasn't exactly unexpected, considering his nearly lifelong illness; what was unexpected was the fact that he survived ALS for over 50 years while becoming one of the most important scientists of that same half-century. His death is a gigantic loss to the science world, of course, but a couple of essays published by Gregory Benford in 2005 and 2012 (and reproduced on File 770 here and here) show a more personal side of Hawking. From the former:

A week after my evening at Cambridge, I got from Stephen’s secretary a transcript of all his remarks. I have used it here to reproduce his style of conversation. Printed out on his wheelchair computer, his sole link with us, the lines seem to come from a great distance. Across an abyss.

Portraying the flinty faces of science—daunting complexity twinned with numbing wonder—demands both craft and art. Some of us paint with fiction. Stephen paints with his impressionistic views of vast, cool mathematical landscapes. To knit together our fraying times, to span the cultural abyss, demands all these approaches—and more, if we can but invent them.

Stephen has faced daunting physical constrictions with a renewed attack on the large issues, on great sweeps of space and time. Daily he struggles without much fuss against the narrowing that is perhaps the worst element of infirmity. I recalled him rapt with Marilyn [Monroe], still deeply engaged with life, holding firmly against tides of entropy.

Damn it, it's almost as if someone is trying to destroy the soundtrack of my formative years piece by piece.

Luckily, they won't succeed.

From the New York Times:

Ms. Le Guin’s fictions range from young-adult adventures to wry philosophical fables. They combine compelling stories, rigorous narrative logic and a lean but lyrical style to draw readers into what she called the “inner lands” of the imagination. Such writing, she believed, could be a moral force.

“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she told The Guardian in an interview in 2005. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”

The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”

I knew his time was going to be up due to his early-onset dementia, but I wasn't prepared for his passing a few days ago.

His rhythm guitar was exactly the sort of concrete you need to build a metaphorical expressway of a rock song on, and it's shown nowhere better than this example from 1977.

And a second musician whose body of work I greatly admired buys the farm in as many weeks.

Oh, shit.

The Allman Brothers Band, At Fillmore East

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. Because if you're going to read a banned book, sometimes you need to go bad. Real bad.

Plus, I started it on the day this went down.

It just seemed all the more appropriate, somehow.

...this was a brand new thing.

In Memoriam.

And this is another warning about how you should be wary of taking political advice that comes from the mouths of celebrities - even ones you admire, despite their politics.

You can read the meat of the mess via the link above, but this stretch of Mr. Eastwood's Wild Ride seems to be an object lesson in not how to articulate a thought:

ESQ: What do you think Trump is onto?

CE: What Trump is onto is he’s just saying what’s on his mind. And sometimes it’s not so good. And sometimes it’s … I mean, I can understand where he’s coming from, but I don’t always agree with it.

ESQ: So you’re not endorsing him?

CE: I haven’t endorsed anybody. I haven’t talked to Trump. I haven’t talked to anybody. You know, he’s a racist now because he’s talked about this judge. And yeah, it’s a dumb thing to say. I mean, to predicate your opinion on the fact that the guy was born to Mexican parents or something. He’s said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides. But everybody—the press and everybody’s going, “Oh, well, that’s racist,” and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it. Just fucking get over it. It’s a sad time in history.

No offense to Clint - no, really - but the only reason why Candidate Stoathead decided to go after that judge is because that judge had both the misfortune to be involved in his Trump "University" case and because there is a very large network of Stoathead supporters who are, and will continue to be, screaming card-carrying racists. So they got to hear the dog whistle loud and clear because he's of Mexican descent. Never mind the little fact that he was born and raised in the US and is therefore this thing called an "American citizen" as a result; that's not what matters in the odd little universe populated by certain Trump supporters - Gonzalo Curiel's background is.

Then again, look at this way: Clint Eastwood is 86 years old. His complaints about Today's Youth (and consider that there's been roughly 3 intervening generations since he was born, so that's some sample size you've got, there) being overly sensitive and blah blah blah are probably not much different than what he heard from some (but not all) members of the generation that preceded his when he was a teenager in the late 40's and they'll probably be no different from the ones coming out of the mouths of some (but not all) millennials some twenty to thirty years after they've had kids. The problem is this: every generation looks down on their successors as somehow being either morally weaker or less courageous than they were, and it's all bullshit. Because that canard keeps getting repeated over and over again. Younger generations just have a different set of problems than previous ones. You can still get killed over essentially nothing if you're 25 now just as you could've bought the farm over trivial shit like your ethnic background or the color of your skin way back in 1946. What's different is that we think we know better. Or should.

As for Eastwood, well, he was a genius as an actor and director. No doubt about it. But that's as far as his genius goes. Looking for deep political insight from an actor is about as bright as asking a ballet dancer about their deep thoughts on quantum physics (or worse yet, asking another actor about what causes autism), but we spend an absurd amount of time giving a shit about their opinions due to the fact that they're! Really! FAMOUS! And being famous means that you have to have equally famous opinions, right?

Not really. And it'll be a sign of genuine societal maturity if people finally realize that fact.

David Bowie, 1947-2016

Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, 1940-2015.

Truly. But I'll let the music speak for itself:

From the Guardian:

In an interview in 2013, Lee spoke about his love of acting. “Making films has never just been a job to me, it is my life,” he said. “I have some interests outside of acting – I sing and I’ve written books, for instance – but acting is what keeps me going, it’s what I do, it gives life purpose.”

Adios, Pete.

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Because my karma ran over my dogma

Entries tagged with cultural icons

In Memoriam: Andrew Vachss, 1942-2021

In Memoriam: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1933-2020

About Ed Brayton

In memoriam: Pete Shelley, 1955-2018

In Memoriam: Harlan Ellison, 1934-2018

In Memoriam: Gardner Dozois, 1947-2018

In Memoriam: Stephen Hawking, 1942-2018

Mark E. Smith, 1957-2018

In Memoriam: Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929-2017

Malcolm Young, 1953-2017

In Memoriam: Gregg Allman, 1947-2017

Now reading

50 years ago today...

Gene Wilder, 1933-2016

Well, f*ck you too, Clint

Ziggy boards the starship bound for home

The end of a very loud era

In Memoriam: Ornette Coleman, 1930-2015

In Memoriam: Sir Christopher Lee, 1922-2015

Pete Seeger, 1919-2014