Timothy McSweeny is dead

I wish the title of this post was actually the first item in a list of dead people or dead things or drunken proclamations that actually turned into a short story published on the internet, but it isn’t.

Timothy McSweeny, of accidental McSweeny’s Internet Tendency fame, is dead at 67.  Dave Eggars has a touching tribute to him, and the whole story of how McSweeny begat McSweeny’s, on the site.  Here’s an excerpt:

One day in Boston in 1943, my grandfather Daniel McSweeney delivered a baby. This baby was put up for adoption, and was adopted by another McSweeney family. He and David were raised in a loving family, and Timothy eventually went to the Massachusetts School of Art and later received an MFA from Rutgers University. After graduating, he taught studio art at Rutgers for a time.

But mental illness overtook him, and he struggled with alcoholism. He was hospitalized many times. Eventually he was put in the care of an institution for mental health, where he remained safe and received treatment. It was from this institution that he began to send letters. According to his brother David, he would search through city and state records, find names, and write to the people he found.

Presumably, he saw my grandfather’s name on his birth certificate and came to think Daniel McSweeney might have been his father, not simply the delivering obstetrician. And thus he sought out the children of Daniel McSweeney.

Ross, David and I figured all this out in 2000, and it was then that they informed me that Timothy was still alive. He had remained under doctors’ care all these years, and the McSweeney family visited him regularly.

Knowing that the journal bore the name of a real person who had endured years of struggle threw melancholy shadows over the enterprise. But the McSweeneys insisted that the use of the name was acceptable, even appropriate, given Timothy’s background as an artist and search for connection and meaning through the written word. Since 2000 we’ve implicitly dedicated all issues to the real Timothy.

Ha

Just saw this in the Columbia student center.  In case you can’t tell, the Marine Corps Officers Program is competing with the campus legalize pot club (?) for recruits.

The question is, can I sign up for both?

Score

I have picked up so many great used books lately.  It is extremely exciting.  Here’s a recent score.  I might never actually read it, but I do love to look at it and think of the wonderful things it probably contains.

Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein Alice Walker and Anthony Arnove

So much to celebrate about Howard Zinn.  Here’s an excerpt from Democracy Now’s tribute to him.  The tribute I know of – they probably did hundreds. You can read the transcript or watch the video/listen to the interview.  Howard Zinn was, among many other theoretically important things, so very, very charming.

AMY GOODMAN: Anthony, I wanted to bring Naomi Klein back into this discussion. I think it’s very touching we’re here at Sundance, where you were with Howard Zinn last year, as he premiered People Speak. But last night, after Howard died, we saw the New York Times put up the AP, the Associated Press, obit. The Times has something like 1,200 obits already prepared for people. They didn’t have one prepared for Howard Zinn. And this Associated Press obit very quickly went to a quote of Arthur Schlesinger, the historian, who once said, “I know”—he’s talking about Howard Zinn—“I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.” Naomi Klein, your response?

NAOMI KLEIN: I don’t think that would have bothered Howard Zinn at all. He never was surprised when power protected itself. And he really was a people’s historian, so he didn’t look to the elites for validation.

I’m just so happy that Anthony and the incredible team from People Speakgave Howard this incredible gift at the end of his life. I was at Lincoln Center at the premiere of People Speak and was there when just the mention of Howard’s name led thousands of people to leap to their feet and give him the standing ovation that he deserved. So I don’t think he needed the New York Times. I don’t think he needed the official historians. He was everybody’s favorite teacher, the teacher that changed your life, but he was that for millions and millions of people. And so, you know, that’s what happened. We just lost our favorite teacher.

But the thing about Howard is that the history that he taught was not just about losing the official illusions about nationalism, about the heroic figures. It was about telling people to believe in themselves and their power to change the world. So, like any wonderful teacher, he left all of these lessons behind. And I think we should all just resolve to be a little bit more like Howard today.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s end with Howard Zinn in his own words, from one of his last speeches. He spoke at Boston University just two months ago in November.

HOWARD ZINN: No matter what we’re told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place, it’s not that we’re going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we’ll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably—inevitably—the indiscriminant massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.

So it’s not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this—all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we’re at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we’re sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.

We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that’s how movements start. That’s how the movement against the Vietnam War started. It started with handfuls of people who thought they were helpless, thought they were powerless. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power. When workers go on strike, huge corporations lose their power. When consumers boycott, huge business establishments have to give in. When soldiers refuse to fight, as so many soldiers did in Vietnam, so many deserters, so many fraggings, acts of violence by enlisted men against officers in Vietnam, B-52 pilots refusing to fly bombing missions anymore, war can’t go on. When enough soldiers refuse, the government has to decide we can’t continue. So, yes, people have the power. If they begin to organize, if they protest, if they create a strong enough movement, they can change things. That’s all I want to say. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, that was Howard Zinn. As we wrap up today, Naomi Klein, your final words?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, we are in the midst of a Howard Zinn revival. I mean, this was happening anyway. And it’s so extraordinary for somebody at the end of their life to be having films made about them and played on television, and his books are back on the bestseller list. And it’s because the particular message that Howard relayed his whole life, devoted his whole life to, is so relevant for this moment. I mean, even thinking about it the day after the State of the Union address, Howard’s message was don’t believe in great men; believe in yourself; history comes from the bottom up.

And that—we have forgotten how change happens in this country. We think that you can just vote and that change will happen for us. And Howard was just relentlessly reminding us, no, you make the change that you want. And that message was so relevant for this moment. And I just feel so grateful to Anthony and, once again, the whole team that facilitated this revival, because we need Howard

JD Salinger dead at 91

Salinger’s been gone for a long time, so maybe this is not really that different, but, well…

I really wish we got more writing from him, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thrilled with what he gave us.  I still look to his work all the time for inspiration and instruction. I never aged-out of Catcher in the Rye.  People love to say it doesn’t hold up, but it does for me.  It’s true I am living a very extended adolescence, but it’s a literary one, okay?   Catcher’s not my favorite, but I still think the writing admirable for how light it seems despite the content it’s conveying.  I am not crazy about the end, but it doesn’t ruin the rest for me.  I was a pretty messed up  teenager, or at least I felt like one (like the only one, naturally), but I never particularly identified with him.  I actually think Catcher is assigned too young. Just because it’s about a young adult doesn’t mean it’s for them.  I think you appreciate the story and the characters as you get older because of perspective, the memory you have of those times.

Anyway, it’s his short stories I really love.

Maybe we are going to get more…there’s always been talk of a posthumous deluge.  Here’s hoping.

huh

I just came across this passage in The Sportswriter:

Detroit…is a great place to be in love; to get a land-grant education; to own a mortage; to see a game under the lights as the old dusky daylight falls to blue-black, a backdrop of stars and stony buildings, while friendly Negroes and Polacks roll their pants legs up, sit by side, feeling hte cool Canadian breeze off the lake. So much that is explicable in American life is made in Detroit.

Hard to imagine (for a few reasons) that this was in the 80’s. I’m pretty sure none of it’s true anymore, except, of course, for last line.

Vintage Printables

A new way to waste my time.  Sweet!

Vintage Printables, which I learned about from Design for Mankind, is an evolving online archive of vintage printed matter such maps, charts, illustrations, scientific work and signs.  It’s so fun to look through all this stuff.  And though I have not tested it myself, it is all printable, which is really exciting.  If you are sick of people at flea market trying to sell you framed pages from olde astronomy textbooks for $100 this is a way to fight back.  It’s also a way to get great wrapping paper and place mats.

The site is curated by “Swivelchair..”  He believes all of the images on the site are legally up-for-grabs but he has a long, smart and funny manifesto about public domain that is definitely worth reading.

Adichie on Achebe

There’s a really interesting piece on Salon by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (they’ve spelled her name wrong in her byline) on Chinua Achebe.  I’m calling it a “piece,” but it seems they’ve just excerpted her introduction to “The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God.”

I don’t know a lot about Achebe, and its was great to have Adichie provide more context to his writing, and to her own, along the way:

Still, the prejudiced representation of African characters in literature could not but have had an influence on Achebe’s development as a writer. He would, years later, write a famous essay about the portrayal of Africans in Joseph Conrad’s classic novel “Heart of Darkness,” arguing not that Conrad should not have written honestly about the racism of the time, but that Conrad failed to hold an authorial rejection of that worldview.

The strangeness of seeing oneself distorted in literature – and indeed of not seeing oneself at all – was part of my own childhood. I grew up in the Nigerian university town of Nsukka in the 1980s, reading a lot of British children’s books. My early writing mimicked the books I was reading: all my characters were white and all my stories were set in England. Then I read “Things Fall Apart.” It was a glorious shock of discovery, as was “Arrow of God,” which I read shortly afterwards; I did not know in a concrete way until then that people like me could exist in literature.

Litter or jerking off

NY Mag has a great piece on Patti Smith, who just published a book, Just Kids, about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.

The book sounds amazing:

…a shockingly beautiful book about their relationship, in which the roles evolved like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s, or even the siblings of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. It’s a classic, a romance about becoming an artist in the city, written in a spare, simple style of boyhood memoirs like Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time….Smith worked in part from a stack of teenage journals with her astrological sign on the front. “I have a good memory once it’s triggered, so with my notebooks, I could sit back and see things like a little movie,” she says. The process still took ten years and two publishers.

Wow, of course.  But what really got me excited was reading what Smith, 63, has to say about creativity.

“A day doesn’t go by where I don’t create something,” says Smith. “Sometimes it’s a rough day and I’m about to go to sleep at eleven o’clock, but I’ll get my Polaroid and take pictures of a series of things. Then I go to bed really happy because I have something to look at, something I did.”

It’s true – I sleep better when I can point to something I accomplished/created that day.  It makes me feel I used the time I was given, and that I deserve it.  It also helps me enjoy the subsequent days a bit more.

“My goals were lofty,” she says. “I wanted to be a painter, or to write Pinocchio or Alice in Wonderland, the kind of book I read a hundred times when I was a kid. I wanted to be in the canon, because to me the rest was litter or jerking off.”

Wanting to be in the cannon is wanting a lot, but if that isn’t the goal, why bother doing what you’re doing at all?  What’s the point  (I’m still wrestling with this one, actually).  Anyway, “litter of jerking off” really sums “the rest” right up. (Also, because my cat runs my life I thought Smith was referring to kitty litter the first time I read this, and that actually works really well.)

Although Smith became famous first, she and Mapplethorpe continued to guard each other’s talent. “Robert believed in me as much as he believed in himself, and it was incredible how much he believed in himself,” says Smith. “He would not rest until he helped me dive down, down, down, and access my confident part. And I did access it, finally. It came out in a funny way, as a performer. But because he gave it to me so early in life, I don’t have to be given it again and again—I just have it. I might have to work to find it when my world gets shook. But I can always find it.”

So many of the relationships we hear about between artists, or artists and their adorning, shit upon partners, are destructive and inhibiting.  What a gift he gave her!  (Where can I buy some?)

Finally, when describing her studio…

In here, among her things, it’s clear that she works best in a hothouse of those who have influenced her. The portal Burroughs spoke about is open for such channeling, she thinks. On tour, when she has days off, she usually visits graves: Chekhov and Bulgakov in Russia, or Samuel Beckett, Baudelaire, and Brancusi in Paris’s Montparnasse cemetery. “It’s infinitely more interesting for me to have all these people hang around me,” she says. “I’m never bored. I can access them if I’m trying to figure something out, just like I can access my family, or Robert.” There’s another reason, too: “We’ve always had a little maxim, in our band, that the guardians of history are soon rewarded with history itself,” says Kaye.

I love how free and honest she is about her influences and inspiration.  It doesn’t seem easy to be like that anymore.  Either people make you feel bad for being obviously influenced by someone (or you feel guilty saying you are), or doing so is off-putting because of the incredibly fucking annoying people who go on and on about how if you’re not tatted up with quotes from Hemingway or Carver or Kerouac (kill me now) you don’t get it.

Score