RIP Milorad Pavić (1929-2009)

Today Milorad Pavić died at the age of 80. He was the author of numerous novels, in particular the before-its-time hypertext Dictionary of the Khazars. The Dictionary of the Khazars was supposedly an encyclopedia about the Khazars, a medieval Eastern European tribe that accepted Judaism, but in fact it was a surreal work reminiscent of Borges in which the story was not told from front to back of the book but by following the references between articles. It would have been trivial to implement in HTML, but the book was written in 1984.

Happy Poe-day!

While the most anticipated 200th anniversary this year is the combined Darwin/Lincoln bicentennial on Feb 12th, they weren't the only famous people that were born in 1809. Today marks the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth -- which occurred in Boston -- not a town that one usually associates with the man who became an editor of the Richmond, VA based Southern Literary Messenger and who died in 1849 in Baltimore.

I'm sure that other blogs and newspapers will bring up "The Raven", but Poe was more than a macabre poet and was more sane and rational than the narrators of his fiction and poetry, which many people confuse with Poe himself. So, I present you with other sides of the man that may be new to you.

1) Poe the book reviewer. Here Poe reviews Francis Glass' bizarre "WASHINGTONII VITA" -- a biography of George Washington written in pseudo-classical Latin!

2) Poe the literary theorist. In the "Philosophy of Composition" Poe describes how he wrote -- or at least how he *thought* he wrote -- which may not be the same thing at all -- shades of the debate over whether the cliched "scientific method" actually describes what scientists do in practice. 

3) Poe the biologist! Or at least Poe the biology textbook author --The Conchologist's First Book: or, A System of Testaceous Malacology, Arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools. There's actually a lot of questions about Poe's contributions to this -- apparently he based it on an existing text and was accused of plagiarism. 

RIP David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

You may have heard the news; last Friday the literary Wunderkind of the 1990s, David Foster Wallace, hanged himself in his Southern Californian home.  I have to admit that I haven't thought much about Wallace since the turn of the century, but his 1996 Infinite Jest was (and perhaps still is) one of my favorite novels.  

In many ways, _Infinite Jest_ was the quintessential 1990s American novel -- the conceit of the story was that American economic and cultural influence would simply keep growing and growing in the future -- as indeed in those heady post-Cold War times it looked like it would.  Of course, part of Wallace's point was that would not necessarily be a good thing given the crass commercialization of US culture  -- his idea that names of calendar years would be sold to the highest bidder is entirely believable given that we live in the world of PETCO Park and Qualcomm Stadium.

Many people have compared Wallace to Bret Easton Ellis (Less than Zero, American Psycho), and in a way they have a point. Certainly, Wallace was far more erudite and literary, but just as Ellis captured the "soul" of Reagan-era America, Wallace did the same for the Clinton era. Who will do the same for our current era?

RIP Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007)

Well, besides TIGR, Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday as well. So it goes. While many of his later works were rather derivative, one is reminded of the quip about Bob Dylan: "sure, he's derivative nowadays, but the person he's plagiarizing from is his younger self." Certainly both Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle will stand the test of time, and I'm rather fond of Player Piano and Galapagos as well.