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Lux Perpetuam: Michael Crichton

Posted by admin on 11.05.2008 at 3:39 pm

Michael Crichton, the literary and literal giant (he was 6’9″!) passed away today after a long private battle with cancer.  Crichton, known for his evocative writing and accessible but engaging style penned such works as The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, and a fantastically successful string of works subsequently made in to movies such as Eaters of the Dead (adapted into “The 13th Warrior”), Congo, Sphere, Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, The Lost World, and Timeline.

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Crichton’s works focused Read more…

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Lux Perpetuam: David Foster Wallace

Posted by Jack on 09.15.2008 at 2:40 pm

Surprise is not a prerequisite for sadness.

David Foster Wallace, wordsmith notable for having written numerous great essays and the wonderful–if complex–Infinite Jest, was found dead yesterday.  Wallace’s wife found him after he had passed by hanging himself.

Few who were familiar with Wallace and his work will be totally shocked; suicide and depression were oft mentioned material for the author.  But the mere proliferation doesn’t ease the pain of losing this kind of talent.

His own prescience about knowing oneself (to use the cliche but correct Polonius phrase) and ability to take perspective, most notable (at least in the free-use realm) in his Commencement at Kenyon was one of his finest gifts.  At the same time this deftness with converting experience into words was one of his most difficult challenges to transcend.  As Wordsworth said of himself, “The world is too much with us; late and soon,” and one gets the feeling the world, and its dusty corners that Wallace shed light on, were indeed “too much with [him]“.  Thus, it is with the same sense which we took on the suicide of Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace will be missed not with shock, but with a kind of resigned tragedy.  It’s like the rain on a parade after a dour forecast; you packed your umbrella, but hope still that the storm will pass.  He was 46 years old.

Check out his excellent fansite for more information and resources about his writing.

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Lux Perpetuam: Robert Giroux

Posted by admin on 09.08.2008 at 3:36 pm

What do the following names have in common, besides their obvious amazing talent: Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott and William Golding? How about this list: George Orwell, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag?

Robert Giroux, who passed away on Friday at age 94 was the editor for the first list and the publisher for the second.  The man had a freakish connectedness in the literary world, having done everything from publishing Orwell’s 1984 to having the following conversation with T.S. Eliot (which I liberally steal from the NYT):

“His ambition to write might have prompted an exchange with Eliot, then in his late 50s, on the day they met in 1946, when Mr. Giroux, “just past 30,” as he recalled the moment in “The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes,” was an editor at Harcourt, Brace. “His most memorable remark of the day,” Mr. Giroux said, “occurred when I asked him if he agreed with the definition that most editors are failed writers, and he replied, ‘Perhaps, but so are most writers.’ ””

Giroux was a man who went from high-school drop out to publishing house luminary and did so with considerable skill and success.  Anyone who loves great literature should take a moment and think about an extraordinary man whose talent and risk-taking produced some of the finest works ever published (and even wrote a book himself).

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Lux Perpetuam: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Posted by admin on 08.08.2008 at 9:22 am



Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of a number of groundbreaking works including: Gulag, The First Circle and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is dead at age 89.  A Russian nationalist who was both a torch bearer of its greatness and simultaneously its largest critic, Solzhenitsyn established himself as both societal Pariah (in America and the USSR alike) and a fabulously gifted writer.

In the same way that the Russian composer group: “The Mighty Handful” of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakriev and Borodin defined what it meant to be a Russian in music, Solzhenitsyn takes his place among brilliant minds and realist Russian philosopher/writers such as Tolstoy and Doestoevsky.

Having brought the world around to see the terrors of the Gulag, the prison system in Russia, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in literature in 1970.  Like Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn was increasing critical of the cultural systems of the west (particularly lashing out against rock music when he was exiled to the US) but fixed on a goal of ameliorating a situation many had given up hope on in his home country, then the USSR.

The amazing part about him though, is the time and tenor under which he wrote his works.  Today, if someone as prolific as Solzhenitsyn were to go to a publisher he would be awarded a lucrative book deal and a massive marketing campaign, but because his work was deemed “subversive to the Russian state” he stated this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “…during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known…”  But luckily for us, his works would see the light of day and cause a huge uproar in the USSR and USA alike when the three volume Gulag Archipelago came out and rocked the public in a fashion similar to if a prisoner were to release a tell-all about Guantanamo (and there were even less info about it currently).

Hitchens writes that “Solzhenitsyn lived as if there were a thing as human dignity” and one is tempted to believe him.
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Find his works here.  My suggestion would be not to start with Gulag, but rather with A Day in the Life… or if you love Dante’s Inferno try on The First Circle which is about the first circle of hell where the writers and intellectuals are cursed to stay for eternity.  His writing The Cancer Ward is also unique as he spent time in a ward while cancer almost took his life in 1954.

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Randy Pausch – Lux Perpetuam

Posted by admin on 07.25.2008 at 9:56 am

Randy Pausch, notable computer science teacher at Carnegie Mellon died today, finally succumbing to the pancreatic cancer that he knew would take his life eventually.  Pausch, perhaps more known for his inspirational Last Lecture, given on September 18th 2007 (and subsequently published), was 47 years old.

From the AP –

The talk was videotaped and subsequently criss-crossed the world via the Internet. More than 3.2 million people had viewed the “Last Lecture” on YouTube alone as of Friday, and according to Carnegie Mellon, tens of millions have watched Pausch’s inspirational talk.

“If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you,” said Pausch, the married father of three young children, at the start of the lecture.

He focused in his talk not on his illness but on “my childhood dreams; how I believe I have been able to enable the dreams of others; and, to some degree, lessons learned… how you can use the stuff you hear today to pursue your dreams or enable the dreams of others.”

Pausch outlined his own childhood dreams, which included writing a World Book Encyclopedia entry, experiencing zero gravity and creating Disney attractions — all dreams that were fulfilled…

“If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself,” Pausch said. “The dreams will come to you.”

The talk spawned a book, called “The Last Lecture,” which was translated into 30 languages and topped best-seller lists around the world.

The book was an attempt by Pausch “to put myself in a bottle that will one day wash up on the beach for my children,” he was quoted as saying by Carnegie Mellon.

Here we have the hardcover (and large print) + audio CD.

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