Chris Boese's Weblog

JK Rowling outs Dumbledore... and reveals other tantilizing Harry Potter back stories

Oh man, I am LOVING this stuff! See, I always knew Dumbledore was gay. I am a total Harry Potter series nut, and I suppose at my age I should be embarrassed by that, but I never have been. I know why that series grabbed me and never let go (besides the phenomenal talents of Jim Dale, who brings the audio books alive even better than the films).

It was Dumbledore. I was always reading the Harry Potter series for Dumbledore. He was Harry's hero, but he was the reason I was reading the series, Dumbledore and hoggy woggy Hogwarts, which was my secret dream of utopia. There, I said it.

It's like, if you get to choose where you go when you die, the landscape of the afterlife, for me, it will be Hogwarts. Ooh, and I need Dumbledore to be there.  The last few books were hard for me that way (no spoilers yet, don't worry), but in the end, JK gave me what I needed by the end of the last book.

And in her talk below, makes me realize why the Harry Potter series also makes me want to sit and watch Donnie Darko over and over. It's not the literary stuff I'm valuing (cuz high literature/film, it ain't), but the same thing is drawing me, just like, also maybe, Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

Anyway, let's pull out some juicy bits below! Watch out. SPOILER ALERT!

Link: The Leaky Cauldron: J. K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall Reveals Dumbledore is Gay; Neville Marries Hannah Abbott, and Much More.

J. K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall Reveals Dumbledore is Gay; Neville Marries Hannah Abbott, and Much More

J.K. Rowling  

Posted by: Edward

 

October 19, 2007, 09:17 PM

Note: A preliminary transcript is now at the end of this post; please note that there may be some small errors in phrasing, and all questions have been paraphrased to save time; this is not a final transcript, but the accuracy of the questions and answers have been maintained.

[...]

Tonight, the one thousand grand prize winners (and their guests) of the Scholastic's Open Book Tour Sweepstakes along with a companion got the chance to see Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling read from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," answer questions and sign books at New York City's Carnegie Hall. We have exclusive information this evening on the myriad of "Deathly Hallows" questions she answered as well as in-depth details on a number of subjects she spoke about.  

A caution now.  Parts of the following WILL contain book seven SPOILERS.   

[...]

First, the biggest revelation of the night came when Jo revealed to her audience the fact that Albus Dumbledore is gay and had fallen in love with fellow wizard and friend, Gellert Grindelwald. This elicited a huge reaction and prolonged ovation. So much so, it promoted Jo to say:  

"If I had known this would have made you this happy, I would have announced it years ago."

The question was: Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?  

JKR: My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair... [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, "Dumbledore's gay!" [laughter] "If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!"  

Jo also said after revelation: "You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! ...Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh?"   

[heh. That would about be the understatement of the year. hoo-eee.]

Jo also revealed that Neville Longbottom married Hufflepuff Hannah Abbott and she was to become the landlady at the iconic Leaky Cauldron Pub. She thought that people would find the fact of Neville's living over a pub particularly cool.

[Actually, I was more interested in Neville becoming Herbology teacher at Hogwarts. 19 years later, the other faculty had retired, but Hagrid was still going strong. Maybe half-giants live longer too, but big dogs don't live longer than small dogs. I was at least wishing Hagrid could have hooked up with Madame Maxime. And I expected Hermione to be Headmistress at Hogwarts, not running the Wizengamont (sp?)]

Equally large revelations were made concerning Petunia Dursley when Jo answered the question of what Petunia could not bring herself to say when Harry and the Dursleys parted ways before his seventeenth birthday. She would have wished him luck, saying:

"I do know what you're up against and I hope it's okay."

[Yeah, but how does she know? More backstory there? Hmmm. Not from listening to Lily and Snape through the bushes, that's for sure. The milk of human kindness still curdles in Aunt Petunia's breast.]

Information on the original Order members was also revealed during tonight's event. Jo related the fact that Remus Lupin, prior to the third book, was unemployable because he was a werewolf and upon his graduation from Hogwarts along with James and Lily, was supported by James using their own money. In addition to this she shed more light on the early days of the Order, saying James, Sirius, Remus and Lily were full time Order members. "Full Time Fighters," as Jo put it.  

Jo also went into further detail about the many portraits in the wizarding world and their occupants. An occupant can only move freely to other portraits in their dwelling or to another portrait in which they are depicted. She also revealed that Harry himself made sure that the portrait of Snape made it into the Headmasters Office, but doubts that he ever went to speak to it.

[I dunno. He named his kid after Snape. I always figured either Harry or Hermione would be in that office one day, and neither would mind if Snape's portrait was there, even if it were as unpleasant as the other Slytherin former headmaster, Phineas Nigelis (it's so hard when you're addicted more to the audio books, you hear words, but can't spell them!).

Then there's the rule, I think, for getting to be a portrait in the headmaster's office. You have to swear an oath of allegiance to support the current headmaster, whoever that is. I think that they said something about that one time when Phineas Nigelis was pretending to be sleeping and didn't want to do what Dumbledore had asked him to do. So even if Snape's portrait were in there and ornery, he'd have to support the headmaster. But wasn't there something else, about abdicating his post, which may have disqualified Snape from being in there?

On yet a third hand, Harry could never do well in a class with Snape in it. I mean, geez, the guy defeats the Dark Lord, but cowers when Snape sneers at his potions? I mean, come on, Harry, get over it.]

[...]

Finally, speaking about her personal feelings and experiences of the past seventeen years with the boy wizard, Jo said finishing the first book and the seventh book produced very similar feelings. She also admits that she was very difficult to live with for the weeks following her completing the last book in the "Harry Potter" series.  

A full transcript of this evening's event will be available on TLC soon. TLC will update throughout the evening with the latest from this event.  

Some highlights have been transcribed:  

[...]

How did you decide that Molly Weasley would be the one to finish off Bellatrix?  

I always knew Molly was going to finish her off. I think there was some speculation that Neville would do it, because Neville obviously has a particular reason to hate Bellatrix. ..So there were lots of optios for Bellatrix, but I never deviated. I wanted it to be Molly, and I wanted it to be Molly for two reasons.

The first reason was I always saw Molly as a very good witch but someone whose light is necessarily hidden under a bushel, because she isn't in the kitchen a lot and she has had to raise, among others, and [Arthur?] which is like, enough... I wanted Molly to have her moment and to show that because a woman had dedicated herself to her family does not mean that she doesn't have a lot of other talents.  

Second reason: It was the meeting of two kinds of - if you call what Bellatrix feels for Voldemort love, I guess we'll call it love, she has a kind of obsession with him, it's a very sick obsession ... and I wanted to match that kind of obsession with maternal love... the power that you give someone by loving them. So Molly was really an amazing exemplar of maternal love. ... There was something very satisfying about putting those two women together.

[I was actually sure of the rightness of Molly facing off with Bellatrix from the moment I saw what Molly's buggart was. That's how I knew she had to have her moment to step up and stand up to her fears. I just wish she were more of a full member of the order, instead of its mommy-cliche mad she-bear. After all, Charlie and the twins take after her more than dad. Of course she is a formidable witch.

As for this next one... oh dear, I knew this was coming. What a wonderful question! From the mouths of babes...]

[...]
 
Q: In the Goblet of Fire Dumbledore said his brother was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms [JKR buries her head, to laughter] on a goat; what were the inappropriate charms he was practicing on that goat?  

JKR: How old are you?  

Eight.    

JKR: I think that he was trying to make a goat that was easy to keep clean [laughter], curly horns. That's a joke that works on a couple of levels. I really like Aberforth and his goats. But you know Aberforth having this strange fondness for goats if you've read book seven, came in really useful to Harry, later on, because a goat, a stag, you know. If you're a stupid Death Eater, what's the difference. So, that is my answer to YOU.  

[loud applause]

  Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?

My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how I always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair... [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, "Dumbledore's gay!" [laughter] If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!

[...]

Q: What did Dumbledore write in the letter to make the Dursleys take Harry?  

JKR: Very, very good question. As you know, as we find out in book seven, Petunia once really wanted to be part of that world. And you discover that Dumbledore has written to her prior to the Howler...Dumbledore wrote to her very kindly and explained why he couldn't let her come to Hogwarts to become a witch. So, Petunia, much as she denies it afterwards, much as she turns against that world when she met Uncle Vernon, who is the biggest anti-wizard you could ever met in your life, a tiny part of her, and that's the part that almost wished Harry luck when she said goodbye to him in this book, she just teetered on the verge of saying, I do know what you're up against and I hope it's OK. But she couldn't bring herself to say it. Years of pretending she doesn't care have hardened her. But Dumbledore appealed in the letter you're asking about, so that part of Petunia that did remember wanting desperately to be part of the world and he appealed to her sense of fair play to a sister that she had hated because Lily had what she couldn't have. So that's how she persuaded Petunia to keep Harry. Good question.

[...]

[This next question the core for me, and I guess that means I identify as an older reader, but more, this is is where I owe my biggest thank you to JK Rowling. I'm just a sucker for people who can point out the bankruptcy of fascist, authoritarian thinking with such flair. I mean, it is troubling, she gives us Muggles, and yet in the wizarding world, there's the equivalent of Muggles too, like Fudge or Umbridge (I still love the names).

But maybe the lesson of the wizard fascists is that power corrupts, no matter what the source of that power may be.]

Q: Many of us older readers have noticed over the years similarities between the Death Eaters tactics and the Nazis from the 30s and 40s. Did you use that historical era as a model for Voldemort's reign and what were the lessons that you hope to impart to the next generation?  

It was conscious. I think that if you're, I think most of us if you were asked to name a very evil regime we would think Nazi Germany. There were parallels in the ideology. I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world. So you have the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion of purity, which is this great fallacy, but it crops up all over the world. People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves in nothing else they can pride themselves on perceived purity. So yeah that follows a parallel. It wasn't really exclusively that. I think you can see in the Ministry even before it's taken over, there are parallels to regimes we all know and love.    

[Laughter and applause.]  

So you ask what lessons, I suppose. The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think ti's one of the reasons that some people don't like the books, but I think that's it's a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.  

[Loud applause.]

Q: What did it feel like completing your first Harry Potter book versus completing the last.  

JKR: What a great question. It felt strangely similar actually. Both feelings were more alike than with any of the other books. When I finished the first book, there was this incredible sense of achievement that i'd actually written a novel, i"d actually finished my book. And it was after seven years of writing and making notes and rewriting. And then when I finished the seventh book, that was 17 years. WIth the seventh book there was a huge feeling of loss as well. I couldn't believe I was done. And it took me weeks, as my poor, long-suffering husband will attest. He's here. [applause] Yes, you should clap him, he's very patient! [ovation] He's not the type to stand up and take about but trust me. Toward the end of a book i'm not that easy to live with. Yes Neil would bear witness to the fact that for weeks, really... it felt like a bereavement. I knew it was coming. I was prepared, I knew it would hurt, and it was huge. So, that's why I'm glad to be here and talk about it. Thank you.  

[...]  

Q: Harry often wondered about his parents lives before he died. What did Lily, James, Remus, Lupin and Sirius do after Hogwarts?  

JKR: To take Remus first, Remus was unemployable. Poor Lupin, prior to Dumbledore taking him in, lead a really impoverished life because no one wanted to employ a werewolf. The other three were full-time members of the Order of the Phoenix. If you remember when Lily, James and co. were at school, the first war was raging. It never reached the heights that the second war reached, because the Ministry was never infiltrated to that extend but it was a very bad time, the same disappearances, the same deaths. So that's what they did, they left school. James has gold, enough to support Sirius and Lily. So I suppose they lived foff a private income. But they were full-time fighters, that's what they did, until Lily fell pregnant with Harry. So then they went into hiding.

[Hmmm, I'm going to say something sarcastic here. So Dumbledore and the original Order of the Phoenix took in James, Lily, Sirius, and (we presume the Order would not discriminate against Lupin, would they?). If so, those are some pretty young wizards to be putting to work right off like that, just out of school, even if Lily and James were head girl and head boy. If Mrs. Weasley were around, she would have pitched a fit!

I mean, weren't there any older wizards who could be daring fighters in the Order? I'm sure there were, the names of the folks Mad Eye listed off, from that picture. Maybe they were just killed off first, the McKinnons and all that. Like Madame Bones, like Neville's grandmother.

I was just thinking, maybe Dumbledore was recruiting his army right out of school, maybe he'd been doing it for decades, just another version of Slughorn, eh? Maybe there was a good reason Fudge was so scared that's what Dumbledore was up to. Dumbledore's track record wasn't that good.

Also kind of illuminates Voldemort's goal in wanting to run Hogwarts. An innocuous little wizarding school it was not. It was prime recruiting grounds. Andover? Skull and Bones of the wizarding world?

I jokes! Psych!]

 

We now interrupt this blog for a bit of 1855 Leaves of Grass

Link: Leaves of Grass (1855).

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? 
Have you practiced so long to learn to read? 
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? 

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, 
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left, 
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, 
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.   

I have heard what the talkers were talking . . . . the talk of the beginning and the end, 
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.   

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now; 
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.   

Urge and urge and urge, 
Always the procreant urge of the world.   

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . . . Always substance and increase, 
Always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction . . . . always a breed of life.   

To elaborate is no avail . . . . Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.   

Sure as the most certain sure . . . . plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, 
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, 
I and this mystery here we stand.

Walt Whitman

 

Philip K. Dick is starting to get his due

Link: Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come - New York Times.

I have to post this as vindication, for all my students who complained about my showing Blade Runner and making them do their first paper on it, for years in first-year composition.

I had a terrible nightmare this morning that had to have been something straight out of Dick, now that I think about it. It was just terrible, a flashback from my previous job. In the dream I sat for seemingly hours, trying to write three 15-second "stories," the details and order of which kept changing the entire time I was writing them, the whole time sitting in someone's ratty bedroom on some really uncomfortable upholstery. When I woke up, I was so sore, I could barely hobble to the bathroom.

They oughta do a study on how many people's dreams get polluted by waking up with NPR news bleed-thru into their dreams.

Anyway, I wasn't dreaming of electric sheep, but I do have a Dick novel I would option for a screenplay in a heartbeat. I'm not going to say which one it is, though. Someone else might get it first. [grin]

Link: Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come - New York Times.

Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come

By BRENT STAPLES

Published: June 8, 2007 

Philip K. Dick was still an obscure pulp novelist known mainly to teenage boys when a friend predicted that he would one day have more impact on the world than celebrated writers like William Faulkner, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. The prediction seemed almost delusional in the 1960s, when Dick was popping pills around the clock and churning out novels in a science fiction ghetto from which he seemed destined never to escape.

He did get out, but only posthumously. And with his recent celebration as the sage of futurism, and his pervasiveness on bookshelves and in Hollywood, the early predictions about the growth of his influence have come to seem prescient.

Dick was largely unknown to the general public at the time of his death in 1982. Most of his novels and short stories were out of print and seemed destined to stay that way. Things began to change after his favorite and best written novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” was introduced to the country in the form of the now classic movie “Blade Runner.”

[...]

The film struck a number of chords in the real world. Its vision of the polyglot, environmentally ruined Los Angeles spawned the phrase “Blade Runnerization” among urban planners who recognized it as a frighteningly likely vision of things to come. In recent years, movies based on Dick’s work —“Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “Next” — have become a cottage industry in Hollywood. Numerous other projects, including a film based on his life, are said to be in the works.

The movie craze carried over into the book world, where publishers have pushed more than 30 of Dick’s novels and scores of his short stories back into print, this time with book covers and promotional material designed to appeal to mainstream readers. The rehabilitation hit a literary high note earlier this month, when the Library of America issued “Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s,” which placed him in the company of Henry James, Saul Bellow, Faulkner and other heavyweights.

Dick wrote his share of bad novels, which is hardly surprising given that he wrote stoked up on drugs and suffered no end of paranoid delusions. His best books distinguish themselves from ordinary science fiction by focusing not on technology, but on the toll that technological advances often take on human values — and on the soul itself.

[...]

Dick was fully engaged in the science of cybernetics — which supposes a similarity between machine and human functioning — and deeply alarmed about what he saw as the encroachment of programmable machinery into human life.

His writing was shaped by the legitimate worry that human beings were merging with the technology that was supposed to be serving them and becoming less human (which is to say, more machine-like) in the bargain.

Androids in much of science fiction are cast as entertaining house pets. Dick’s androids are sinister and potentially dangerous, because they lack the leavening spark of humanity.

[...]

The science fiction writer’s job is to survey the future and report back to the rest of us. Dick took this role seriously. He spent his life writing in ardent defense of the human and warning against the perils that would flow from an uncritical embrace of technology. As his work becomes more popular, readers who know him only from the movies will find it even darker and more disturbing — and quite relevant to the technologically obsessed present.

      

 

Stories you probably didn't hear about, and don't want to miss

The Project Censored series of books remains as important as ever, but for now, let's focus on the stories on this list, and make sure they are not forgotten.

Link: Amazon.com: Censored 2007: The Top 25 Censored Stories (Censored): Books: Peter Phillips,Project Censored,Tom Tomorrow,Robert Jensen.

From a helpful reviewer on Amazon:

This year's CENSORED 2007 is PC's 30th anniversary edition and, along with the top 25 censored stories of the year and the usual array of supplementary essays on media bias, this year's edition includes updates on the most important stories of the last 30 years - a nifty bonus. 2007 stories include:

1.  The Future of the Internet: giant cable companies seek a monopoly on cable Internet
2.  Halliburton charged with selling nuclear secrets to Iran - illegally - under Cheney
3.  The worldwide death of oceans: warming, toxic buildup, dead zones, changing PH balance, fish, grass and kelp die offs 
4. Hunger and homelessness in the US on the rise: Government solution? Discontinue Census surveys that keep statistical tables on poverty
5.  US supports genocide in the Congo to gain access to resources used to make high-tech gadgetry such as cell phones
6.  The end of federal whistleblower protections
7.  US operatives torture detainees to death in Afghanistan and Iraq
8.  Pentagon exempts itself from the Freedom of Information Act
9.  World Bank funds the Palestine-Israel Wall
10. The death toll of civilians in Iraq from the expanded air war
11. Dangers of genetically modified foods confirmed
12. The dangers of common pesticides like Roundup
13. Homeland Security contracts KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) to build detention centers in the US
14. The EPA's primary research partner is the chemical industry
15. Ecuador and Mexico defy the US on the international criminal court
16. The Iraq reconstruction promotes OPEC agenda: profit for major US oil companies
17. Physicist concludes that official 9/11 explanation is scientifically implausible
18. Destruction of rainforests is at an all-time high
19. Bottled water: a global environmental problem
20. Gold mining threatens ancient Andean glaciers
21. Billions in homeland security undisclosed
22. US Oil targets Kyoto in Europe
23. Cheney's Halliburton stock rose of 3000 percent last year
24. Pentagon plans to build new landmines
25. US military in Paraguay threatens the region

The best kind of tribute to Vonnegut: QUOTES!

They're collecting them over at Daily Kos... more being added all the time.

Here are some of my favs:

Link: Daily Kos: State of the Nation.

"We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodley do,
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust."

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

As part of the gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger-from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains.  That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

What is the purpose of life?  Kilgore Trout's answer:

To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fool.

Kilgore Trout's epitaph:  We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

"Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon!"

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.

Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

"The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to know there is such a thing as being smart."

"The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were."

"Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative."

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Kurt Vonnegut R.I.P.: the world will miss one of its most sarcastic voices

I couldn't do a steady diet of Kurt Vonnegut, but I always had a love of his arch sensibilities. We also shared a birthday, something that every newspaper horoscope column would tell me every year on my birthday. Sort of makes you feel like you're buddies or something, you know?

My favorite Vonnegut story is Player Piano. What's yours? 

Here are some other obits:

Link: Kurt Vonnegut | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited.

Link: Democracy Now! | Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84.

Link: US writer Vonnegut dies from injuries sustained in fall - North America - World - Breaking News - Belfast Telegraph.

US writer Vonnegut dies from injuries sustained in fall

Thursday, April 12, 2007

The US writer and novelist Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84 from injuries he suffered in a fall at his Manhattan home a number of weeks ago.

Vonnegut was the author of 19 published novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays.

He was regarded as one of the United States' most articulate and imaginative social critics, using satirical commentary to get his message across.

Vonnegut is best known for his novels Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle.

Link: NPR : Novelist Vonnegut Remembered for His Black Humor.

Remembrances

Novelist Vonnegut Remembered for His Black Humor

by Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne 

Thos Robinson

Kurt Vonnegut and his wife, Jill Krementz, attending the opening night of  What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole at Biltmore Theatre on Feb. 2, 2006 in New York City. Getty Images

NPR Interviews with Vonnegut

• Sep. 12, 1999
  Vonnegut on a new collection of his earliest short stories, Bagombo Snuff Box.
• Sep. 10, 2003
  Vonnegut on the British firebombing of Dresden, Germany, near the end of World War II.
• Sep. 11, 2005
  Vonnegut on the release of a collection of essays and speeches, A Man Without a Country.
• Jan. 23, 2006
  Vonnegut on how society has changed in the last 50 years.

Morning Edition, April 12, 2007 · Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., the acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels, short stories, essays and plays, died in Manhattan Wednesday. He was 84.

Vonnegut leaves behind many novels, including that iconic novel born out of his memories of war and its absurdities. Vonnegut's mother killed herself when he was a young man leaving to serve in World War II. As a private in that war, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a former slaughterhouse in Dresden. From there he stepped out into the hellish, surreal landscape that Dresden became after it was firebombed. It took him 25 years to turn that experience into Slaughterhouse-Five.

"You can't remember pure nonsense," Vonnegut told Renee Montagne in 2003. "It was pure nonsense, the pointless destruction of that city, and, well, I just couldn't get it right. … I kept writing crap, as they say."

Slaughterhouse-Five, filled with the blackest of black humor, was finally published in 1969 — and became an instant bestseller. Vonnegut said he saw the book's publication as a kind of liberation.

"I think it had not only freed me, I think it freed writers," he said, "because the Vietnam War made our leadership and our motives so scruffy and essentially stupid that we could finally talk about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis, and what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly. You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff."

Vonnegut was a committed humanist and an outraged critic of the war in Iraq. On the lecture circuit in the years before his death, he told students that teaching is friendship, and he told artists that their anti-war protests had the power of a banana cream pie. Vonnegut also asked people to notice when they feel happy.

Fellow author Gore Vidal says Vonnegut was a writer like no one else. "He was a witty writer. He was a very good science fiction writer, which meant that he could deal rather safely in satire at the times in the '50s when other people didn't really dare."

Indeed Vonnegut approached the darkest subjects with humor, which was also the way he described his own life. He was a longtime smoker who once explained the habit by calling it a "fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide." In Vonnegut's case, it never quite took: He lived into his ninth decade, and died from complications from a fall.

Vonnegut's last work was a collection of essays called A Man Without a Country. In it, he suggested the way that music helped him through tragic times.

"Why this is so I don't know," he explained in a 2005 interview. "Or what music is I don't know. But it helps me so. During the Great Depression in Indianapolis when I was in high school I would go to jazz joints and listen to black guys playing, and man they could really do it. And I was really teared up. Still the case now."

Though he was a vocal religious skeptic, Vonnegut wrote in that final essay collection that "if I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: 'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'"

[...]

                                                            

Blackwater and Jeremy Scahill: pretty amazing reporting

Jeremy Scahill is making the rounds, and I hope to get in to see him speak at an event tomorrow, now that his book is coming out from Nation Books. I just heard an extended interview with him on the Democracy Now podcast, and Amy Goodman will be moderating the talk tomorrow.

I've been obsessing on Blackwater for some time now, but Scahill has really done the kind of research I was hungry for, and I'm really impressed to hear about the backgrounds of both Erik Prince and Cofer Black, and their excursions and interests in Afghanistan, Somalia and Chile. Just fascinating, the timing on some of this stuff, and 9/11. And Blackwater in New Orleans too.

The question is, is Blackwater the new global Brown Shirts?

I have got to read this book! I think I'll get a signed copy tomorrow.

Link: Bush's Shadow Army.

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070402/scahill

Bush's Shadow Army

by JEREMY SCAHILL

[from the April 2, 2007 issue]

Jeremy Scahill reports on the Bush Administration's growing dependence on private security forces such as Blackwater USA and efforts in Congress to rein them in. This article is adapted from his new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books).

On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting--many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation--Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.

"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."

The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757--American Airlines Flight 77--smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war--laid out just a day before--on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."

Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the "most sweeping transformation of America's global force posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld's trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in modern warfare--the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.

The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq--an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.

[...]

The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq--an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.

To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as "its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors--constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors--conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.

[...]

In the ensuing years the company has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war on terror," winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts, many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres, making it the world's largest private military base. Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries, with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing surveillance blimps and target systems.

In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans, where it billed the federal government $950 per man, per day--at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from Texas to Mississippi. Since Katrina, it has aggressively pursued domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division. Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the Department of Homeland Security, and its representatives have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company has applied for operating licenses in all US coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical presence inside US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California.

[...]

 

Human Subjects Review Boards gone mad?

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

I ran into this kind of ridiculousness in grad school as well. The thing is, my study was massively attentive to research ethics, and I went far beyond whatever ethical requirements a review board might make, because the theoretical frame of my study took a strong position against the exploitation that comes with colonialist thinking, even with scholarly "territories."

But even so, I ducked out on the Human Subjects review with one quick trick. It may not have been the best solution, and, as the absurd issues pointed up in the article below highlight, the Review Board probably could have still taken an insanity pill and come after me.

Basically, even though I was technically conducting an ethnography in cyberspace, I chose to ONLY collect texts that would have otherwise existed in the public domain, a linguistic fiction that worked because communication in cyberspace domains is a hybrid of both published texts and live interaction.

The article below accurately points out, such restrictions certainly limit the kinds of findings that can come from any research. To my end, I still did "informal" research, and just removed it from any connection to my formal data-gathering process, through forming personal and private relationships in the group I was studying, but keeping them out of the study. But they surely did inform my larger breadth of knowledge on my subject.

Another reason why this is just nuts occurred to me when working back in the field of journalism the last five years.

Since the journalistic enterprise is not constructed as formal "research," journalists can do many more things to gather information from human subjects than academic researchers can. How does this affect how knowledge is made, how truths are constructed, when academic censorship becomes a major influence in the social construction of that knowledge?

Journalists operate with a Jeffersonian epistemology of sorts, where the supposedly free flow of ideas helps them arrive at the best-guess contingent truths. Yet, by default, because academics stay in their disciplinary walled gardens and rarely participate in public knowledge-making as public intellectuals, the journalistic research methods construct more of our common truths than anything else, simply because academics have ceded the Commons to them.

Meanwhile, Human Subjects Review Boards seem to have morphed into Cotton Mather and the good folk of 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, seeing evil lurking in every nuance and human interaction, every specter, every hint of a specter.

And do you know why? It's because I've been coming into their homes in the night, during their dreams, and pinching them, over and over. Pinch, pinch.

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: February 28, 2007

Ever since the gross mistreatment of poor black men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to light three decades ago, the federal government has required ethics panels to protect people from being used as human lab rats in biomedical studies. Yet now, faculty and graduate students across the country increasingly complain that these panels have spun out of control, curtailing academic freedom and interfering with research in history, English and other subjects that poses virtually no danger to anyone. 

Photo by Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

Bernadette McCauley, a historian who was temporarily banned by an ethics panel from doing any research.

The panels, known as Institutional Review Boards, are required at all institutions that receive research money from any one of 17 federal agencies and are charged with signing off in advance on almost all studies that involve a living person, whether a former president of the United States or your own grandmother. This results, critics say, in unnecessary and sometimes absurd demands.

Among the incidents cited in recent report by the American Association of University Professors are a review board asking a linguist studying a preliterate tribe to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form,” and a board forbidding a white student studying ethnicity to interview African-American Ph.D. students “because it might be traumatic for them.”

“It drives historians crazy,” said Joshua Freeman, the director of the City University’s graduate history program. “It’s a medical model, it’s inappropriate and ignorant.” One student currently waiting for a board to approve his study of a strike in the 1970s, Mr. Freeman said, had to submit a list of questions he was going to ask workers and union officials, file signed consent forms, describe the locked location where he would keep all his notes, take a test to certify he understood the standards.

Review boards, first created in 1974, were initially restricted to biomedical research. In 1981 the regulations were revised to cover all research that involves “human subjects” and is designed to contribute to “generalizable knowledge.”

Yet precisely how to interpret these rules has largely been left to each review board — 5,564 in all. And while the regulations apply specifically to research that gets federal dollars, many colleges use Institutional Review Boards to monitor all research, no matter where the funds come from. This system of helter-skelter enforcement, critics say, has no meaningful oversight and no appeal process.

[...]

But to many faculty and graduate students, review boards are like a blister that gets worse with every step. Those outside of the hard sciences say the legitimate concerns over ethics and safety are largely irrelevant to most of their research.

According to a stack of reports, symposiums and studies by academic associations and scholars, the system’s “mission creep” is having a pernicious and widespread effect on humanities and social science research. Legal scholars also argue the boards violate the First Amendment.

The growing number of complaints in recent years apparently stems from an overall crackdown after a series of medical-research blunders beginning with the death of an 18-year-old in a gene-therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

[...]

In the past year, discussions about what some call the “I.R.B. wars” have sprung up in specialty publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education, conferences, scholarly journals and blogs. Although research proposals are rarely rejected, scholars argue that the requested changes in the wording of questions and consent forms can alter the nature of the study and scare off participants.

Bernadette McCauley, a historian at Hunter College, said she ran into trouble a couple of years ago when she tried to help students working with the Museum of the City of New York on an exhibition about Washington Heights. She asked if a few nuns who had grown up in that neighborhood and whom she knew from her research would talk to the students. And that, Ms. McCauley said, was “when things went haywire.”

The review board discovered the request and lambasted Ms. McCauley for failing to consult with it, she said. The board also demanded proof that previous research for a completed book did not use any archival material involving living people and banned her from doing any research.

Michael Arena, the director of communications at City University, said in an e-mail message that Ms. McCauley initially refused to send in a “brief description” of her research so that board members could determine whether federal regulations covered her work. Ms. McCauley hired a lawyer and after six months of negotiations, the board agreed that her research was exempt.

[...]

Ms. Dougherty, an associate professor of communications at Missouri, said review boards were needed because “historically, social science has done things abhorrent to human subjects.” Unfortunately the current process “obliterates a lot of research,” she said, because untenured faculty and graduate students on a timetable cannot afford to spend months waiting for approval. So, for example, “instead of talking to people who are victims of violence, you might look at newspaper articles,” she said, echoing a common complaint that the requirements cause academics to steer clear of controversial topics. Research decisions “should be guided by science,” she said, “not whether or not it’s going to get through the board.”

Ms. Dougherty said she was willing to speak openly, unlike many graduate students and faculty, because she had tenure.

[...]

Mr. Schwetz said there was no chance that some subjects like oral history and journalism would be altogether excluded from review, as some academic organizations have urged. “If we were just to say, ‘Assume you don’t have to take them before an I.R.B.,’ I think we would regret that,” he said. But he said the new guidelines “will give a lot of examples and will give more guidance on how to make the decision on what is research and what is not.”

Some critics fault the universities, placing blame either with overzealous panels or with university administrations that have not done enough to differentiate between research that receives federal money and research that does not.

Mr. Freeman of City University said that within the humanities “most faculty members don’t know these rules exist.” He added, “If they in fact followed these rules, the whole I.R.B. system would grind to a halt.”

 

We're all going to miss Molly Ivins...

Even those who didn't agree with her positions will feel a blank spot. I'm not in that group, however. I can't tell you how many times I wish she was a permanent replacement for the NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who often took similar positions, but with greater straining toward eloquence or cleverness, an eloquence and cleverness that just seemed to fall effortlessly from Ivins's pen.

I'd wondered, last month, when Ivins declared a wall-to-wall column campaign against "The Shrub's" proposed troop increase in Iraq, how she could hope to sustain her extended protest, her fever pitch. I must say, I didn't know what was going on with her health. I thought she'd inadvertently given herself an assignment that would be impossible to sustain. But I've no doubt, she knew she could sustain it for the time she had left.

As with another dear friend I lost just a few weeks ago, I have to say it's just that the time they both had left ended too suddenly, for us at least.

Link: Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins dies - Politics - MSNBC.com.

Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins dies at 62

Best-selling author, sharp-witted Texas liberal succumbs to breast cancer

Taylor Jones / AP file

Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins poses for a portrait at her home Sept. 22 in Austin, Texas. She died Wednesday at 62 after a long battle with breast cancer.

View related photos

BREAKING NEWS

Updated: 7 minutes ago

AUSTIN, Texas - Best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, the sharp-witted liberal who skewered the political establishment and referred to President Bush as “Shrub,” died Wednesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62.

David Pasztor, managing editor of the Texas Observer, confirmed her death.

The writer, who made a living poking fun at Texas politicians, whether they were in her home base of Austin or the White House, revealed in early 2006 that she was being treated for breast cancer for the third time.

[...]

To Ivins, "liberal" was no insult. "Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal — fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed," she wrote in a column included in her 1998 collection, "You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You."

In a column in mid-January, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war," Ivins wrote in the Jan. 11 column. "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"

[...]

Ivins' best-selling books included those she co-authored with Lou Dubose about Bush. One was titled "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" and another was "BUSHWHACKED: Life in George W. Bush's America."

Ivins' jolting satire was directed at people in positions of power. She maintained that aiming it at the powerless would be cruel.

"The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point," she wrote in a 1997 column. "Poor people do not shut down factories,... Poor people didn't decide to use `contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits."

 

Link: Molly Ivins, known for poking fun at politicians, dies at 62 - CNN.com.

[...]

Ivins loved to write about politics and called the Texas Legislature, which she playfully referred to as "The Lege," the best free entertainment in Austin.

"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?" she wrote in a 2002 column about a California political race.

Born Mary Tyler Ivins, the California native grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University's journalism school. She also studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.

Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She worked her way up at the Chronicle, then went on to the Minneapolis Tribune, becoming the first woman police reporter in the city.

[...]

n the late 1960s, according to the syndicate, she was assigned to a beat called "Movements for Social Change" and wrote about "angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

Ivins later became co-editor of The Texas Observer, a liberal Austin-based biweekly publication of politics and literature that was founded more than 50 years ago.

Bare feet too much for New York Times

She joined The New York Times in 1976. She worked first as a political reporter in New York and later was named Rocky Mountain bureau chief, covering nine mountain states.

But Ivins' use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.

"She's a force of nature," Sargent said.

[...]

One of my most influential teachers has died

Drury "Dean" Long died November 21, 2006 in Thousand Palms, California

He was a high school teacher for me, and one on whom I modeled many of my own teaching techniques. The one high school teacher I had who was so powerful and communicated so much to me, I didn't meet another on his level until I got into my MFA program at Arkansas and met Jim Whitehead.

I took every literature class Mr. Long taught, and my senior year I was a T.A. for those same classes, just so I'd have an excuse to sit through them again. I'll never forget Mr. Long saying there was no point in reading all the footnotes on T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," since most of them referenced Sir James Frasier's "The Golden Bough" anyway. He said just go to "The Golden Bough" instead, and he did, introducing us to archetypal and mythological literary criticism at the high school level.

Oh, and going on 30 years later, I still have those classical lit notes, and found them the other day, while packing for my next move. So bite me, Edith Hamilton. I never needed you. [grin]

I didn't realize until I got to college lit classes and discovered none of my classmates had ever heard about any of that stuff that it was anything out of the ordinary. We finally did get to it in college, but not until my SENIOR year, in the upper division literary criticism course for English majors (and I wasn't even technically an English major, so don't ask me what I was doing in there. I ended up three credits short of a double major with Journalism/English, just because I was obsessed with Emily Dickinson and decided to do an independent study on her instead of that last required course for the major).

I took Mr Long's drama classes too, although I didn't do so well at those. I was too much of a "speech student" to lose myself in the parts the way he wanted me to. He gave me a shot at "Mammy Yokum" in "Lil' Abner," tho, even though our musical never made it to the stage that year.

I never got the part I really wanted in "The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-on-the-Moon-Marigolds," so I became the stage manager instead. It was a crazy schedule, because I was also on the basketball team, so I'd get to school really early, write my newspaper stories, go to classes, then basketball practice, and then late play practice.

The only way I could do it was because Mr. Long actually lived out my way, almost to Wasilla, and he'd give me a ride home, often not until 11 pm when we got done. Then I'd get up the next day and do it again. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything, though, because I got a rare treat. On the way home, Mr. Long would go over that night's rehearsal with me and ask my opinion about what was working and what wasn't. He really listened to my ideas and even ended up incorporating some of them into the play. I'm sure he never knew how much that meant to me, to be treated with such respect and have my ideas valued that way, by someone I thought so highly of.

We didn't always get along so agreeably, and I think he even gave me a C in drama one semester. But "Gamma Rays" was a really neat time, and an amazing play. I've seen many productions over the years, and it always amazes me to see higher level and even professional productions that fall short of performances I saw Mr. Long get out of high school students.

And I still have my copy of "The Golden Bough," even if archetypal literary criticism is now out of fashion. I use it in other ways now, with Tarot cards. And I do still read Edith Hamilton's "Mythology," when I need to bone up a bit.

Link: adn.com | obituaries : Obituaries.

PALMER

Dean Long, 78

Drury "Dean" Long, 78, of Palmer died Nov. 21, 2006, at his winter residence in Thousand Palms, Calif.

A celebration of life for friends in the community who would like to share memories will be held in spring, when he normally would have returned. An announcement will be published beforehand.

Mr. Long was born May 8, 1928, to Lucinda and Floyd Long in Hindsboro, Ill., and was reared in Illinois.

An educator who taught in Missouri, California and Alaska, Mr. Long was respected by his students and fellow teachers. He retired after teaching English and drama for several years at Palmer High School. He also led the production of numerous plays and musicals at the high school and in community theater.

Family wrote: "Dean touched the lives of many, many students and community members who participated as actors or in other capacities in one or more of the myriad dramatic productions that he directed and produced.

"Subsequent to his retirement, he traveled extensively with his wife Jean, and became an avid writer, joining writing groups and publishing several works. He continued to write until his final illness and leaves a novel ready for editing and submission.

"Dean was also an avid golfer who traveled to play the finest courses in America and abroad and as a lover of flying, he flew his own plane in Alaska, Canada and the Lower 48.

"Dean will be forever missed by his family, friends and former students who valued his company and counsel."

He is survived by his wife, Jean Long; son, Gary; grandson, Christopher; granddaughter, Donna Jean Kramer; great-grandson, Ethan Kramer; and sisters and brothers, Dorothy Koelsch, Garnet Kincaid, Paul Long and John Long.