Crad Kilodney, 1948-2014

"Not only Joyce, but it reminded me of Acker's work," Trav is saying. "Has anyone read by the way, Crad Kilodney's Lightning Struck My Dick? It's amazing, amazing."

"What does that mean?" I ask her.

"Figure it out," she whispers.

                                  -- Bret Easton Ellis, "The Rules of Attraction" 

We are heartbroken to learn this morning that our old friend Crad Kilodney has passed away. We've written about our admiration for Crad and our friendship in other places, and at the moment we're too upset to say much more.

We'll just say that for over 35 years we always spoke of him and to him under a different name, his real name, which he wished kept secret, and we mourn that person as well as the truly one-of-a-kind writer and provocateur Crad Kilodney.

Yesterday The Crad Kilodney Literary Foundation came online to preserve and promote his literature.

Other links: Crad Kilodney - Wikipedia * Crad Kilodney - Facebook * Cult Literary Figure Crad Kilodney Dies - The National/Canadian Broadcasting Company * Crad Kilodney Papers - Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto * Crad Kilodney - New Writings * Such a Nice Guy: The Legendary Crad Kilodney - Bookslut * Some Thoughts on Crad Kilodney * Author Crad Kilodney Was a Cranky and Courageous Fixture on Toronto Streets - Toronto Star * Whatever Happened to Crad Kilodney * Crad Kilodney - Beautiful Desolation * Crad Kilodney (1948-2014) * About Crad Kilodney’s Archives * Crad Kilodney Ramble - Anatomy of Melancholy * Crad and I - Bloggamooga * Girl on the Subway by Crad Kilodney - That Shakespearean Rag * Some Things That Crad Kilodney Should Know Now That He is Dead - a remembrance - Donna Lypchuk *

Se fe el Crad * Crad Kilodney: CanLit Original * Les Voyages Hauts en Couleur de Crad Kilodney - L'Express * Crad Kilodney's Word on the Street - Eye Weekly * Yonge Street in Fiction - Toronto Public Library * A Eulogy for a Man I Did Not Know - The Anarchist * Souvenir de Crad Kilodney - Journal Documentaire * Crad Kilodney (1948-2014) R.I.P. - Black Scat Books * Crad Kilodney Was Innocent (Lyrics by Armed & Hammered, Music by Exploited) * Crad Kilodney - video by Tristan Baker * The Dusty Bookcase: L'enfer c'est les autres: Crad Kilodney, 1948-2014 * A connoisseur of the bizarre, Crad Kilodney railed against hypocrisy of the world - Globe & Mail * Crad Kilodney: 1948-2014 - BoingBoing * Mentions of Crad's work in The New York Times and The Washington Post

Many thanks to Lorette C. Luzajic

Above all, we treasured our early friendship with Crad for his human-ness. Here's an excerpt from a letter he wrote us on January 18, 1979:

Yes, I liked reading about myself in the Excalibur review, mainly because it’s still new to me – that is, reading about myself. But I think I’d feel terrible if I got panned. Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that being inoffensive is as important as being talented. I don’t want to be a target for anyone, and I’m very careful of what other people will think of me. I come off as being extremely shy and grateful for the slightest praise. I don’t bad-mouth people behind their backs, and I would never intentionally make an enemy . . . My ego is the source of all my problems. I constantly have to shift between extremes. On some days I’m terribly vain; on others, I have an inferiority complex. When I act too self-effacing, I feel stupid, and when I get carried away by my pride, I feel guilty.

"Me too, me too!" we wrote when transcribing this excerpt in 1979. We'll miss Crad Kilodney more than we ever thought we would.

Ned Vizzini, RIP

We are heartbroken to hear of Ned Vizzini's passing. He was the nicest person, and we will miss him terribly. Our condolences to his family and to his many friends.

Louis Strick, RIP

We were saddened to learn today of the passing of Louis Strick, a really wonderful multi-talented and generous man who gave us our start as an author by publishing our first collection of short stories in hardcover back in 1979.  He was an intelligent, warm, funny, astute person whose wide-ranging interests and gift for friendship made him someone we will always admire greatly.  (Our book Autumn in Brooklyn is dedicated to him.)  We used to talk fondly about Midwood High School, which he graduated from exactly twenty-five years before us, in the first graduating class. 

We loved hearing his stories about Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Ashbery, and other writers he knew.  As his colleague from Meridian Books, the legendary editor Aaron Asher, once said, "Louis Strick was a guy who loved books and publishing and fiction" (Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America 296).

Our mom was a calligrapher, as were some of our friends, and Louis Strick more than almost anyone was responsible for the flowering of calligraphy in mid-century America. (See this 1974 New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece called "Everyman's Art.")  He had an incredible career and a rich life.

Here is the obituary from Westport Now:

Louis Strick, a 32-year Westport resident, died May 12 at the Jewish Home for the Elderly in Fairfield following a brief illness. He was 87.

Strick was raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of Rosalind and Charles Strick. Growing up near Ebbets Field, he was an ardent fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers.  In 1940, he became a member of the first class of Midwood High School.

Strick went on to attend Cornell University. His college education was interrupted by World War II, and at age 19 he served as a staff sergeant in occupied Italy.  After the war, Strick completed his undergraduate studies and went on to Columbia Universirty to pursue a Master’s in economics. 

He then wrote a weekly column on the stock market for the Journal of Commerce.  Next he worked as a financial analyst for the investor Fred Stafford.  In the late 1950s, he purchased H.M. Storms, a manufacturer of ink ribbons; their primary customer would become the National Cash Register Co.

During this period, Strick bought a radio station in St. Louis.  WAMV was the first American station to play the hit song “Volare.” In the early 1960s, Strick co-founded a pioneering quality paperback line, Meridian, publishing Philip Roth among others. After selling H.M. Storms, he acquired Artone Ink, whose distinctive bottle featured the letter “a” in the form of an ink drip, an idea of Strick’s that was designed by Push Pin Studios and gave rise to a popular typeface.

In the late 1960’s Strick began importing calligraphic art supplies, distributed through his Pentalic Company.  By making special nibs, pens and instruction books widely available, Strick spearheaded a revival of the calligraphic movement in America;. He also established the Calligraphy Workshop, a school on lower Fifth Avenue.

In the late 1970’s, Strick purchased the Taplinger Publishing Company, bringing out works of literary fiction as well as volumes on modern art, reflecting two of his passions. 

Strick himself was an artist who focused on collage; several of his pieces were exhibited in juried shows in Westport where he lived with Elizabeth for 32 years.

He is survived by his wife of 41 years, Elizabeth, his three children, Ivy, Wesley and Charlotte, a stepson, Simon, seven grandchildren, and two younger brothers, Walter and Stanley. 

We will miss him a great deal and offer our deep sympathies to his family, especially to our friends Wesley, who was the editor of our first book, and to Ivy, who designed the book's beautiful cover.

Elan Steinberg, RIP

It's very sad to read of the passing of Elan Steinberg, the former head of the World Jewish Congress, in today's New York Times. Although we didn't know Elan that well at Brooklyn College, we took a few classes together and sat next to each other in men's health ed first semester. We remember him as very smart, intense but friendly, kind and thoughtful and outspoken, the kind of person at school you basically just see in passing and make small talk with but who you know is really cool.

His accomplishments are almost uncountable, and he would stand up to anyone, no matter how powerful, for what he believed was right. Practically irreplaceable, he will be missed by many people all over the world. This what Douglas Martin wrote in the Times:

Elan Steinberg, who brought what he called a new, “American style” assertiveness to the World Jewish Congress as its top executive, winning more than $1 billion from Swiss banks for Holocaust victims and challenging Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general, over his Nazi past, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 59.

The cause was complications of lymphatic cancer, his wife, Sharon, said.

As its executive director from 1978 to 2004, Mr. Steinberg was a key strategist for the congress as it grew bolder under a younger generation of Jews. He helped organize the research, hearings, press leaks and lawsuit that led the Swiss banks to agree to pay $1.2 billion to Holocaust victims in the late 1990s.

He also ruffled feathers. Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told The New York Times that he applauded the congress’s “persistence,” but worried that the Swiss might begin to see Jews as “their enemy.” He said the congress’s crusade “fed into the stereotype that Jews have money, that it’s the most important thing to them.”

Even Simon Wiesenthal, the relentless hunter of Nazi war criminals, questioned the congress’s new aggressiveness when it threw itself into the Austrian presidential campaign in 1986 to try to defeat Mr. Waldheim, who was ultimately elected. Mr. Waldheim had hidden his membership in a Nazi military unit linked to atrocities.

Mr. Wiesenthal argued that Mr. Waldheim was “an opportunist” but not a war criminal. He worried that the congress, by inserting itself into Austria’s internal politics, was undoing years of patient work toward reconciling young Austrians and Jews.

Mr. Steinberg countered that electing Mr. Waldheim would stain all Austrians. “In the whole world it will be said that a former Nazi and a liar is the representative of Austria,” he said.

The tough stance was a departure for the congress, which was formed in 1936 in response to the rising Nazi threat in Europe and whose headquarters are now in New York. Mr. Steinberg himself used the word “strident” to describe his approach in taking the once-staid organization into quarrels, as it did in 1985 when President Ronald Reagan, alongside Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, visited a German cemetery in which Nazi SS soldiers were buried.

“For a long time,” Mr. Steinberg said, “the World Jewish Congress was meant to be the greatest secret of Jewish life, because the nature of diplomacy after the war was quiet diplomacy. This is a newer, American-style leadership — less timid, more forceful, unashamedly Jewish.”

Mr. Steinberg steered the congress in opposing the presence of a Carmelite convent at the site of the Auschwitz death camp and championing former slave laborers under the Nazis in their fight for compensation.

When Steven Spielberg was making the 1993 film “Schindler’s List,” he wanted to shoot scenes inside a building that had been part of the Auschwitz camp, Mrs. Steinberg said. As she recounted the episode, Mr. Spielberg went to the congress and conferred with Mr. Steinberg, who told him, “You cannot film on the graves of Jews.” Mr. Spielberg instead built a replica of the building.

“Whenever Jews were in danger, or Jewish honor offended, he vigorously yet elegantly spoke up,” Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor, said in a statement read at Mr. Steinberg’s funeral. “Whenever Jewish memory was attacked, he attacked the attacker.”

Elan Steinberg was born in Rishon LeZion, Israel, on June 2, 1952, to Holocaust survivors. He grew up in the Brownsville and Borough Park sections of Brooklyn and was a graduate of Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and Brooklyn College. He received a master’s degree in political science from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, then taught there.

He joined the congress in 1978 as its United Nations representative, and rose to executive director — first of the American section, then of the world body. Menachem Rosensaft, the congress’s general counsel, said Mr. Steinberg was instrumental in persuading the Vatican and Spain to recognize Israel.

Mr. Steinberg resigned in 2004 but remained a consultant to the congress’s president, Ronald S. Lauder. He was vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

In addition to his wife, the former Sharon Cohen, Mr. Steinberg, who lived in Manhattan, is survived by his children, Max, Harry and Lena Steinberg, and his brother, Alex.

Mr. Rosensaft told another story to illustrate his friend’s mix of grit and wit. Mr. Steinberg was negotiating one day with the French culture minister to recover paintings stolen from Jews during the Holocaust. The minister huffed that Mr. Steinberg knew nothing about art.

“You’re right,” Mr. Steinberg said. “I don’t know anything about art. I’m from Brooklyn. I know about stolen goods.”

Our love and sympathy go to his family and friends.

Hugh Fox, RIP

We were saddened to learn from Richard Kostelanetz that another of our old friends from the early small press days, a legend and a great writer, Hugh Fox, died yesterday at a hospice near his home in East Lansing, Michigan.

When we started publishing in little mags in the mid-1970s and reading them before that, one name we kept seeing over and over again was Hugh Fox. Everything he wrote -- and he was both a master of multiple genres and someone who gave a young kid like us encouragement and hope as well as a role model in the small press ("indie press," in today's parlance) world -- seemed fresh and exciting. Hugh's own litmag Ghost Dance was required reading. We also remember fondly his female alter ego, writer Connie Fox.

Hugh Fox was personable, warm, quirky and funny. And he knew everything and everyone, it seemed to us. We used to think he might be a collective writing under one name, except he had such a distinctive personality. We'll never forget his work, nor his kindness and generosity.

Here's a little from his Wikipedia entry:

Hugh Fox, born in Chicago in 1932, is a writer, novelist, poet and anthropologist and one of the founders (with Ralph Ellison, Anais Nin, Paul Bowles, Joyce Carol Oates, Buckminster Fuller and others) of the Pushcart Prize for literature. He has been published in numerous literary magazines and was the first writer to publish a critical study of Charles Bukowski.

Fox was raised in Chicago as a devout Catholic, but converted to Judaism in later life. He has a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a professor at Michigan State University in the Department of American Thought and Language from 1968 until his retirement in 1999.

Fox is the author of over sixty-two books, including six books on anthropology, he wrote over fifty-four books on poetry and many volumes on short fiction, and published many novels. He also wrote a number of books on pre-Columbian American cultures, catastrophism, which would fit into the pseudoarchaeological category, such as his book Gods of the Cataclysm: A Revolutionary Investigation of Man and his Gods Before and After the Great Cataclysm (1976). Some of his books with these themes in have been compared to the work of Ignatius Donnelly.

His book Gods of the Cataclysm received a number of positive reviews, Curt Johnson an editor praised the book claiming “Hugh Fox’s Gods of the Cataclysm...ought to be required reading for cultural historians of all disciplines.”

The Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, Mass. published Way, Way Off the Road: The Memoirs of an Invisible Man by Hugh Fox with an introduction by Doug Holder in 2006. This book recounts Fox's life and the people he knew in the small press over the years such as Charles Bukowski, A.D. Winans, Sam Cornish, Len Fulton, etc.

Here's a piece done for Literary Kicks (LitKicks) by Doug Holder, the founder of Ibbetson Press and the publisher of Way, Way Off The Road ... by Hugh Fox, edited by S.R. Glines:

When you whisper "small press" in the ears of many 60's era poets and publishers, one of the first responses you will get is "Hugh Fox." Fox was a founding board member of the Pushcart Prize, a publisher of a well-regarded avant-garde literary magazine Ghost Dance founder of the seminal organization for little magazines and small presses COSMEP, a reviewer of thousand of chapbooks, magazines and books, and the author of the first critical study of Charles Bukowski. In his memoir of the small press movement, Way, Way off the Road, Fox quotes Charles Plymell, a City Lights-published jazz poet and the first printer of ZAP Comics:

"... the generation that came after the Beats, was overpowered by the Beats themselves. All that media hype. My god, the media fell in love with them. They were practically rock stars. And the post-Beats, the Hippie-Yippies, whatever you want to call them, were lost in the Beat's shadow. They were and still are invisible!"

Plymell defined the group of poets Fox feels he was part of. Fox was solidly in his 30's, a nerdy academic, equipped with a Ph.D and a foundation grant, when he picked up a copy of Crucifix in a Death Hand by the "dirty old man" of poetry Charles Bukowski. Fox was thrilled by the Buk's use of language and felt a new door was opened for him outside the stagnant air of the academy. Fox wound up doing a critical study of the man. Here is an account of his first meeting with Bukowski:

"So I'd gone over and found him in this motel-hotel place in Hollywood. You know, the usual tattered, potted palms out in front, everything kind of run down."

Fox told Bukowski that he wanted to do a critical study of his work. Fox was sick of Eliot and Pound, and wanted a taste of the wild side. Here is Bukowski's response according to Fox:

"... Nothing wrong with Eliot and Pound, they're some of my best friends, he answered, got up and started emptying the wall of bookcases that contained all of his printed work, all the books, all the magazines. Went into a closet and started taking out suitcases and throwing the books and mags inside."

Bukowski said: "Ok I can trust you. I'm gonna give you the whole schmear. And if you find any duplicates, keep them."

Fox wound up writing the first critical study of the man, as well as studies of A. D. Winans and Lyn Lifshin, and began his life as a wandering-Jewish scribe, recording the comings, goings, happenings and personalities in the small press for the last 40 years.

Fox recounts his years at COSMEP, a seminal press organization, that he was a founding board member of, and his years of publishing the avant-garde lit mag Ghost Dance. Fox, who admits he has a very manic side, has written literally thousands of reviews of poetry books, chaps, and small press publications, as well has edited the groundbreaking anthology The Living Underground.

Way, Way Off The Road ... is not a straight narrative. It reads the way Fox talks. It is written in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so that often the reader has to catch his or her breath. His description of fellow writers is often inspired. Here is a portrait of a down-at-the-heels Richard Nason, a movie critic for TIME magazine:

"And when he'd come into the office out of the Captain Midnight dark, you always smelled the booze on him. Pickled full time. Fedora. Sports jacket. Topcoat. Remnants of former glory. Only when he pulled his topcoat off there would be five pens in the front pockets of his sports coat, all of them uncapped, leaking into the coat itself, another uncapped pen in his shirt pocket also leaking, so it looked like he had been harpooned and was bleeding blue blood.'"

Fox has an inquisitive, fascinating, and hungry mind, and he covers a wide range of subjects from drug-induced writing, ancient Indian cultures, men's sexual prowess and perversions, you name it. In the books there are countless anecdotes about personages from the world of the small press like Harry Smith, Len Fulton, Richard Kostelantz, Allen Ginsberg, "The Boston Underground," Bill Costley, Sam Cornish , Bill Blatty and Donald Hall. Fox has an original take on them all.

In ways Fox's literary history reminds me of Howard Zinn's writing. He gives you a view of the outsider, and how the outsider views things. This is a history you won't find in the classrooms, although it should be there. Fox makes darkness visible, with this iconoclastic, zany and compelling memoir.

Here's a beautiful article Ellaraine Lockie published about Hugh Fox in Centrifugal Eve:

I didn't know which gender would arrive at the train station. He could have come as either: Hugh Fox, small press legend and renowned anthropologist for over thirty years, or Connie Fox, his alter ego and author in her own right who often appeared in the flesh. Slightly nervous, hoping a year's worth of e-mails would enable me to recognize the inner Fox either way, I arrived an hour early. As I waited by the passenger entrance door, I found myself getting more and more curious about Connie and hoping it was she who would walk off the train. I also reflected on the week ahead when Fox would be collecting information for his book, Portraits, in which I'm one of four female West Coast poets he studies.

My slight disappointment at not meeting the corseted, red-lipsticked, stilettoed, big-haired beautiful woman I'd seen in a photo gave way immediately to concern when the tweed-coated and hatted mountain man before me mumbled (as he enfolded me in a bear hug), "Bad news, Pal . . . mouth's half paralyzed." Visions of a mad drive to an emergency ward and of a stroke or Bell's Palsy blinded me momentarily to the man who resembled a mischievous Santa Claus with no beard but with grey/white flowing hair, rosy cheeks, skin that would make a young woman jealous and a little-boy "foxy" twinkle in his eyes. His laugh was a sound that would resonate through my world for the next week, as would his well-acted charades.

Driving to my home in Sunnyvale, California, Foxy told me about how his mother enrolled him in endless acting, piano and singing lessons as a boy, and how he performed roles in Chicago's All Children's Grand Opera Company – once with the Metropolitan Opera. His young life was filled with ballet, concerts, the study of violin and composition and art lessons at the Chicago Art Institute.

At bedtime that first night, Foxy emerged from the guest bedroom wearing a bright red undershirt and red checkered pajamas. He said, "How about we go for a walk?" Off we went, him glowing like a fire hydrant and with a tendency to veer to the center of the streets, me black as the night in the sweats I sleep in and preferring to skirt the sidewalks. This became a nightly ritual, neighbors be damned.

The next morning, Foxy sat down at the breakfast table in his tweed hat and blazer, pen and notebook in hand ready to get right to work. When I told him hats weren't required for breakfast, he responded, "My Irish grandfather said, ‘Always wear a tweed hat, me boy,' and I do." He was incredulous about the healthy breakfast I fed him (one I have every morning), and I later heard him tell one of his wives on the phone that I'd forced three pounds of oatmeal down him. It was my first live experience with Foxy's zany ability to exaggerate, although I'd had many an e-mail bursting with this trait.

No, he's not a polygamist; he just stays emotionally close to his two ex-wives, as well as to the one to whom he's been married for eighteen years and together with for twenty-seven. Ex-wife Two lives in his second house three blocks from him in East Lansing, Michigan, and Number One comes to visit often from Kansas City. I could never tell by the adoring tone of voice (that always concluded with a bit of baby talk, like what I say to my cat) just which wife or which of his six kids were on the other end of the line.

After breakfast that first morning, we engaged in one of my rituals – one or two hours of writing at the local Starbucks. Here is where I learned that Foxy talks to EVERYBODY – people in coffee shops and restaurants, shoppers, streetwalkers... He'd try out all the many languages he speaks on each person, and if there was no response, he'd revert to English and say something different each time like: "How old do you think I am?" or "As your priest, I want you to get down on your knees and thank God for this beautiful woman you're with."

People reacted in vastly diverse ways: some picked up immediately that he was just having fun and would reciprocate. Others were polite but firm, like the woman who told him that her husband, who was in the bathroom, was very jealous so no, Foxy shouldn't pretend that he was an old boyfriend. Still others looked around for a fast escape route.

His favorite audiences were people of ethnicities different than his, and he'd always try to guess their nationalities. One extremely thin, dark-skinned woman (Foxy was sure she was Ethiopian) ran out of Trader Joe's after he said she should follow him around and buy what he did if she wanted to be skinny. He was so bothered by her reaction that he talked to the store manager about her, imparting his suspicion that she ran away because, maybe, she was an illegal immigrant or a shoplifter. She was still on his mind the next morning and, with almost childlike befuddlement, he considered her behavior strange.

He saved his best antics, though, for my friends and acquaintances when I introduced him. He would become suddenly both blind and mute, staring straight ahead and putting his limp hand out for my help, much like a puppy's paw-shake. Or he'd have some other less-definable-but-serious ailment. It was always a surprise.

Lunch on that first day was at a deli en route to the Hakoni Gardens in Saratoga where we were going to write haiku. Foxy said to the waitress, "This is my daughter. We have to eat out because I'm afraid she'll poison me to get my money." When she looked over at me sternly, I rolled my eyes. Still, by the end of lunch the girl felt so sorry for him that she'd pat him on the back every time she walked by.

Later in the Gardens' Zen-like gift shop, two women employees were loudly and brashly discussing inventory. Foxy turned to me and asked if he should tell them they'd just ruined the whole peaceful experience of the Gardens, and I said no. He told them anyway. No joking this time.

He was also serious over dinner that night when he emerged as Professor Hugo Fox, Ph.D. in American Literature, and discussed the eighty-plus books he's published (including the first book written about Charles Bukowski and Lyn Lifshin) and detailed his numerous archeological discoveries. The Professor stayed around for the evening, sharing his life story in immaculate detail: a mother who at times dressed him in girls' clothes and immersed him in the arts before demanding later that he become a physician like his father.

The teen-aged Hugh wore nothing but English and Harris tweeds that his mother had tailor-made: pants, suit coat and cap (all scratchy). He always carried a leather briefcase and later smoked a pipe. A regular Sherlock Holmes. This elicited taunting from the other boys at school. He developed a stutter at fifteen that lasted for years, which is now hard to believe he ever had, given his extremely extroverted personality.

He purposely flunked out of medical school to pursue what would eventually be a professorship at Loyola University and University of Michigan, with interspersed Fulbright Fellowships taking him to Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. He received grants to study in Argentina and Chile. He lived in Spain, made yearly trips to Peru and visited ruins in every South American country.

He was the first person to recognize Phoenician writing on pots in Peru and statues in Bolivia, Sumerian writing on other Bolivian statues and pictures of Lebanese goddesses on pots from tribes in Mexico. Then he correlated all these discoveries into one theory that rocked the world of archeology. While here with me, he found twenty-some of his books at Stanford University Library.

He also talked freely about his late conversion to Judaism and about Connie: Connie didn't survive the castration surgery that Hugh chose to have in an extreme effort to combat prostate cancer. Her clothing and personal effects lay boxed in Hugh's garage, and she is, for all practical purposes, dead. But her stories live on through Hugh and her books, one of which was released in 2005 by Presa Press. I believe Connie's story should be written by him, rather than me. I'm sorry I missed out on this her part of him; I would have liked her.

Now that he's in his seventies, Foxy said his preoccupation is with "death and how to get the maximum out of the little time we have above ground." I can attest that he lived this philosophy for the week we were together. Every following day resembled the first one in its serendipitous and often outrageous course.

At Starbucks Foxy wrote twenty poems and a long essay over the week, while I worked on one poem, looking for that killer ending (It's easy to see how he has thirty unpublished novels, short stories, plays and poem collections). He tired quickly of my healthy breakfasts and turned to oatmeal cookies, Starbucks' maple strudel muffins and Butterfingers from a near-by store.

New interests and talents radiated from this Renaissance Man. There was nothing he wasn't interested in learning, and more than a week with him would have been required to even skim what he already knows. One evening I demonstrated my Yamaha player piano with its renditions of Chopin. After one of the Preludes, Foxy said, "Turn it off," and he sat down to play a virtuoso Chopin-like piece that he had composed. There are dozens of tapes of his original piano pieces at home.

We saw and loved a matinee movie of The Queen. On the way home in the car on his cell phone, Foxy told one of his wives that I "ate popcorn like a horse eating hay." (I had to; he was stealing it.) He later declined an evening movie invitation from me . . . something about the popcorn. I went anyway (and ate popcorn).

We took day trips to Monterey/Carmel, where his joy at being alive took the form of impromptu hugs on sidewalks and the holding of my hand as we walked. We visited and were visited by his friends and relatives in the Bay area. His dear friend and poet of many years, Karla Andersdatter, came to spend a couple of days with us and to attend Foxy's featured poetry reading in Santa Cruz, hosted by Brian Morissey (Poesy Magazine) and Christopher Robin (Zen Baby). Foxy is the only poet I've ever heard who can get away with stopping in the middle of a poem to chat or talk about the poem, then finish it and still have his audience's rapt attention. A true entertainer.

We then drove to San Francisco to meet A. D. Winans, another small press icon and long-time friend of Foxy's. We arrived early, and while waiting, Foxy shimmied up to many a female bystander listening to street music and asked her to dance. The only one who would have accepted (me), he didn't ask. I was becoming a friend with whom he treated with no pretense, as he did also A. D. Their meeting was a pleasure to witness, like watching two bull elk from the same herd come to terms after locking horns (After a thirty-year friendship, the two had a recent falling-out over contents in Fox's most recent book). Foxy asked first thing, as we all sat down for coffee, "So do you forgive me?"

"I'm thinking about it," came from A. D.

It was clear to this observer that things are copasetic with the herd leaders once again. Honesty and, yes, affection that goes way back was unmistakable, albeit behind a mask of maleness. Besides, staying mad at Fox might just be impossible for anyone.

He and I had only one confrontation. It happened right before his formal interview of me, which he had wanted to film with his new camera to be on a DVD that would accompany Portraits. I had told him previously that I wouldn't allow the interview to be photographed. He reluctantly agreed but then changed his mind as the interview in my living room was beginning. There was a fierce display of willfulness on both our parts. Readers will have to wait for the book/DVD set to see how it was resolved.

Leaving for the airport on day eight held a sadness for both of us, lightened only slightly as we were going out the front door when Foxy said, "Wait, I forgot my cane."

"You don't have a cane, Foxy," I said.

In its tribute earlier today, the publishers Haggard & Halloo reprinted this poem, "Bringing," one of many wonderful poems written by Hugh Fox over decades:

Bringing them all back, the right Andean
chemicals, prayers to the Underground
spirits, Great-Great-Great-Grandmother
Adeline Fox coming out of the Red Cedar
River, Great-Great-Great Grandfather
Sean walking over the mountains toward
our stone cabin with a pitchfork in his
hands praising Jesus, “Not long now and
He’ll be back,” The Inquisition hovering
around in the clouds as the Great-Great-
Great-Greaters make their way north into
Celticism, the latest womb-escaper, Beatrice,
coming into my workroom, “I want colored
paper, violet, I’m making violets,” as the
Weather Devil drolls on “Tomorrow, tomorrow,
tomorrow you’ll see, see, see…..,” feeling
existentially ONE as the rest of the antiquities
slither through the cracks in the windows and
drop down the chimney into the flames that
can’t/won’t touch them.

Richard Kostelanetz once wrote, "Hugh B. Fox is the most distinguished man of alternative letters of our time." The world of literature will miss him. Along with countless others, we're really going to miss Hugh Fox.

Saul Galin, RIP

We were saddened to hear about the death of Saul Galin, who was our first creative writing teacher. Saul was the professor for our introductory undergrad creative writing class at Brooklyn College in the spring of 1972, and he was the first person to really encourage us, saying we were one of the few students who he thought could become a writer. We loved his stories and his amazing sense of humor, his no-nonsense but gentle style, and his great personal warmth and keen intelligence. We will miss him a lot and send our condolences to his family. Here was the obituary notice from today's San Francisco Chronicle:

Saul Galin

Died in San Francisco at age 85. Survived by his last former wife and friend Elizabeth Vasile, one daughter, and three grandchildren. Predeceased by another former wife and friend, Marlene Kopec. Professor Emeritus of English at CUNY Brooklyn, where he taught poetry, drama, and creative writing for over 40 years, spearheaded the creation of the departments BFA program in Creative Writing, and developed and directed the CUNY Brooklyn London Summer Program in Literature and Theatre. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=153190694#sthash.TcbHP1eS.dpuf

Above all, he was a champion of the power of the imagination, and encouraged his students and those surrounding him to find their creative voice. He also took pride in making great works of literature accessible to all. In 1961, he founded Odyssey Review, a quarterly journal of modern Latin American and European literature in English translation, which he served as editor. Odyssey published works never before translated into English, including pieces by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Cesar Vallejo, and Nicanor Parra, and in so doing made these voices available to a wider audience.

In 1999, near the end of his career, he produced a 27-hour marathon reading of Moby Dick for the People of England, in which professional actors, students, and the general public were invited to take a part in reading the great work from beginning to end. Throughout his life, Galin had a passion for teaching and for the art of conversation. He was known for his exuberant personality, wit, and intellectual inventiveness.

Following his retirement from CUNY, he started a play reading salon, dubbed The Republic of the Imagination, where he presided as self-appointed President. A 2002 New York Times article about the salon captured the essence of these literary gatherings in quoting him thus: "The Republic of the Imagination is in everybody . . . It's a country on the map of the world where we can all go. Once we're there, we're free." The Republic of the Imagination convened play reading groups in New York apartments, and at the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco, where he also directed the first Mechanics Institute Annual World Poetry Reading, which featured the works of 34 poets recited by 17 readers in 10 languages.

Born in Suwalki, Poland near the German border, Saul came with his mother to New York in 1932 to rejoin his father, who had emigrated to the US a few years earlier. The family settled in the Bronx, where they had a small neighborhood grocery. Saul volunteered for US Army service in WWII, and fought on the front lines in the Battle of the Bulge. All of his family members who remained in Poland were lost, victims of the Holocaust. Following the war he returned to university, earning his Bachelors in Economics at NYU, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Funeral services were held on August 4, 2011, at Home of Eternity in Oakland, CA. Donations in Saul's memory to The Academy of American Poets, preferred.

Edwin Honig, RIP

We had a nice time this morning at Dobson Ranch Park but felt sorrow upon reading there an obituary notice for the great poet and translator Edwin Honig, who was not only a first-rate writer but someone we liked and deeply admired from the time we met him at The MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1980.

Actually, we'd appreciated Edwin Honig's writing before that because we'd discovered his work in the late 1970s when it appeared in some of the little magazines we read (and sometimes appeared in ourselves). He was then the age we are now, and he'd had a long and productive career both behind him and still ahead of him.

We took walks and talked about growing up in Brooklyn -- Ed's mother was still living in Brownsville then -- and discussed literature and other subjects. He was working with another MacDowell fellow, the talented (and extremely nice) composer Anne LeBaron for whom he produced the text for Lamentation/Invocation, for baritone, clarinet, cello and harp.

Here is the full obituary by Richard C. Dujardin from the Providence Journal:

Edwin Honig, a poet, playwright and translator who taught at Brown University for a quarter century before retiring in 1983, died at his home on the East Side Wednesday after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 91.

Honig once told former Providence Journal columnist Wanda Howard that he was 13 when an alert teacher at the high school he was attending in Brooklyn, N.Y., introduced him to poetry, putting him under the influence of such writers as Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. [Our note: it was Abraham Lincoln H.S., where his early poetry appeared in the 1935 literary magazine and year book.]

Thanks to his grandmother who spoke Spanish, Arabic and Yiddish but little English, he said, he also developed an intense lifelong interest in Spanish and Portuguese.

All together, he wrote 10 books of poetry, 3 plays, 5 books of criticism and 8 translations, one of the earliest of which was on Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet murdered by Franco’s fascists in Granada. It was published in 1944. Four decades, later he was knighted by the president of Portugal for helping to introduce Fernando Pessoa to the English-speaking world and was similarly honored in 1996 by the king of Spain for his translations of Spanish poets and playwrights.

Honig, who taught at Harvard University before going to Brown, received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mishkenot Sha’Ananim in Jerusalem, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

He would later compile nearly a half-century of his poems in a volume titled “Time and Again,” and was working on a second volume, “Over Time,” when he became ill.

In “To Restore a Dead Child,” he released decades of sorrow over the death of his 3-year-old brother who was run over by a truck when Honig was just 5.

“Honig has been a poet whose sorrow is always coming home ... No poet of our time has more fiercely presented man’s tragic mortality even as he finds an impressive variety of means by which that mortality is admitted and sublimed,” wrote Daniel Hughes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

He was the husband of the late Charlotte Gilchrest, who died of cancer in 1962, and the ex-spouse of Margot Dennes, from whom he was divorced. He is survived by a sister in Colorado, Lila Putnam, and by two sons, Daniel and Jeremy, and was cremated in a private service Thursday. Brown University said it plans a memorial service in Honig’s honor in the fall.

When we first met Edwin Honig, he was working on what would become the poem of his we treasure most. We reprint it here:

To Restore a Dead Child

1

1925
Sometimes while I sleep
I hear the single cry and tire screek
that never end.
My blond and foolish brown-eyed brother
lugging his fretful love
shambles after me
as the cunning Mack truck
lurching out of nowhere
cuts him down.

He's a long dead almost-three.
I'm a long lived five
just turned sixty-one
still running in a dead heat
with the rolling cab that swooped him up
heading for the vanished hospital.

It's then on waking
I feel the snot of infant faces
leak into my mouth.


2

Hearing it wake, we feel
the windy calling to each other
of the kindred sleep and death
in the morning opening
of the eyes of country horses,
the odor of earth's dampness
in the crystal tree light,
and the touch of rough bark
on fingertips.

Seeing it, we feel again
the worn heart welcoming
the slow envelopment of dark,
the falling off of sight
in the old gray house,
when sun's heat passes
and the first breeze
lifts a faint dust
along the hedges.

Remembering, again we see
the embers crumbling in the grate,
the fire flaring up again,
the pause before the turning shadow
spans the polished floor
and drifts into the open world,
a street that wanders
endless as a silent grief
that will never know itself.


3

We walked out of time
into the woods of pain
and never seemed
the same again.
We tilted with the hope
of finding ourself
in another skin,
and bent on recovering,
turned with open eyes
to find welcome in the arms
of a dead brother --
sleeping his dream of being,
a dream so long unfulfilled
there was no time
even to begin to live it,
till in his own hope
we lived what we believed
may have been
reserved for him.


4

Watching the immense self scattering ocean
ruffle out before us,
our wonder stirred and time became
an intricately formal mating,
night on day on night,
a repeated wave flash
signaling the act and its abating,
and the last long rolling into shore
turned into a fresh aspiring
of newborn creatures
to join the greater mating
sky and ocean,
and the creatures reeling beyond our wonder
mingled with the lifetimes
of our aged parents, each one apart,
our cheerful sister's pregnant daughter,
also apart,
and this briefly sunlit reawakening
stung alive the still unanswered
black and blueness
we never would be clear of --
though no longer cherishing
the old bruised core,
no longer poised against
the battering disablements,
we simply gazed again
and let our wonder live again,
and die.


5

For everyone the call of light,
seeing figures of the creatures
from the mountain and the sea:
an eagle flying and a snake
whipping past the chicken coop,
a horse neighing in a flash
of meadow, with wayward water there
to slake the thirst a moment.
As light descends,
following the slow shapes
bulking briefly in their place,
it makes as if to stop
and give them way and cause,
as if to stroke
and praise their substance fully
before each creature
passes into its own remove
with rapid smile print
(as on your face and mine appears
held there by heads soon to be
no longer yours or mine)
till it lets the shadow quicken,
overtake the bobbing bulks,
and rise immensely over
like a mercy to devour them.


6

As we would have it,
it would be nothing simple
or profound,
nothing easily attained,
long worked for or perfected.
It would be of a wholeness,
full and large and figured
in its substance.
It would be all engrossing
to itself and others --
like the playing of a mindless tune
between a richer music
and a silence:
a peaked and dribbling sound,
a sound wavering in descent
but kept in measure,
and in that measure
letting all know
how deeply it could love
the silence following.


7

Not to be listening
yet to be heard
in the huge inconsequences
of the heart,
where having conveyed
the full measure of our hate
as a gesture of belief
in something worse than ourself
is barely to have escaped
self murder,
the intended sacrifice
become the bound body of love
in a younger self --
wearing a brother's features
still scored through
the dead boy's memory --
forever jammed between
the tonnage of his death
and self hate's last convulsions,
like the lost deserter
fixed in an ice cake
some intruder yells up
early one spring.


8

As the light descended
the night was pierced a moment
and there was seen
in the vagueness of a shadow
a form more his
than our idea of him,
and the shadow wobbled
into a figure merging
with the hope of his lost being
come to be again,
as we tried swiftly to put on
the dark loose patches
fallen from him in the light --
trying to fill and fill
all that was left
of his living clothes
before his body vanished


9

No longer would he have to run
each time we left him
before our mindless going
struck him
as needing to be answered,
and the need make him
fly to us
and press his body
on us briefly.

For now, if again we left
without a smile or hand wave,
he would no longer need to fret
or wonder how to weight the meaning
since as last reminder
he had left
his body printed on us.

Here is a clip of this great poet in the 2010 film by his cousin Alan Berliner, Edwin Honig: A Poet's Alzheimer:

We will miss him and always treasure his work.

Robert Donald Spector, RIP

We were very sorry to read in the New York Times obituary notices that our friend Robert Donald Spector has passed away. Here's Long Island University's official announcement, by President David Steinberg and Brooklyn Campus Provost Gale Haynes:

It is with deep sadness that we write to inform you that Dr. Robert Donald Spector, coordinator of the Humanities Division and professor emeritus of English at the Brooklyn Campus, and chairman of the University’s George Polk Awards in Journalism, died on February 25. A gifted poet and writer, he was an inspiration to students and colleagues alike.

Dr. Spector’s association with the University began during his undergraduate days; he earned a B.A. in English, magna cum laude, from the Brooklyn Campus in 1948. After completing an M.A. in English at New York University, Dr. Spector returned to Long Island University to begin a teaching career that spanned more than five decades. He always was passionately involved in the University community. In 1967, Dr. Spector organized a movement to oppose the sale of the Brooklyn Campus. Thanks in large part to his efforts, faculty and students successfully lobbied against the sale, preserving the campus for generations to come.

Dr. Spector, who also held a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, was a renowned author of scholarly books, articles and volumes of poetry, and as chairman of the Polk Awards, played a significant role in the administration of one of America’s most coveted journalism honors. His commitment to his work earned him the University’s Trustees Award for Scholarly Achievement, now called the Abraham Krasnoff Memorial Award for Scholarly Achievement, in 1978; a Tristram Walker Metcalfe Alumnus of the Year Award in 1981; and an honorary doctorate from the Brooklyn Campus in 1994.

Despite the magnitude of his achievements, Dr. Spector cited “over 50 years of teaching thousands of students” as his greatest accomplishment. He will no doubt be missed.

We first knew Dr. Spector as the father of our friend Eric, whom we met over 40 years ago at Midwood High School and with whom we also went to Brooklyn College.

In early March 1975, thirty-four years ago, we were chatting with Eric on the phone one evening and at the end of our conversation, Eric said, "My father wants to talk with you."

Dr. Spector, then the English Department chair at LIU's Brooklyn Center, said that one of his older professors had died of a heart attack on his way home to New Jersey from a night class in freshman comp. Knowing we'd finished our M.A. work at Richmond College (now The College of Staten Island), Dr. Spector asked us if we were interested in taking over the class.

Just 23 and in the second semester of our M.F.A. program in creative writing at Brooklyn College, we had never really given much thought to college teaching. Before our appointment at LIU the next afternoon, we stayed up reading whatever we could on the teaching of college writing, mostly our M.F.A. director Jonathan Baumbach's great book, Teachers as Writers/Writers as Teachers.

We were prepared to be interviewed, but when we walked into Dr. Spector's office, the first thing he said was, "Mr. Grayson, your students are going to eat you alive."

He told us about the class, English 11, and about how upset the students would be at the sudden death of a beloved professor. It was an evening class, and as we were to soon learn, except for one Orthodox Jewish boy, we were younger than any of the students in the class, working adults whose day jobs were on Wall Street or in banks or offices.

Dr. Spector got us through that scary first semester and the four wonderful years afterward that we taught adjunct classes in LIU's English Department as we learned to teach everything from remedial writing to the short novel. By then Dr. Spector had moved on to become coordinator of the entire Humanities Division, so he was no longer our direct supervisor. But he was always there with good, common-sense advice for a rookie college teacher. We learned a lot from him.

Dr. Spector had a generous spirit and a kindness that's sometimes rare in academia. The M.A. students in English and the English majors adored him, and he was one of our models for what a good college teacher of writing and literature would be. Also inspirational was his devotion to LIU and to the integrity of the Polk Awards in journalism (one of this year's winners, announced two weeks ago, was our Arizona friend Paul Giblin, for a series he co-wrote for The East Valley Tribune investigating Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s nasty campaign against illegal immigrants).

Dr. Spector also introduced us to Humphry Clinker and other works by Tobias Smollett, the great eighteenth century British writer who taught us many tricks.

Dr. Spector was perhaps the leading Smollett scholar in the country, and he also wrote and edited many, many books of and about British literature, a few of which are pictured here.

We will miss him, and we express our deep condolences to his wife, to Eric and his brother Stephen (with whom we used to teach at CUNY) and their families.

Now heading out to the Brooklyn College campus to teach an English class for Borough of Manhattan Community College - one of four schools where we are happily teaching this term - we will think a lot about Robert Donald Spector, who gave us our start doing what we love.