In years past, I’ve written about movies I’ve watched or books I’ve read during the past year. I don’t think I saw any movies last year, and you can see the books I read at one of the links on the right if you’re interested. Instead, I’m going to mention a few of the people who died last year.
Arthur C. Clarke—author of several classic SF novels, including Childhood’s End, which I read when I was seven. The reach of its imagination has stuck with me since. My favorite Clarke novel is Imperial Earth—I can’t say why, but I’ve always admired how he fit so many of his interests into it. He was also a cheerful popularizer of science, especially marine studies, astronomy and space exploration, and an incorrigible optimist. His books always left me with a sense of the vastness of the universe and its wonders.
James Crumley—author of hard-boiled detective novels set in the empty parts of the American west. His books are soaked in booze, drugs, violence, and a dilapidated but defiantly romantic view of honor and manhood. My love of them is wrapped up in my feelings about the west, about right and wrong and honor and duty, and about the power of a good drunk. Crumley somehow managed to write about terrible things and make them sing of the good in life.
Kevin Duckworth—starting center on the Blazers basketball teams of the late 80s and early 90s. I grew up in Portland, and the city loved those teams. I listened to games on the radio at night when I was a kid, and watched them on TV with high school friends or in college dorm rooms. Duckworth was a slow but serviceable center that was miscast on a team that thrived on running, and he was never able to live down not being some other, better center. He loved Portland, though, and he settled in the area, getting involved in a couple of businesses and doing a lot of community work. I have to admit that when he died, I hadn’t thought about him in a while, but hearing about him brought back a lot of good memories of those teams and those times.
Dock Ellis—pitcher who threw a no-hitter while on LSD. This is a terrible thing to have on your figurative tombstone, especially for an intelligent and outspoken man who had a good career outside of his no-hitter, then went on to do a lot of things with his life after sports. However, this sort of mythology is why baseball is my favorite sport. It’s ludicrous to think that a football player would play a game on acid. There’s no way he could compete, and the kind of people who would drop acid don’t generally play football. Maybe a basketball player would, but I can’t see them playing well. For whatever reason, baseball is somewhat more tolerant of characters, whether they’re eccentrics or crusaders or just guys who would take the mound while higher than a kite.
George Macdonald Fraser—author of the Flashman series of novels. These concern Harry Flashman, Victorian cavalryman, unwilling adventurer, womanizer, coward and cad, who manages to end up at many of the pivotal historical events of the 19th century. Fraser was a meticulous researcher, and he could spin a story.
Gary Gygax—inventor and popularizer of Dungeons and Dragons and role-playing games in general (with apologies to Dave Arneson and others). I cannot calculate how much of my youth was spent playing RPGs, either D&D or any of a plethora of other games. Those games passed many hours and introduced me to a lot of my friends, and their worldview shaped my personality. I still reflexively try to explain systems by breaking them into simple rules that can be simulated with random numbers, which has even proven useful at my day job. I also still consider what sort of monsters might live in any sort of hidden space, which is less useful.
Rudy Ray Moore—comedian who recorded raunchy party records that were a huge influence on rap, and movie maker who wrote, directed and starred in Dolemite, one of the seminal blaxploitation movies. It’s hard to explain why Dolemite is so great—the plot is iffy, the acting is bad, and the movie is essentially a showcase for Moore to strut around, mack on women, do bad karate, and act like a bad-ass. Which he does, and it’s glorious.
(Many other people died in 2008. Some of them were more noteworthy to the average person, and each and every one of them was probably noteworthy to someone. The people I mention here were noteworthy to me.)
