Stephen Vincent wrote:
>Richard Pryor
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/10/AR2005121000
>740.html
>
>Senator Eugene McCarthy
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/10/AR2005121000
>704.html
>
>
"No such thing as coincidence." I just put on the 2nd movement of
Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). THEN I opened
the email. Neither bit of news surprises--I gathered Pryor had been
very ill for years--but both constitute a terrible loss. Pryor...I
wonder if he ever really came back from the freebasing disaster in 1980,
from the addictions it revealed. MS and finally his heart took him, and
I don't know if one thing can build on another.
But...his best self...he made me laugh. He and Gene Wilder combined for
some moments of classic insanity. All I can picture is two idiots
prancing around a bank in woodpecker suits or Pryor and Wilder going
into lockup trying to act tough: "We baaaad, we baaaaaaaad!"
Gene McCarthy. Clean for Gene. My ex-wife hated him. That's got
nothing to do with it, just a memory that inevitably rushes back as I
think now of that somewhat emotionally distant man. My ex is a far more
political beast than I am, she worked on the RFK campaign in New York in
1968, she saw McCarthy as an impediment. She probably was right: I
believe RFK would have won, McCarthy's Olympian manner was "him" but
totally wrong even in the ancient days of the 1960s. I wonder what kind
of President he might have made. Oddly I have never read a word of his
poetry, which I've HEARD sounds like reheated Lowell. What matter?
But McCarthy proved a few things--you can challenge injustice and a mad
policy. You can subvert assumptions. You can change history.
To both: Requiem aeternam.
Ken
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Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com
39. Not observing the imperfections of others, preserving silence and a continual communion with God will eradicate great imperfections from the
soul and make it the possessor of great virtues.
--St. John of the Cross, Maxims on Love (The Minor Works)
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