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Sad to hear of the death of critical theorist Mark Poster:

It is with deep sadness that we share the news that our esteemed colleague Mark Poster, Emeritus Professor of History and Film & Media Studies, passed away in the hospital earlier this morning. Mark Poster was a vital member of the School of Humanities, and for decades one of its most widely read and cited researchers. He made crucial contributions to two different departments, History and Film & Media Studies, and played a central role in UCI's emergence as a leading center for work in Critical Theory...

Mark Poster was a major figure in the rapid development of media studies and theory in the USA and internationally. While as an intellectual historian he could draw on Frankfurt School thought as well as on cybernetics, he was particularly interested in the potential of poststructuralism for media studies. From his translations of Baudrillard to his dissemination of Foucault, Poster played a highly influential role in the study of media culture, including television, databases, computing, and the Internet; he continued to offer crucial commentary on the relevance to technology and media of cultural theory, and his numerous articles and books have been translated into a number of different languages. Reflective of the breadth of his interests and expertise, Poster held courtesy appointments in the Department of Information and Computer Science and in the Department of Comparative Literature. First hired at UCI in 1968, Poster had recently retired after 40 years of service to the School and the Campus (more...)

News just in from his English-language publisher Dedalus that Herbert Rosendorfer, "one of Germany's greatest post WW2 authors", has died:

Herbert Rosendorfer was born in Germany in 1934 and died in 2012. His first novel Der Ruinenbaumeister (1969) was a critical and commercial success, and is regarded by many critics as one of the masterpieces of German twentieth-century fiction. It was published in English by Dedalus in 1992 as The Architect of Ruins. This was followed by Stephanie in 1995, which was shortlisted for the Shlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. Letters Back to Ancient China is the most commercially successful of his novels and in Germany has sold over two million copies. Mike Mitchell's translation was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize in 1997. Dedalus published Grand Solo with Anton by Herbert Rosendorfer in 2006.

It has just come to my attention (first via Booksurfer) that the anarchist writer Colin Ward has died. Sad, sad news:

Colin's contribution to anarchism has been invaluable - he founded, edited and often wrote Anarchy magazine for over ten years. In Anarchy, and a whole series of books and hundreds of articles he wrote about the practical application of anarchist ideas to social organisation. and outlined anarchism as a sociological theory. He is probably best known for Anarchy in Action, but every book he wrote provided new insights into the revolutionary potential of the way ordinary people organise and live their lives in the face of enormous odds (more...)

This via the Five Leaves Blog:

The anarchist writer Colin Ward, who died on the night of 11th February, was indirectly responsible for the existence of Five Leaves. We’d met years before, and like several people I later met, I’d been vaguely collecting Colin’s Anarchy (first series), still the best anarchist magazine produced in this country. A small group of us in Nottingham, publishing as Old Hammond Press, brought out a couple of pamphlets by Colin, one on housing, one on William Morris’s ideas of work. But in 1994 I got so fed up waiting for Faber to bring out the paperback of The Allotment: its landscape and culture that I offered to buy the rights. Colin said that as long as his co-writer, David Crouch, was in agreement he’d be pleased if Faber were to hand them over, and if it helped, the co-authors would do without royalties as they were simply pleased to have the book available in paperback.

Well, thousands of copies later Colin never regretted his generosity, and as well being the first book published by Five Leaves (though initially, for the sake of any bibliographers reading, Mushroom Bookshop), for years The Allotment kept the press afloat. We went on to publish Colin’s Arcadia for All (co-written with Dennis Hardy), Talking Anarchy (with David Goodway) and Cotters and Squatters. Colin also wrote the introduction to our edition of The London Years by Rudolf Rocker, who of course he knew. Rocker in turn knew Peter Kropotkin, whose Mutual Aid had such an influence on Colin as a political thinker (more...)

The American historian, playwright and author of the bestseller A People's History of the United States Howard Zinn has died aged 87. Lots more info via howardzinn.org.

Genius -- as ever -- from The Onion:

In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything (more...)

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, on the 7 November 1913 into a working class family. The Diary Junction Blog today continues:

When he was still very young, during the First World War, his father was killed, and his mother suffered a stroke on hearing the news. Camus won a scholarship and studied at the lycée in Algiers until 1932. Thereafter, he took various jobs, joined the Communist Party, studied at the University of Algiers, and married Simone Hié. He also contracted tuberculosis.

Then, 50 years ago today, at the age of 46, he died in a car accident near Sens, in a place named Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. Wikipedia tells me that "in his coat pocket lay an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train, with his wife and children, but at the last minute accepted his publisher's proposal to travel with him. The driver of the Facel Vega car, Michel Gallimard — his publisher and close friend — was also killed in the accident." In the car was the manuscript for The First Man (Le premier homme) an autobiographical work about his childhood in Algeria and was published in 1995.

More cheery fodder, about other gone-but-not-forgotten authors, can be found in the Guardian's Living in the memory: A celebration of the great writers who died in the past decade.

Welcome to the Teenies. Be assured, we can expect more deaths!

You won't need me to tell you I'm sure, but just in case you haven't heard: the novelist and critic John Updike has died at the age of seventy-six of lung cancer.

Philosopher Arne Naess (January 27th 1912 - January 12th 2009), who invented the concept of "deep ecology", has died (via The Norway Post):

The recognized Norwegian philosopher, author, environmentalist and mountain climber Arne Naess sr has died at the age of nearly 97. He died in his sleep on Monday night, VG reports. Arne Naess sr was born on January 27th 1912, and received his MA degree in 1933, as the youngest ever. Doctor of Philosophy in 1936. He became professor at the University of Oslo at the age of 27... Naess was an advocate of Mahatma Gandhi's pilosophy of non violence which he developed further (more...)

Mick Imlah, poetry editor at the TLS, whose own volume of poetry, The Lost Leader, won the 2008 Forward prize for best collection and was shortlisted for this year's TS Eliot prize (won yesterday by Jen Hadfield), has died, aged 52:

The Lost Leader was only the second collection of poetry from Imlah, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in December 2007. His first volume, Birthmarks, was published in 1988 — a full 20 years earlier — to critical acclaim: reviewing it in the Times Literary Supplement, Neil Corcoran described him as "a poet of striking originality and cunning, a genuinely distinctive voice in the murmur and babble of the contemporary". (More...)

Via The New York Times (thanks Steve):

Richard Seaver, an editor, translator and publisher who defied censorship, societal prudishness and conventional literary standards to bring works by rabble-rousing authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade to American readers, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82. (More.)

Via Nomadics:

Inger Christensen, considered one of Denmark's greatest authors and long mentioned among probable candidates for a Nobel Literature prize, has died at the age of 73, on Friday, January 2, her publisher said on Monday. Born on Jan 16, 1935 in the western Danish town of Vejle, Christensen published her first collection of poems, Lys (Light) in 1962, followed by Graes (Grass) a year later, Det (It) in 1969, Alfabet (Alphabet) in 1981 and Sommerfugledalen (The Butterfly Valley), which critics have hailed as her masterpiece, 1991 (more...)

The Associated Press released this just a few hours ago: "David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46." (More ...)

Dorothy H. Crawford is a Professor of Medical Microbiology and Assistant Principle for the Public Understanding of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Her most recent book, Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History, takes us back in time to follow the interlinked history of microbes and man, impressing upon us how a world free of dangerous microbes is an illusion.  In an excerpt this morning we looked at SARS.  The excerpt below looks at the effect of poverty on disease.

It is glaringly obvious from a glance at the figures that poverty is the major cause of microbe-related deaths. On a worldwide scale microbes are still major killers, accounting for one in three of all deaths. But the huge discrepancy in the death rates between rich and poor nations reveals the stark reality. Whereas only 1–2 per cent of all deaths in the West are caused by microbes, this figure rises to over 50 per cent in the poorest nations of the world, and it is in these highly microbe-infected areas where over 95 per cent of the global deaths from infections occur. Most of the 17 million killed by microbes each year are children in developing countries where the link with poverty is clear. It is the poor who are malnourished, live in filthy, overcrowded urban slums and go without clean drinking water or sewage disposal, and therefore they are the ones who fall prey to the killer microbes: HIV, malaria, TB, respiratory infections and diarrhea diseases like cholera, typhoid and rotavirus; all eminently preventable and treatable given the resources.

The spread of HIV is an excellent example of how microbes exploit the poor, striking at the most disadvantaged in the community. The virus emerged in Central Africa and spread silently throughout the continent in the 1970s, given a head start by its long silent incubation period, and aided by despotic leaders, corrupt governments, civil wars, tribal conflicts, droughts and famines. Carried by undisciplined armies and terrorists, the virus infiltrated city slums, infected commercial sex workers, was picked up by migrant workers and passed on to their wives and families. While malnutrition accelerated the onset of AIDs, breakdown of health-care services in the political turmoil of Africa excluded any possibility of medical support for the millions in need.

Now we are living through the worst pandemic the world has ever known, with 40 million living with HIV, 25 million already dead and around 10,000 dying daily—the equivalent of over three 9/11disasters every twenty-four hours. A third of people living in sub-Saharan African cities are HIV-infected, and while highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has converted this lethal disease into a manageable chronic infection in the West, presently only a tiny proportion of Africans living with HIV receive this treatment; for most there is no hope of obtaining the drugs vital for keeping them alive.

The dynamics of HIV in Africa reflects its mode of spread. As the virus is sexually transmitted gender inequalities mean that women are particularly vulnerable. In general they are poorer and less well educated than their male counterparts, and are often powerless to choose or restrict their sexual partners, or to insist on condom use. Indeed many are forced to exchange sex for essentials like food, shelter and schooling. Now one in four African women are HIV-infected by the age of twenty-two years (compared to one in fourteen men of the same age), and women account for 60 per cent of all those living with HIV.

Over 90 per cent of HIV-positive women in Africa are mothers, and the virus has created 15 million orphans worldwide, 12 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa. These children are bearing the burden of the HIV pandemic; they miss school to care for their sick mothers or to earn the family income; the virus has not only deprived them of their parents but their childhood and their education as well.

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The poet E.A. Markham sadly died yesterday of a heart attack aged just 69 (more via Baroque in Hackney).

The 79-year-old "poet, publisher, designer, essayist [and] iconographer", and champion of the avant-garde, Jonathan Williams has died. He is remembered by Pierre Joris, Mark Scroggins, Ron Silliman, John Latta and citizen times (links originally collected at wood s lot).

Alain Robbe-Grillet est mort, il avait 85 ans. The father of the nouveau roman died last night of a heart attack.

Celui que l'on appelait «le pape du Nouveau Roman» est mort dans la nuit du 17 au 18 février, emporté par une crise cardiaque. Né en 1922, Alain Robbe-Grillet avait été ingénieur agronome avant de devenir l'auteur des «Gommes» (1953), de «la Jalousie» (1957) et du «Voyeur» (1955).

Son passé à l'avant-garde n'avait pas empêché son élection à l'Académie française, le 25 mars 2004 - même s'il n'y avait pas encore été officiellement reçu. Son dernier livre, «Un roman sentimental» était paru à l'automne 2007.

Still recovering as I am from my mammoth 'flu attack, I've not been keeping an eye on things as closely as I usually try to do. So, I've only just noticed that German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died, aged of 79, last Friday. Sad news indeed. I was a big fan. (More at NPR.)

The philosopher André Gorz, 84, co-founder of the Nouvel Observateur weekly, has committed suicide together with his wife Dorine. More via AFP.

Wikipedia tells us:

Gorz was a theorist of workers' self-management. Later, he was also concerned with political ecology. His central theme is work: liberation from work, just distribution of work, alienated work, etc. He is also one of the advocates for Guaranteed basic income.

He also was a main theorist in New Left movement,inspired by the young Marx humanism and Alienation discussion and the liberation mankind,seeking a third way between communism and reform capitalism like his mentor, Jean Paul Sartre, but even in the same spirit as the people like C. Wright Mills and the people round him in the New Left Review, and Jurgen Habermas and the Frankfurter School. Gorz called him self an "revolutionary-reformist", a democratic socialist who wanted to see system changing reforms.

Such sad news: the American short story writer, poet, and political activist, Grace Paley, died yesterday. As soon as I know more, I'll add to this.

   
_{Ingmar Bergman, via bergmanorama.com}

What was I supposed to be doing this morning? What was I supposed to be writing? Never mind, I think to myself. Bergman's dead.

_{George Melly (photograph via the BBC)}

There just aren't enough jazz-singing, surrealist, alcoholic, bisexual Scousers in the world. And now, sadly, there is one less: George Melly, born in Liverpool in 1926, died yesterday from the effects of battling lung cancer and vascular dementia. RIP George.

The philosopher Richard Rorty died on Friday -- I've not seen anything much about his death, no obituaries as yet, so, for now, this is all I know. More information via Telos; nice appreciation over on Waggish.

The great Michael Hamburger (best known for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald) died yesterday. As soon as I know more, I'll add to this -- wikipedia has more details about the poet, but no details as yet about his death.

Worthy of lots of clicks: Edward Champion has got together a great list of web-based Vonnegut resources.

The great, anti-war writer Kurt Vonnegut died this Tuesday, 10th April, in New York, at the age of 84, due to brain injuries from a recent fall. The defining moment of his life was the firebombing of Dresden, in Germany, by allied forces in 1945 -- an event he witnessed as a young prisoner of war. His experience was the basis of his best-known work, Slaughterhouse Five which was published at the time of the Vietnam War. More via the BBC.