kathleen_dailey

The Canadian writer and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro has died.

I've read and reread all of her work many times over the years. She was in complete command of her craft, and her stories always reveal something new to me whenever I revisit them.

This 2009 article in The Walrus describes Munro's early life in Wingham and the influence of Huron County on her body of work. Well worth reading.

ETA: Also worth reading: this NYT article. It doesn't appear to be behind a paywall (at this moment, anyway).

I don't really know what to say. I learned today that Rabble Rouser died in 2018. That news, coming on the heels of the news of JK's death, is shocking and profoundly saddening. RR, along with JK, was a fundamental part of the TrekFest and ASCEM crowd, and I can't begin to estimate how deep her influence, like JK's, was on my writing and thinking.

She was the author of many stories, but the one that has stayed with me all these years is Sympathy for the Devil. Her characterization of T'Pring was, for its time, astonishingly and courageously radical. If I ever finish the T'Pring WIP (now in its 20th year of non-completion), it will be entirely dedicated to RR's memory.

This litany of losses can stop right now, please, goddesses of Fate, TYVM.

The Vulture article at least mentioned Kirstie Alley's role as Saavik in ST:TWOK, but so far no other mainstream outlet has. It's her portrayal of Saavik that was and is at the front of my mind whenever I think of the character. The Saavik in "Elective Affinities" is 100 percent KA, and if Robin Curtis's portrayal was all I had to go on, I probably would never have written the story. (Ditto for the epilogue to Any Other Lifetime.)

It seems as if this journal is becoming mostly a listing of those we've said goodbye to. On Friday I learned of the death of my former colleague, Cintra R. We met back in the extremely faraway days when the major accounting firms were called the Big Eight (as opposed to the Big Four, or by now probably Big Two). She was doing technical writing for one of the firms, and I was editing and revamping some of their publications. We hit it off right away, and over the next 40 or so years we remained more or less regularly in touch. She made numerous changes in her career, from corporate to academic to corporate to academic, changing cities frequently in order to accept a new job or appointment. Over the last few years we'd lost touch, but I thought of her frequently, and I always felt that we'd see each other again when the workload was lighter and the world less crazy. Sadly, that didn't happen. I don't know the cause of her death; I do know that she was a cancer survivor, that heart disease ran in her family, and that she was a smoker. So it could have been one or a combination of those factors that caused her to die far too soon. She will be missed.

Joanne Linville, who portrayed the Romulan Commander in the TOS episode "The Enterprise Incident," died on Sunday, June 20, at age 93. As I've said many times in many places, it was her serious and sensitive portrayal of the character that spurred me to write about What Happened Next. I hope that I did her character justice. I'm truly sorry to learn of her death, and I'm very grateful for her body of work.

Another B5 actor is gone. She played one of my favourite genre characters, and she spoke a line that I remember to this day: "He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else."

Another Trek author gone. I admired both her technical skill and her prose style, and if I am remembering correctly (not a sure thing these days), she was the one who (in The Entropy Effect? now I wish I'd kept all my old Trek paperbacks so that I could check) offhandedly made Spock a fan of avocados--and then had his Vulcan training kick in, so that he cautioned himself not to enjoy them too much. McIntyre thus taught by example how to create a revealing character attribute in just a few words. The obits are saying that she died of pancreatic cancer--yet another person lost too soon to this horrible disease.

Syn Ferguson has died. This news took me by surprise, even though I hadn't corresponded with her for many, many years. I remember reading "Courts of Honor" in typescript, long before it was available on the Internet. From a 2017 viewpoint, it's hard to believe how much controversy that zine generated, but it certainly gave me the impetus to write my own version of the Romulan Commander.

Syn's stories had a great influence on Trek fans in the 1980s and 1990s, and I am sorry to hear of her death.

Such a sad loss. His influence was so widespread--it's impossible to know how many lives, hearts, and minds he touched. Condolences to his family, friends, and fans.

During the last couple of weeks, I came upon reports of the deaths of two people I once knew well in what amounts to two of my former lives. Debated whether to discuss these deaths with people I know well now, and then decided not to even try. Past history is so difficult to explain or analyze, especially when from a present-day viewpoint it seems more like fiction (with a plot only vaguely recalled) than actual lived-through-it fact.

If I include these two decedents in the count, four people with whom I had a reasonably close connection (either in private life or in work life) have died in the past few months. Statistically, that's probably not remarkable at my age. Experientially, it's pretty shocking.

In other news, there is no news. The status remains quo, and I have to say that I'm about at the point where I don't really expect that to change. Miracles happen, but still.