Endless Knots

Daja Wangchuk Mizu Meston, 1970-2010

Bryan Marquard's sensitive and insightful obit ("Daja Meston: Buddhist peace hid his inner struggles") in today's Boston Globe for our dear friend, Wangchuk. I've written about him and his wife Phuni a number of times before here, never expecting what has happened. Wangchuk, who struggled with depression, took his own life on July 11.

Phuni, along with their friends Robert Barnett, head of the Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University, and Patrick Curley, an attorney here in Boston, speak beautifully about Wangchuk in the obit. Please read it.

Today friends and family will gather for his memorial service at 3 PM at 10 Twin Pond Lane, Lincoln, MA.

We are all so very sad.

 

 

 

 

 

Occupation? Angel

Don't skip Bryan Marquard's obit, "Graham H. Gardner, 22, 'angel in service of God," in today's Boston Globe. Read to the end.

Another of the networking greats passes on: Seymour Sarason

Back when we were first writing about networks, we received a letter (in the mail, that long ago), written on beautiful stationery. It was from Elizabeth M. Lorentz, who said that while she liked our book, we'd missed a very important source of information: the books she'd written with Seymour Sarason (who died on Jan. 28 in New Haven). She went on to point out that we'd failed to recognize a critical role in networks, that of the coordinator, again a function that she and Sarason had identified.

Shame on us. We'd missed their work entirely. In fact, we'd never heard of either of them until the letter came, but, once it did, a friendship was born with Elizabeth that lasted until she died about ten years ago.

I could (and eventually will) write for pages about Elizabeth, her remarkable life, and what turned out to be an important friendship. Her father was Eugene Meyer, first head of the World Bank, but that was only later in his life, after many other positions, including chairing the Federal Reserve Bank, and buying, at auction, The Washington Post, which Elizabeth's younger sister, Katharine Graham, would eventually run. The world passed through the doors of the Meyer home and, during the fifteen years of our friendship, I heard many stories about people whom I only knew from reading--Brancusi, Steichen, Gershwin, to name a few. The most important to our work was Seymour.

The Times obit that I linked to in the first paragraph reviews Seymour's remarkable contribution to psychology, which acknowledges the role of community in shaping people. I'd never met Seymour face-to-face until Elizabeth died and her sister organized a memorial service in New York. At the luncheon following, I was seated between Seymour and Mrs. Graham. (Somehow he was instantly Seymour but I couldn't think of her as Kay.)

He was warm and funny, knew our work, and wanted me to come visit him in Connecticut. You no doubt have a list of such trips yourself, ones that you really want to make but never can make happen, say, next Tuesday. I'm so grateful that I did make the time, many times over, to see Elizabeth and get to know her.

Seymour's and Elizabeth's work together, which began after she was well into her fifties, called out "The Challenge of the Resource Exchange Network," the title of one of their books. (Seymour wrote dozens, by the way.)

One of its central tenets lies close to the heart of all of us interested in networks: that we have a great deal to offer one another but we have to reach outside the narrow bounds of the organizations we serve in order to realize it--and to manifest what cross-boundary communication and sharing really make possible. Coordinators, back to that first letter from Elizabeth, are the people who can make this happen.

As I'm madly trying to find some passages that describe what Elizabeth and Seymour were talking about, I've put my fingers on a few pages in The Age of the Network on their work. Will post that too.

Meanwhile, a deep bow to the phenomenal body of work that you produced, Seymour, which we all need to study more closely.

And a huge public note to self: Stop delaying all those trips.

Margalit Fox on Tomas Eloy Martinez

Fox, mentioned below, has a thorough bio of Tomas in her obit, including some extraordinary moments in his life that I remember his talking about. Poignant.

Tomas Eloy Martinez...

...has died. The Argentine journalist, who for a number of years headed the Latin American studies department at Rutgers, was also a novelist whose books played with reality, Santa Evita perhaps the emblem of the genre. What genre, I'm not certain, but Tomas did it masterfully. The story of an investigative reporter on the hunt to find Eva Peron's body, the book is carefully footnoted to the point that it's nearly impossible to distinguish what came out of the author's mind and what the reader can actually google.

I have two photos of Tomas, neither very good, taken at book club at our house in 2006. The backstory: as previously reported, I often take the train back and forth to New York. As some measure of my particular karma, I often meet a writer on that journey. As karmas go, this is a good one.

But sometimes I'm very tired on these trips and don't want to talk to anyone at all. Such was the case early one Sunday evening in 2006 when I was a little late getting on the train. There were only a few seats available and I chose the one where I anticipated the least interaction--a couple sitting opposite each other, both with their laptops running. I sat down next to the woman (Gabriela Esquivada, far right in photo), we exchanged smiles, and I settled in for a rest.

A few minutes later, Gabriela asked if she could get by, then offered to get me a coffee for disturbing me...and we were off and running. She introduced me to her husband, who was deep in concentration, watching some sort of thriller, as I recall...and then she explained who he was, one of the great Latin American writers, and soon all of us were talking. (It was from Tomas that I later learned that Carlos Fuentes loves bluefish, a phrase that will eventually make it into an essay about such train encounters, drafted so far only in my head.)

But why were they coming to Boston? Tomas turned the right side of his head toward me, a very large and red scar searing down the side, just behind his ear. Glioblastoma, he said, and he was being treated here in Boston.

We struck up a friendship and a month or so later, Tomas and Gabriela, also an Argentine journalist and editor, came to book club. I wrote a note about the evening for my friends on Zoetrope (see below). About two years ago, we lost touch. I was sad to see the news this morning but amazed that he lived for so long with this terrible disease.

From my notes:

Tomas Eloy Martinez came to our book club last night to discuss Santa Evita. So far, Tomas has written seven novels, I believe, and a whole lot of journalism down the years, but has not had as much exposure in the US as abroad, at 71 not as familiar as other Lat American writers, Carlos Fuentes, for example, whom he’s known since he was 18 (Fuentes is 10 years older).  One of Tomas’s books, unpublished in the US, The Flight of the Queen has sold 500k sales globally, many translations, best foreign book in China (dunno year), and on. I found this interview with him in Three Monkeys Online and it squares with what I’ve been learning from him, worth reading.

Tomas and Gabriela Esquivada-Martinez, his wife, have been here in Boston for past couple of months where Tomas is being treated for brain tumor. I met them in early March on the train from NY to Boston ten days after his surgery; they were traveling to Boston from their home in Highland Park, NJ, where he’s been heading Lat Amer studies dept at Rutgers. Mission: his first round of chemo and radiation. When I picked them up last night, I expected him to look haggard and ill. He looks great. His incision is healing and he spoke well and clearly for many hours.

Tomas focused on the line between fiction and fact, blurry, saying that the woman writing the intro to the anthology of his work being pub’d in Venezuela (hope I’ve got this right) finds the theme of his work to be “doubt.” I agree, caveat being that I’ve only read one of his books…but it is impossible to know, reading it, whether it is fact or fiction. How could this be a novel, I kept asking myself, but Tomas told us last night that only the last three pages are true. He entered the “black hole” of nine missing months in Eva Peron’s history and from it spun this book. Very dark, no redeeming characters, except perhaps the “I” who appears late in the book, relatively speaking, and is never fully revealed.

My book club has been meeting for 15 or so years, monthly, 190 books to date, primarily classics. This evening was in its own category and I encourage everyone to read Tomas’s work.

Whole Howard

Great picture from Boston Globe obit

The praise is pouring from the skies around the world, the tributes, the pure joy at someone of Howard Zinn's commitment, brilliance, and warmth being posted more quickly than Google can even keep up. You must click on that first link before going any further to see a truly beautiful picture of this man.

My tiny reminiscence with the reminder to always say hello. Always.

In one of those funny coincidences of life, I nearly always see Howard when I go to the nearby Whole Foods. By which I don't mean occasionally. I mean it's rare that I go -- and I go a lot, grocery shopping being the sole shopping experience that I enjoy (I know, I'm bad for the consumer economy of the U.S.) -- to the store and don't bump into Howard.

Almost always (read on), I say hi, sometimes exchange a few words, complimenting him on his latest triumph/publicity/appearance-on-Jon-Stewart. Even if we haven't stopped to speak, we smile back and forth. He was just a lovely man, unmissable because he was so tall, in astonishingly good shape and very handsome, with thick wavy hair, even at 87, straight spine, moving gracefully through the vegetables and fruits, wheeling past the dairy department.

About a week ago, I was in a rush and so as I grabbed for some grapes and noticed Howard out of the corner of my eye near the cucumbers, I made that split-second decision to not stop, not engage, just to keep moving because I was on a schedule.

On a schedule that I can't even remember now. I have no idea why I was in such a rush that I couldn't smile at Howard for the last time, remind him how much he'd inspired me to keep doing my work, and to say something nice about his daughter and son-in-law, Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn, with whom we share the same karass.

Smiling now for all you gave and for staying the course. And sending love to the whole family.

Ardath Rodale

Sad to learn of the passing of Ardath Rodale, most recently "Chief Inspiration Officer" at Rodale Press. Although I never met her, her husband, Bob, who was killed in an accident while traveling in Russia in 1990, was on the Calvert Social Investment Fund Advisory Council with us (Jeff Stamps and me); her son, David, who died in 1985 of AIDS-related pneumonia, was one of our co-founders ("our" here meaning Lisa Kimball et al) of the Electronic Networking Association; and her daughter, Heather, became a friend. Rodale Press, one of the last family owned publishing enterprises in the U.S., is responsible for so many good ideas--books, magazines, initiatives. Ardie was an innovator in business thinking for decades, served as chair and CEO of the company, and was a fearless AIDS educator before people really understood the disease. Thinking of the whole family today.

Samuelson: "Women are men without money"

I'm sure there are plenty of people sharpening their keystrokes finding fault with this statement ("women are not men!" "plenty of women have money!" "women and men are never to be equated!" "men ARE NOT women!" and so forth) but...

There is great "economy" in this statement which cropped up in the NY Times obit for Paul Samuelson, a bit of a quipster, apparently:

When women began complaining about career and salary inequities, for example, he said in their defense, “Women are men without money.”

And kudos to Michael Weinstein for a very comprehensive review of Samuelson's life and thinking. Obits are one of the best sources of education, in my opinion, gateways to tiny, you-must-be-kidding/all-in-the-family fun facts, like this one: Larry Summers is Samuelson's nephew (which of course only makes Samuelson's comment more intriguing, viz. this). Cut my teeth as a reporter writing obits and still cannot open the daily paper (or click to one of my fave dailies) without looking at them first.

Thinking of Dorothy

Two years ago today.

Updike: "A crazy belief that you have some exciting news about being alive"

John Updike's death yesterday at 76 gives wide berth for his obituari-teers (huh?) to write beautifully about his enormous body of work. Though Updike and I (this is going to be a tenuous connection, folks) grew up barely twenty miles and a scant generation apart--and his father once worked as a substitute in the high school English department that my mother chaired (Go Daniel Boone HS, Birdsboro, PA!)--I never was a fan of his actual works. His writing, of course. He reminded me of an extraordinary cake decorator, taking the common form and turning it into something of unusual beauty, something far beyond confection. His subjects, though, were, may I say this, plain vanilla, at least given what interests me, a non-male, non-upper-middling-class, non-suburban-living, non-adult-of-the-50s who doesn't play golf.

So it takes his death to tremble my heart. Mark Feeney's elegant bio in this morning's Boston Globe (Page One, "John Updike, literature's wide-ranging master, is dead at 76") carries Updike's brilliance as to why people sit, as I do, hour after hour, day upon day, year in and year out, at the keyboard, wearing out the imprints of the letters. Thank you, Mr. Updike, and we're all sorry you went so young:

"There's a kind of confessional impulse that not every literate, intelligent person has," Mr. Updike said in his [1991 Boston] Globe interview. "A crazy belief that you have some exciting news about being alive, and I guess that, more than talent, is what separates those who do it from those who think they'd like to do it. That your witness to the universe can't be duplicated, that only you can provide it, and that it's worth providing."

UPDATE on Updike: Just listened to a "Remembering John Updike," a special On Point on WBUR about the breadth and depth of Updike's work. One story after another about how universal his topics--and his generosity and graciousness. And so my reading begins.