Dead.
I’m always curious when I see things like "Best-selling author Michael Crichton has died in Los Angeles aged 66 after a “courageous and private battle against cancer”, his family has said."
Doesn’t everyone have a private battle?
What I was planning on writing is looking increasingly like a disrespectful diatribe at freshly dead bloke. It’s not meant to be. It stems from this,
“Through his books, Michael Crichton served as an inspiration to students of all ages, challenged scientists in many fields, and illuminated the mysteries of the world in a way we could all understand.”
The last two points of which are clearly a load of bollocks.
Anyway, I’m reviewing a very Crichton-esque Podiobook for Lablit right now, so I can have my fun in safer (feedbackless) forum after he’s in the ground…
I always ask my self in such circumstances whether I’d be disrespectful when they were alive. (yes)
I also wonder about the use of the word ‘courage’ in these contexts.
Ditto mate. I just have this post-Christian sense of maybe I should at least wait till rigour has passed before I begin my disection…
I once read an article by a cancer patient who hates the ubiquitous use of the phrase “long and courageous battle against cancer”. He/she (can’t remember) wanted their own eulogy to include the words “brief and cowardly skirmish” instead.
My aunt died of cancer a couple of weeks ago. I too find the term/phraseology objectionable. I think my aunt’s choice would have been:
I guess in times like these, maybe the “private” stems from “not everybody knew he had cancer [like Patrick Swayze for example] and it was a family thing” since he was a celebrity/writer?
Then again, I don’t know. Well, I do know that the wording probably reflects more of the journalist rather than the deceased. The whole “afraid of death/talking about death” that imho people who are suffering from terminal illnesses have less of a problem with.
So sorry to hear about your Aunt Ian.
@Asa: I’m up for great big post mortem shindigs like in the olden days. I want flowers, gifts, professional mourners, a big party celebrating my life and all my friends telling stories about the limitless number of daft and entertaining things I’ve done. I want a fuckoff great big mausaleum (sp) with hooded angels, statuary…an oak tree… the lot!!
@Cath: Thanks. I nearly blogged about it, but then she really did die, and it wan’t as fun anymore. Silly woman was “spotting” but ignored it, and ovarian cancer spread quickly to her bowels and liver. From initial admitance, she was dead in a couple of months. Sad, and pointless. And just plain silly.
I’d be happy to be buried under a tree by a river.
And yeah, a fuck-off big party, and lots of people ringing my mobile while I’m in the casket.
I would like a Viking funeral, complete with burning boat. I grew up in York and went to the Viking festival whenever possible. The “funeral” boat is usually set on fire using flaming arrows shot from the riverbank, there is lots of singing, and beer aplenty. It seems like a pretty good send-off.
…yeah…a room with a view, as it were :)
I had a chum in Uni who enjoyed…ah, Mother Nature’s green resources, as it were, too an excess. He was insistent that upon his death he should be cremated publicly and “smoked” by those present…so an not to waste any good “bud” that might be lingering in his adipose layers.
@Cath: one of my favourite movies is The Vikings with Kirk Douglas. The great send off for the dead king at the end has the traditional burning longboat, complete with epic “war horn” tritonic scale
…I know some really weird people…
My husband worked on the 13th Warrior – a terrible movie with Antonio Banderas as a Moorish Viking warrior. Yeah, you read that right. Mark helped to build the longboats that were used in the film – and these were proper boats, they ran them down river rapids and everything. We have a gorgeous framed photo on our living room wall of two of the boats on a misty river at dawn, with mountains in the background. This may have contributed to my funereal preferences…
Hey, I just went Googling for an image and found that Michael Crichton wrote the 13th Warrior! That’s a hell of a coincidence, I had no idea!
And here’s me thinking how quickly this thread had got off topic…
! Just goes to show huh!
and yeah…that film was awful. Shame, cos it had promise :/
cool coincidence Cath! Nevermore shall I complain about OT posting LOL
I am always irked by the seemingly ubiquitous description of death as ‘tragic’. Is there any other kind of death? Such overworked cliches are, in the end, disrespectful to the dead.
I agree. Perhaps we can turn this comments thread into a novel terminal lexicon?
abruptly
“Ian Brooks abruptly died today, apropos of nothing in particular. Colleagues said he’d looked a bit peaky, but didn’t think much of it at the time.”
explosively
“Senior Nature editor, Henry Willberforce Gee, died explosively this afternoon from unknown causes. Police are investigating the manure heap of at the bottom of the garden at “The Maison des Girrafes”, the stately home owned by the Gees in Cromer, Norfolk. “That bloody Gee farm” as it is known by the locals, has been declared unfit for human habitation due to structural damaged caused by the force of Dr. Gee’s detonation. “His lurex boob-tube nearly took out the Eco-Mo,” said his widow through fits of hysterical giggling, brought on no doubt, by the unexpectedly exciting Nature of her husband’s passing (pun intended).
Think big, guys. I’m aiming for something like,
NO CARRIER—-
Has anyone ever died noisily in their sleep?
I think Crichton set back sensible discussion of global climate change by 5-10 years. The world may just be a more sensible, forward looking place without his unfortunate ability to (almost deliberately) confuse fact and fiction in his novels. That’s a whole other post though (It’s easy to argue it was a skill he was particularly good at and used it to considerable literary effect).
I’d love to be left out in the woods to let the funghi have their wicked way with me at the end of my
unnatural life. With the following limeric scrawled into a nearby tree:@Bob: If my dad’s wife smothered him last night, that would be my father. And understandable. I’ve never heard such a thin person snore so loud.
@Ian: my condolences as well. Mortality is sobering, isn’t it? But when you cited your green friend there, I burnt my choanae on my coffee. Recycling at its noblest.
In slight defense of the press release, often the family will subcontract such statements to the funeral home, and they’ll bring out their stock arsenal of phrases. If you really want to avoid that for your loved ones after your demise, write the one you really want before you pass on.
And how many of us have actually done more than think about writing a will?
I’m sure I’m going to inspire a pile-up, but I really like some of his novels and I am saddened to hear of his death. ‘Jurassic Park’ is a great yarn and a lot of the science is well transmitted and thought-provoking, even if the premise is speculative. It shows scientists in an interesting light and stimulated a lot of my non-scientist friends into debates about the topic of forensic reconstitution.
And ‘Andromeda Strain’ rocks.
I really enjoyed reading “Airframe”, and “Andromeda Strain” was riveting, terrifically great fun to read. Crichton was an excellent author, if you didn’t know much about the details behind what he was writing about, but after reading State of Fear, I wondered if I should reappraise his other work. It’s so hopelessly unbalanced it starts to become offensive, a bit like this little chestnut. Being naturally lazy though, I didn’t, and clung onto the opinions I formed based on one dodgy novel instead.
Well, isn’t that your fault for believing what is obviously fiction?
Reports are coming in of a mysterious death in Cromer. A body, washed up on the beach and tied to a mobility scooter, is believed to be that of reclusive local author and smallholder Dr Henry Hussein Gee, who disappeared more than a week ago in mysterious circumstances. “’I’m just nipping out to buy some new crocs – I may be some time’, he said,” reported his wife Penelope (21), unconvincingly, “and that’s the last I saw of him.” Neighbours suspect a different story. Rumors have been circulating in the Lowdley-Purring Institute (where Dr Gee was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck International Worm Observatory) and the Dazed Haddock (Dr Gee’s local pub) that Mrs Gee had got fed up the the
snoringblogging, and that there have been reports of frequent visits at the house from a research scientist based in Sydney, Australia. “Mrs Gee is helping us with their inquiries,” said Detective Inspector Perspehone Sheepwool of Norfolk Police, in a statement. Yesterday.While I might have known it was fiction and where I could find evidence to counter his flimsy scientific tales, I was left with the chilling feeling that there would be an awful lot of other people out there reading his book who weren’t scientists. Crichton prefaced more than one of his books with something like the following:
That’s lifted directly from “Stare of Fear”. The next quote is from the inside flap of “State of Fear”:
(my emphasis) – yet it is emphasised, deliberately to stress the fact that Crichton knows his subject areas and is therefore a worthy authority in the fields on which he narrates. Which is disingenuous and will mislead inquisitive readers who don’t have the same access to scientific resources that I do to help me balance my opinion in a manner that correctly reflects the current state of a field.
Not everything contained in his books is fiction. But his presentation can obviously distort the views of people outside the scientific debate that will affect the political debate.
Of all his novels, I liked Disclosure the best. No prizes for guessing why.
We’re back to the whole ‘blame the writer for reader swallowing fiction as fact’ thread that was done to death on my blog last week. I don’t want to recover old ground, but I do want to point out I think it’s silly when people stop liking a work of art they used to love when they find out something unpalatable about its creator after the fact.
The art should stand alone, regardless of how much of a prat the artist is, or how crap a subsequent work was. At that moment, if you liked it, how can you retrospectively decide you don’t based on factors extrinsic to the experience? I’ve never understood that, when my friends say, “that used to be my favorite song until I saw the lead singer acting arrogantly in an interview.”
Sorry Jennifer, I didn’t read that blog. But I might suggest that if our experience before an event can affect how we enjoy the event, why not our experience after the event?
Would you deny people the chance to change their mind in a positive way, or only in a negative way?
The problem with that reasoning is what you call “factors extrinsic to the experience”. Although new information surely cannot affect how much you enjoyed a work of art BEFORE acquiring it, that’s not necessarily true for what you experience the next time you come in contact with it, with the info already being incorporated to your mind. Why should this be regarded as inherently “extrinsic” to the experience?
Apologies if I’ve imposed my own personal modus operandi on proceedings: I see I didn’t phrase that very well last time. To try again: I personally believe that art can and does stand completely separately from its creator. It can be a stand-alone, context-free experience and that is how I like a lot of my art, especially visual art. I don’t want to look at something that requires knowing all of the antecedents and history and what the painter had for breakfast to ‘appreciate’ the work — I like to be viscerally struck. If a work can’t stand alone and needs all sorts of ancillary explanation, I feel it is less of an achievement.(Though I accept that for others, it’s the opposite).
But the same is true in fiction, again for me personally. If Crichton wrote a misleading, stupid book about climate change, it will not affect my enjoyment of Jurassic Park, either read before or after. Jurassic Park stands alone as a work either to admire or despise, regardless of what the author is up to in his personal life or with other works.
For me, that is.
I agree with you in that, Jennifer, but my point was not saying that to appreciate something you need to know all of the antecedents but, on the contrary, that knowing the antecedents (or at least some of them, in some cases) may change your perception and/or response to a certain work. To follow on your example, if my favorite song happens to be an anthem for universal peace and understanding among people, and I happen to learn later that the author is indeed a racist and engages regularly in hate speech, then the next time I hear the song the word “Hyprocrisy” would be constantly flashing in my brain, to the point that I will no longer feel that I’m enjoying the song in question (probably I’d be disgusted by it instead). The song in the meantime remains the same, but my appreciation of it has radically changed. That would be my loss, of course, but I don’t think that there would be a way to prevent it, our minds are not so compartimentalized that you can just exclude that inconvenient piece of information whenever we feel like doing it
Good Lord, I turn my back for no more than 15hrs and look what’s happened!
@Christian: Thanks for stopping by. I think i agree with you (and Mike) about retrospectively finding my original opinions altered by novel information. However, jenny’s point stands (I’m not really trying to nible everyone’s whimple here, honest).
Great art (of any kind) should be stand alone good. However there are so many caveats to that we could be all year discussing it. For what it’s worth, I loved Jurassic Park, and reading Prey didn’t change my opinion of that, although it did alter my opinion of the author. I didn’t bother with State of Fear. Jurassic Park was used as a “teaching tool” in my undergraduate genetics classes, and very effective at engaging the group.
Prey, on the hand, was not only not very well written it was giggle-leakingly poor in its attempt at nano-syntho-evo-devo (as i like to call it). However, I am a trained scientist (skeptic) so I’m (we’re) obviously going to see the holes in the plot that the GenPub generally won’t, because they don’t have A) a biology background, and/or B) the advanced training in skepticism we possess.
As to the “disclaimer” in the front, I always figure that’s part of the plot, otherwise I would be reading non-fiction. Dan Brown does the same thing in his books and I’ve had lengthy discussions with people (GenPubs) about this. Just because the author says s/he found govt. documents doesn’t make it real. It’s called “willing suspension of disbelief” (cos I can’t spell verisimilitude), and some are better than others. Even knowing better I find myself falling for it in some books and I love that!
Has anyone ever died noisily in their sleep?
@Bob: Maybe if I sneaked a hand grenade under your pillow?
I’d love to be left out in the woods to let the funghi have their wicked way with me at the end of my un natural life.
@Mike: Have you heard of The Body Farm at University of Tennessee, Knoxville (my main campus). A good book to read about this is Stiff by Mary Roach
_ If you really want to avoid that for your loved ones after your demise, write the one you really want before you pass on._
@Heather: Good point, I didn’t think of that!
And how many of us have actually done more than think about writing a will?
True. Although in uni, inspired I think by a Stephen Fry or Bill bryson sketch, my friends and i wrote mock eulogies for each other, all in the same vein as the previous efforts.
In high school, one of my friends insisted that, should she die, we had to wear party hats at her funeral and listen to “Loser”. I was okay with the party hats, but not with the choice of music. (She is still alive, and might have changed her mind by now.)
I would concur with Jenny on letting work stand on its own artistic merits apart from the biography of the author and/or performer. That level of enjoyment shouldn’t be lost. (Sinatra fans have always struggled with this.) Its when the art has a clear message and also a distinct messenger that things get muddled. If the messenger drifts into hypocrisy when delivering the art, that’s hard to ignore. In my own case, I hope whatever art I create stands above the many dubious acts of my squalid personal life, and that the vast hypocracies within my work will remain little known and poorly documented (unless I can keep the film rights).
@Eva: Sounds a bit emo-teenager to me!! (the music)
@James: nice point. That’s one reason I write for lablit; control the release of the juicy bits, as it were…
Heather> And how many of us have actually done more than think about writing a will?
yes, my point exactly. It does help a lot, through the haze that follows the death (at least by someone you were close to) and the trying to please everyone involved in the family and all. All the guessing “what would s/he had wanted” etc.
I personally like that anecdotes and even the laughs at the wakes. It all depends on the age and manner of the person who died of course. It is easier (maybe not the word?) to remember the good times with someone older, where the passing was somewhat less of an unexpected thing to happen, than with a younger victim of say cancer?
Then again, it is a personal experience so maybe one can not generalise it as much?
Ian> I think your friend’s plan sounds horrid. But then I am a microbiologist. I kind of find the burning ship appealing if it wasn’t for the fact of burning all that timber… and all that CO2…
maybe just better to shove my coffin (made of the cheap and biodegradable “wood like” material) into the fire and get the ashes to spread somewhere… ashes to ashes and all that…
My boss died recently, very suddenly. His funeral was really tough, largely because the minister knew nothing about him (an evolutionary ecologist first, socialist 2nd, atheist somewhere further down the list) and insisted on banging on about some fellow called God in his eulogy. The Finnish Lutheran church have a monopoly on funerals you see.
My boss had nothing to say about God in his life, so why did the minister bring it up when he’d died? Everyone agreed it was inappropriate and uncomfortable. One of his PhD students and I sang Space Odyssey1 at the end of it all, and it was the only time I’ve ever performed when I’ve been happy to see people cry. It was such a good way to say goodbye, it’s really helped me to deal with the loss.
I want to say something about not being able to understand art without experience, meaning it’s impossible to let art stand on its own merit (we must have some frame of reference to be able to comprehend what our senses tell us), but I won’t just now.
1 He did loads of work on spatial population ecology.
Jeez Mike, I’m sorry about that, all of it. Very rough. Seems like you and your co-workers “rescued” the situation though…
Whenever, I’d be interested in your frame of reference thesis…
Umm, well I think it’s pretty basic. We can’t really talk about appreciating any sensory experience (as adults) in the absence of outside influence. Our existence means we collect experiences, even if that means being locked in a cupboard with only a cotton reel to play with. You come out into the bright light and relate what you see now to what you experienced in the past. There’s also a feedback from what you see now which shapes how you understand what you experienced in the past – it’s too bright out here and there’s lots of loud, confusing things that aren’t cotton reels. Help!
I picked up State of Fear because I’d really enjoyed other Crichton books. I haven’t picked one up since then. I listen to music in different ways depending on whether I think I can play it or not. It’s hard (nay, impossible) for me to separate my experience of any external stimuli from experiences accumulated over the rest of my existence.
As for rescuing anything at the funeral, we were pretty reluctant to sing in the first place, but you can’t really say no to a dead man’s widow. And we were both very glad to have had the chance to do it afterwards. I suppose this fits in nicely with my reappraisal of situations theme.
And on the death theme, I’d heard about the Death Farm a while ago – a morbidly fascinating place. Sally Mann had a photo exhibition in Helsinki a year or so ago with snaps from there which was even more morbidly fascinating. I’d consider donating my body, but fear the customs wrangling would not be a suitable inheritance for any of my loved ones.
Umm, well I think it’s pretty basic
:) I want to elaborate on this point but I have a ride waiting for me.
but you can’t really say no to a dead man’s widow
…or even a living man’s widow? Sorry…couldn’t resist…
I’d consider donating my body, but fear the customs wrangling would not be a suitable inheritance for any of my loved ones.
I really don’t know how I feel about it tbh. I’m an organ donor, but I dunno how I feel about my whole body being donated…so med students can giggle and pull cruel jokes on each other with my privates etc. The odd point is the obvious one…