Said will be missed. He was an able scholar and from all I know, a good
man.
As a matter of personal privilege, I am compelled to also comment that
Dennis Pett, a colleague for many years at Indiana University also
passed away on Wednesday (perhaps some of you saw Joel Pett's editorial
cartoon - Denny was his father). No where near as famous or influential
as Said, Denny was similarly a very good man, a wonderful mentor for
students all over the world and a friend.
I think it is important to keep alive the memory of people who have
touched your life. I once wrote a paper in which I compared the death of
a friend and colleague with magnetars. Basically magnetars are
super-magnetized neutron stars created by supernova explosions. They are
exotic stellar corpses, stars with a solid crust. Just as the solid
surface of Earth can experience earthquakes, the surface of a neutron
star can undergo starquakes. In a magnetar, the crust is deformed by
magnetic forces and sometimes it cracks. At that instant, pent-up
energy is released and seismic waves produce a flash of X-rays. Each
time we see a burst from an magnetar, we are seeing a starquake in
action. So strong are these quakes that on August 27, 1998 a powerful
blast of stellar radiation from a star corpse 20,000 light years away
briefly penetrated Earth's upper atmosphere. Among other things the
radiation stripped atoms of their electrons and disrupted the quiet of
the high night sky with electrical conditions that severely limited the
range of radio transmissions and caused temporary shutdowns on at least
7 space craft. Here, I think is an inviting metaphor for the lasting
influence and participation of the dead in our lives. The dead are not
sleeping, they have not gone home, they are not lost, they are not
having a well deserved rest. They function as magnetars in the rhizome
of our collective consciousness, occasionally providing brilliant bursts
of insight as connections grow and change.
RIP Edward Said and Dennis Pett........djc
Don Cunningham
Indiana University
-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Ryder [mailto:mryder@carbon.cudenver.edu]
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2003 12:36 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Edward Said 1937-2003
Renowned scholar, musician, literary critic and activist Edward W. Said
died yesterday after a decade-long battle with leukemia. He will be
missed.
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc/postmodern.html#said
Martin R.
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