Tag: Obit

Rest in Peace – Demaryius Thomas

I’d like to think he got a small taste of the appreciation on that November afternoon a few months later, when he returned to Denver as a member of the Texans. The Broncos draped a massive banner on the side of the stadium reading, “Thank You D.T.” When he walked to the bus after the game, Manning’s kids ran up to him in little Thomas No. 87 Texans jerseys. I don’t even know how Manning was able to get them made in a matter of days. The children hugged Thomas like a favorite uncle they hadn’t seen in years. Just as he’d been during Manning’s retirement ceremony, Thomas was basically an honorary member of the family.

There wasn’t a person in that stadium who didn’t want a picture with DT. Or just to shake his hand and tell him they missed him. He’d been gone less than a week.

Demaryius Thomas was uniquely talented on the football field — and truly special in life
James Palmer

RIP – Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose startling 1994 memoir, “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America,” won praise for opening a dialogue about clinical depression and helped introduce an unsparing style of confessional writing that remains influential, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 52.

NYTIMES

A. Alvarez – RIP

A. Alvarez, a British poet, critic and essayist who played a pivotal role in bringing the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to the public, and whose acclaimed book on the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas helped transform high-stakes professional poker from a cult to a televised sport, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 90.

Mr. Alvarez’s enormously influential anthology “The New Poetry,” published in 1962, brought the poetry of Mr. Hughes, Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill and the American confessional poets John Berryman and Robert Lowell to a wide audience in Britain. Ms. Plath and Anne Sexton were added to the 1966 edition.

In his polemical preface, Mr. Alvarez railed against the genteel tradition in English poetry and what he called “the cult of rigid impersonality.” The new poetry, he argued, took emotional risks. It embraced “experience sometimes on the edge of disintegration and breakdown.”

William Grimes, Sept. 23, 2019, nytimes

From Alvarez’s book Night:

Apart from the ‘organised and steady system’, something else hasn’t changed since Dickens went out with the police: the ‘individual energy and keenness’. But police take on the character of their territory. In London, the energy and keenness are masked, like the city itself, by a certain reticence; in Manhattan, they come with a New Yorker pace and appetite. When I called Lieutenant Raymond O’Donnell, the head of media liaison at Police Plaza, the NYPD’s downtown redbrick fortress, to arrange a couple of nights as a ‘ride-along’ in the back of a patrol car, I asked to go to precincts where I might see some action.

A gravelly voice at the other end said, ‘Whaddya want, drugs or whores?’
‘How about both?’
‘You got it!’