LUKE COLE, COURT ADVOCATE FOR MINORITIES
Published: June 10, 2009
Luke Cole, an early leader of the environmental justice movement, which holds that many minority neighborhoods have become toxic dumping grounds because their residents are poor and powerless, died Saturday in Uganda. He was 46 and lived in San Francisco.
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Luke Cole in Antarctica.
Mr. Cole was killed in a head-on traffic accident when a truck veered across the road, his father, Herbert Cole, said. His wife, Nancy Shelby, was seriously injured. The couple was on vacation.
As executive director of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, an organization based in San Francisco that he founded in 1989 with Ralph Abascal, Mr. Cole played a key role in several significant environmental law cases.
In the mid-1990s, he represented residents of Kettleman City, Calif., most of them Hispanic, in their campaign to stop Chemical Waste Management Inc. from building a toxic-waste incinerator there. Kettleman City, in the San Joaquin Valley, was already the site of a vast toxic-waste landfill. A state court enjoined the company from constructing the incinerator.
Even more, the court invalidated the environmental-impact report issued by Kings County, Calif., citing its failure to translate even the summary of the study into Spanish.
“It really raised the issue of systemic exclusion of communities from understanding environmental decisions that affect their lives,” Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, said in an interview.
“Luke actually began this work before the term ‘environmental justice’ was in widespread use,” Mr. Angel said.
More recently, Mr. Cole represented a group of residents of the Waterfront South neighborhood in Camden, N.J. — most of them black or Hispanic — who took the unusual action of citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a lawsuit against the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
The plaintiffs claimed that the department had violated their rights by issuing a permit to build a concrete grinding plant without considering that it had already granted more than twice as many industrial permits for Waterfront South as were found in the typical New Jersey ZIP code.
They also argued that more than 20 percent of Camden’s contaminated sites — abandoned factories, a chemical plant, waste-treatment plants, automotive shops and a petroleum coke transfer station — were in their neighborhood. In 2001, the United States District Court in Camden ruled in favor of the plaintiffs.
“It marked the first recognition by any court that African-Americans and Latinos were experiencing discrimination with regard to the siting of noxious, polluting facilities,” said Olga Pomar, a lawyer with South Jersey Legal Services and a co-counsel in the case.
“That sparked greater awareness among environmental justice activists.”
Later that year, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit declared in a related case that private citizens did not have a legal right to enforce the antidiscrimination regulations that were the basis of their claim. Only the federal Environmental Protection Agency had that right, the appeals court said. In effect, the ruling overturned the decision in the Camden case.
From 1996 through 2000, Mr. Cole served on the E.P.A.’s national environmental justice advisory council.
Luke Winthrop Cole was born in North Adams, Mass., on July 15, 1962, one of three children of Herbert Cole, a professor of art history, and Alexandra Chappell Cole, an architectural preservationist. Besides his parents and his wife, Mr. Cole is survived by a son, Zane; his stepmother, Shelley Reed Cole; two brothers, Peter and Thomas; his sister, Sarah Cole; and a stepbrother, Daryn Kenny.
Mr. Cole graduated from Stanford in 1984 and then worked for three years in Washington as one of Ralph Nader’s so-called Nader’s Raiders, editing a consumer advice newsletter. After receiving his law degree from Harvard in 1989, he moved to San Francisco and soon after started the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.
The environmental rights of American Indians were of particular interest to Mr. Cole. In one California case, he represented the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, which is trying to halt open-pit gold mining using cyanide to leach out the gold on ancestral land in Death Valley. A ruling in pending.
In another case, he helped residents of Kivalina, an Inuit village in northwest Alaska, sue the Teck Corporation, claiming that the company’s zinc and lead mine had polluted the village water supply for years.
A settlement, reached last year, called for Teck to stop depositing mining tailings into the Kivalina River and to build a pipeline to the ocean, about 50 miles away.
But legal action is not the ultimate solution to environmental discrimination, Mr. Cole told The New York Times in 1993.
“The only way to ever decisively and permanently win these battles is through the political process,” he said. “When a community organizes itself at the grass roots, we can exercise our power, the power of people.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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HUEY LONG, GUITARIST FOR THE INK SPOTS
Kerry Beyer
Huey Long played Dixieland, swing and bebop jazz, along with making other musical detours.
Published: June 13, 2009
Frank Davis and his Louisiana Jazz Band were booked to play at the Rice Hotel in Houston in 1925. The banjo player never showed. For Huey Long, who shined shoes outside the hotel and occasionally got onstage to announce the bands, this was the unmistakable sound of opportunity knocking. Putting down his ukulele, he ran out to a music store, got a banjo on credit and stepped into the breach.
And so began an 80-year career in jazz and popular music. For the rest of the century Mr. Long, who took up the guitar in 1933, performed with an extensive list of greats in a journey that began with Dixieland, moved into swing and jumped forward to bebop. Along the way, he spent nine months in 1945 as a guitarist and singer with the Ink Spots, the enormously popular and influential vocal quartet that paved the way for rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.
He died on Wednesday in Houston, the last surviving Ink Spot from the days when the group still had some of its original members. He was 105.
The death was confirmed by his daughter, Anita Long.
On the extended timeline of Mr. Long’s career, his tenure with the Ink Spots takes up no more than a couple of inches, but he joined the group in its heyday. In early 1945, while playing with his own trio at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street in Manhattan, he was approached by Bill Kenny, one of the earliest Ink Spots and the group’s signature voice.
Kenny wanted him to replace their guitarist, Bernie Mackey, who was filling in for Charlie Fuqua, an original member who was doing military service.
In late March Mr. Long, providing guitar accompaniment and vocal support, appeared as an Ink Spot at Detroit’s Paradise Theater. He also recorded several songs with the group, including “I’m Gonna Turn Off the Teardrops,” “I’ll Lose a Friend Tomorrow,” “The Sweetest Dream” and “Just for Me.”
When Mr. Fuqua reappeared unexpectedly in October, Mr. Long was suddenly an ex-Ink Spot. But his career rolled on.
Mr. Long was born in Sealy, Tex., a farm town about 20 miles west of Houston. His brother Sam played ragtime piano, and Huey picked up the chords on his ukulele. After he finished his adventure with the Louisiana Jazz Band, a visiting aunt took him back to Chicago, intent on getting him some music lessons and starting him out in nightclubs.
In 1933 he switched to guitar to perform with Texas Guinan’s Cuban Orchestra at the World’s Fair in Chicago. The city was a hotbed of jazz, and Mr. Long, who developed a deft hand at constructing chordal solos, found himself in demand as a studio musician. In 1935 and 1936 he recorded sessions for Decca Records with the pianist Richard M. Jones’s Jazz Wizards and the pianist Lil Armstrong and Her Swing Orchestra, including her signature tune, “Just for a Thrill.” He went on to perform and do arrangements for the trumpeter Zilner Randolph’s W.P.A. Concert and Swing Band.
It was a colorful period. “If you were an entertainer in Chicago, you worked for the gangsters,” he told The Journal of Longevity in 2006. “After midnight they would close a club to the public for a party. Generous and friendly, they threw large bills on the stage as some sort of status symbol. When they left, you counted it, and it was always more than enough.”
Fletcher Henderson hired Mr. Long to play with his orchestra at the Grand Terrace Cafe and later took him to New York, where the simmering bebop movement propelled Mr. Long into a new phase. He joined the pianist Earl Hines’s orchestra and performed with emerging stars like Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie before forming his own trio and then taking a detour with the Ink Spots.
After playing with the saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis’s Be-Boppers, he formed a new trio of his own and entertained American troops in Korea and Japan as part of a U.S.O. tour.
Mr. Long briefly attended Los Angeles City College in pursuit of a teaching certificate but grew homesick and returned to New York. The Ink Spots, in the meantime, had broken up, spawning a host of groups using the name, some with no connection to the original group.
In the early 1960s Mr. Long formed his own version of the Ink Spots and performed with them in California for two years before returning to New York, where he set up a teaching studio in an apartment in the CBS Building. The studio developed into a small school, which he moved to Broadway and 52nd Street.
In 1996 Mr. Long returned to Houston, where in 2007 his daughter started the Ink Spots Museum across the street from his apartment. In addition to his daughter, Anita Long of Houston, he is survived by two sons, Rene and Shiloh, both of San Jose, Calif.; and seven grandchildren.
At his death Mr. Long was compiling what his daughter described as a musical dictionary, a compilation of the chord melodies he developed over the years. It helped tune out unwelcome developments in popular music.
“Music is defined as sound vibrations that are picked up by the ear,” he told The Journal of Longevity, diplomatically. “The music of today has sound and vibrations — heavy on the rhythm.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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GAAFAR AL-NIMEIRY, A SUDAN LEADER WITH SHIFTING POLITICS
Published: June 11, 2009
Gaafar al-Nimeiry, an army colonel who took over Sudan in a 1969 coup and, by taking a constantly swerving political course, held on to the presidency until a bloodless coup ousted him in 1985, died in Sudan on May 30. He was 79.
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Camera Press
Gaafar al-Nimeiry
The death was announced by SUNA, the state news agency, which did not give a cause.
In his 16-year tenure, President Nimeiry veered from ardent Arab nationalism to socialism, from friendly relations with the Soviet Union to a pro-Western stance and a close alliance with the United States. Although he was often seen as one of the more moderate Arab leaders, he was not averse to violent crackdowns and even mass executions of opponents. He survived four attempted coups in his first nine years in power.
Colonel Nimeiry led a small group, calling itself the Free Officers, that seized power on May 25, 1969. Their cause, they said, was Arab nationalism and revolutionary socialism patterned after the ideology of President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. At the time of the coup, the southern region of Sudan — home to black Christians and animists who felt oppressed by the Muslim-dominated government — had been plagued by rebellion for 14 years.
Step by step over the next eight years, President Nimeiry tried to draw together the diverse elements of his country: the Christians and animists in the south, hard-line Muslims and die-hard Communists. He met resistance from extremists on the left and the right.
In 1971, Mr. Nimeiry survived a Communist-instigated coup during which he was imprisoned for three days. He escaped by jumping out a window as loyalist forces arrived.
After that coup attempt, he started turning Sudan away from Soviet influence and toward an alliance with conservative Arab governments like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. His government also became more pro-Western and began receiving armaments from the United States.
Then, in March 1972, he signed a peace agreement with the rebels in the south, granting regional autonomy to the southern provinces. His unification efforts were lauded in the West. He was the only Arab leader to support President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt after Mr. Sadat signed the Camp David peace accords with Israel in 1978.
By then, the United States viewed Mr. Nimeiry as a counterweight to the Marxist government in Ethiopia, on Sudan’s eastern border, and to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s hostile government in Libya, to the northwest. In 1976, during a Libyan-backed coup attempt, President Nimeiry avoided capture when his plane arriving from Europe landed ahead of schedule because of a tailwind. When 98 people implicated in the plot were executed, Mr. Nimeiry drew worldwide criticism.
He became increasingly dictatorial. In 1983, seeking support from Muslim extremists, he imposed Islamic law on all of Sudan. In violation of the 1972 peace accord with the rebels, he dissolved the southern regional government. That reignited a conflict that continues to this day.
Soaring food and fuel prices led to mass demonstrations and a general strike in 1985, prompting Sudan’s military to oust Mr. Nimeiry. He remained in exile in Egypt for 14 years. In 1999, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir allowed him to return to Sudan.
Gaafar Mohammed al-Nimeiry was born Jan. 1, 1930, in Omdurman, opposite Khartoum on the banks of the Nile, when his country was still under the joint rule of Britain and Egypt. (It became independent in 1956.) His father was a messenger for a British company. He is survived by his wife, according to the Sudanese state news agency.
Mr. Nimeiry’s official biography says he was rebellious even as a teenager: When Britain delayed granting Sudan self-determination, he led a strike that kept his secondary school closed for seven months.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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EDWARD HANRAHAN, PROSECUTOR TIED TO ’69 PANTHERS RAID
By JO NAPOLITANO
Published: June 11, 2009
CHICAGO — Edward V. Hanrahan, a former Cook County state’s attorney who built his reputation by prosecuting high-profile criminals only to see his political career derailed by a deadly police raid on Black Panthers in 1969, died Tuesday in River Forest, Ill. He was 88.
The cause was complications of leukemia and old age, said his nephew Tom Wheeler.
Mr. Hanrahan was groomed by Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago for nearly a decade and was thought to be the mayor’s successor. He was supported by Mr. Daley for an appointment in 1964 as the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, and then later won election to the state’s attorney position.
A tough-talking Harvard Law School graduate, Mr. Hanrahan was considered a possible contender for governor. That all ended when police officers detailed to his office raided the headquarters and residence of the Black Panther Party before dawn on Dec. 4, 1969, killing Fred Hampton, the Chicago group’s charismatic leader, and Mark Clark.
Supporters of the police, including Mr. Hanrahan, said the raid was valid. The Black Panthers were known for their open contempt for the police, and officers did find guns on the premises. But the officers’ claims that the police had been fired upon first were brought into question by reporters who discovered that markings passed off as bullet holes from weapons fired at the police were exposed nailheads.
After overwhelmingly winning office in 1968, Mr. Hanrahan lost his former support among black voters, and the Democratic Party withheld its support for his bid for re-election to the state’s attorney office in 1972. He was indicted by a grand jury on conspiracy charges stemming from the raid and lost the election, though he was eventually acquitted.
Mr. Hanrahan never again held office, despite subsequent runs.
Mr. Hanrahan, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, served in World War II in intelligence in the Army Signal Corps. He practiced law until the end of his life and was working on two cases when he died, Mr. Wheeler said.
He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Geraldine; two sons, Edward and Gerald; two daughters, Julie Danaher and Kathy Hefner; and several grandchildren.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ROBERT COLESCOTT, PAINTER WHO TOYED WITH RACE AND SEX
Published: June 9, 2009
Robert Colescott, an American figurative painter whose garishly powerful canvases lampooned racial and sexual stereotypes with rakish imagery, lurid colors and almost tangible glee, died Thursday at his home in Tucson. He was 83.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Robert Colescott at the Phyllis Kind Gallery
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Ode to Joy (European Anthem),1997
His death was confirmed by his wife, Jandava Cattron, who said he had suffered for several years from Parkinsonian syndrome.
Mr. Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997, the first African-American to do so. By then he was well known for pitting the painterly against the political to create giddily joyful, destabilized compositions that satirized, and offended, without regard to race, creed, gender or political leaning.
People of all colors haunt Mr. Colescott’s paintings, mostly as chimerical stereotypes that exchange attributes freely. Their mottled skin tones often suggest one race seeping through another. Their tumultuous interactions evoke a volatile mixture of suspicion, desire, pain and vitality. His slurred shapes, wobbly drawing and patchy brushwork imply that no truths can be held to be self-evident, that life is mired in slippery layers of false piety, self-interest and greed, but also lust, pleasure and irreverence.
Steeped in history and art history, Mr. Colescott often found new uses and meanings for the landmarks of Western painting, borrowing compositions and characters from van Eyck, Goya and Manet and peppering his scenes with the Africanized faces from Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
In “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook,” from 1975, he reinterpreted Emmanuel Leutze’s famous painting of George Washington during the American Revolution with Carver at the center, accompanied by black cooks, Aunt Jemimas and banjo players. “Eat Dem Taters” another painting from 1975, substituted laughing black people for the pious Dutch peasants of van Gogh’s “Potato Eaters” to attack, in his words, “the myth of the happy darky.” No American painter of the late 20th century made such telling use of painting’s European past to lambaste the painful contradictions of the American present.
Mr. Colescott’s work anticipated the appropriation art and Neo-Expressionist painting of the 1980s. His imagery shared aspects with Pop Art, although he disdained its coolness. His improvisational approach had precedents in jazz and Abstract Expressionism. He said he wanted his surface to “squirm.”
Mr. Colescott was born in Oakland, Calif., on Aug. 26, 1925. His mother, a pianist, and his father, a jazz violinist who supported the family as a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad, had moved to California from New Orleans in 1919 to improve their children’s chances for a good education.
He grew up playing the drums and always kept a drum kit in his studio. But he also drew and painted from childhood. The African-American sculptor Sargent Johnson, who worked with Mr. Colescott’s father on the Southern Pacific, was a family friend.
After serving with the Army in France and Germany during World War II, Mr. Colescott majored in art at the University of California, Berkeley, emerging in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in painting and a geometric abstract style. During a year in Paris he studied with the painter Fernand Léger — whose emphasis on scale, color and narration made a lasting impression — and spent a lot of time in museums, looking at 19th-century painting. He returned to Berkeley for a master’s and spent the next decade teaching in the Northwest.
In 1964, a teaching residency took him to Cairo, where Egyptian art reiterated for him Léger’s ideas about narrative, but from outside the Western canon. After another stint in Paris he returned in 1967 to the United States, which he found changed by the civil rights movement, and to the Bay Area, where artists like Roy De Forest, William T. Wiley, Joan Brown, Robert Arneson and especially Peter Saul had developed extravagant, often caustic figurative styles. By the end of the 1960s he had found his mature style.
Mr. Colescott’s first four marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Ms. Cattron; his brother, Warrington Colescott Jr., of Hollandale, Wis.; five sons from previous marriages — Alexander, of Napa, Calif.; Nicolas, of Portland, Ore.; Dennett, of San Rafael, Calif.; Daniel, of Modesto, Calif.; and Cooper, of Tucson — and one grandson.
While Mr. Colescott’s work was overtly political and multicultural, it was often at odds with the academic earnestness of such approaches. In his disregard for simplistic dualities regarding race and sex , he helped set the stage for transgressive work by painters like Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Sue Williams and Carroll Dunham and multimedia artists like Kara Walker, William Pope.L and Kalup Linzy.
When asked if he didn’t feel an obligation to serve “the black community,” Mr. Colescott replied, “The way that one serves is to serve art first,” adding that “the way you serve art is by being true to yourself.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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RAJEEV MOTWANI, A PROFESSOR AND A GUIDE IN THE CREATION OF GOOGLE
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: June 10, 2009
Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford computer science professor and an investor in technology start-ups who mentored many young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including the founders of Google, died on Friday at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 47.
The cause of death was being investigated, said Robert Foucrault, the San Mateo County coroner. Responding to a report of a drowning, police officers went to Mr. Motwani’s home and found him dead at the bottom of his backyard swimming pool Friday morning, said Lt. Mike Guerra of the Atherton Police Department. There was no evidence of a crime at the scene, he said.
Professor Motwani was best known for helping to guide Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, when the two were graduate students at Stanford in the mid-1990s. Professor Motwani, an expert in algorithms and the mathematical theory underlying computer science, helped Mr. Brin and Mr. Page explore the possibilities emerging from the analysis of the Web as a graph of interconnected pages.
“We spent a lot of our time thinking, talking, brainstorming,” Mr. Brin said Monday. Those conversations and Professor Motwani’s approach, he said, were “what enabled us to ultimately create something that turned out to be very useful for search.”
After Google’s founding, Professor Motwani became a member of its technical advisory council.
Professor Motwani’s work spanned various areas of computer science, including databases, data mining, Web search and information retrieval. He is recognized academically for his research on “randomized algorithms,” which are used as a kind of shortcut to solve problems that are so complex and involve so much data — for example, all the pages on the Web — that computing an exact answer would be impractical or impossible.
Professor Motwani helped explain when a randomized algorithm, which performs only a subset of the computations needed to obtain an exact answer, is sufficiently accurate.
Professor Motwani wrote or contributed to several books. In 2001, he received the prestigious Gödel Prize, which recognizes breakthroughs in theoretical computer science.
His impact on Silicon Valley, however, was felt well beyond academia. As director of graduate studies in the computer science department at Stanford, he came in contact with students who asked him for advice on how to turn their ideas into businesses. Professor Motwani developed close ties to many Silicon Valley investors, including August Capital, a prominent venture capital firm.
“He saw more early-stage deals than anyone in the Valley,” said David Hornik, a partner at August Capital. “He was a point of first contact with a huge number of young entrepreneurs.”
Professor Motwani went on to become an early investor in many of the companies started by the entrepreneurs he had advised. But he was not an investor in the most successful of all the companies he helped, Google, although he did receive some shares as compensation for his advisory role.
Professor Motwani was born in Jammu, India, and grew up in New Delhi. He received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1983. In 1988, he earned a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
He is survived by his wife, Asha Jadeja, and daughters, Naitri and Anya; and two brothers.
His death prompted a string of online eulogies by some of Silicon Valley’s best-known bloggers, investors and technology luminaries. Even Mr. Brin broke a nearly nine-month silence on his blog to speak of Professor Motwani’s influence.
“Today,” Mr. Brin wrote, “whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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KAMALA DAS, INDIAN POET AND DARING MEMOIRIST
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: June 13, 2009
When Kamala Das began writing five decades ago, her choice of subject matter was a bold one for a woman in midcentury India. A poet, short-story writer and memoirist, Ms. Das was known for her open discussion of women’s sexual and romantic lives, daring themes when her work was first published.
Over the years since then, Ms. Das became — and remained — one of India’s best-known writers, widely published, widely read, widely discussed and widely celebrated.
Ms. Das, who wrote in English and her native Malayalam, died on May 31 in Pune, India.
She was 75. The cause was respiratory failure, her doctor told the news service United News of India.
A prolific author, Ms. Das wrote most of her poetry in English. Most of her fiction, which appeared under the pen name Madhavikutty, was composed in Malayalam, a non-Indo-European language spoken primarily in the South Indian state of Kerala.
She wrote several memoirs, the most famous of them “My Story,” written in English and published in 1976. In it Ms. Das recounts her childhood in an artistic but emotionally distant family; her unfulfilling arranged marriage to an older man shortly before her 16th birthday; the emotional breakdowns and suicidal thoughts that punctuated her years as a young wife and mother; her husband’s apparent homosexuality; and the deep undercurrent of sexual and romantic yearning that ran through most of her married life.
Originally serialized in an Indian journal, “My Story” is organized into 50 fragmentary chapters. In a detached, dreamlike voice, Ms. Das tells of her husband’s brutish sexual inadequacy and her own lifetime of desire, often unrequited but sometimes consummated in affairs with other men and occasionally with women.
For decades a public figure in India, Ms. Das by many accounts embraced both controversy and contradiction. Championed by feminists for writing about women’s oppression, she declined to be identified as a feminist herself. She ran unsuccessfully for a seat in India’s Parliament in 1984 but later turned away from political life. Born to a prominent Hindu family, she converted to Islam in 1999, renaming herself Kamala Suraiya.
Highly publicized, her conversion drew criticism, for a diverse array of reasons, from Hindus, Muslims and feminists.
In her nonfiction Ms. Das could be a deliberately, and artfully, unreliable narrator. Though “My Story” caused a sensation in India when it first appeared, she presents its most sensational material obliquely. In Ms. Das’s quiet, measured telling, many passages about her romantic encounters could reflect inward, unrequited longing as easily as they could outward reality.
“She’s always consistently being inconsistent,” Rosemary Marangoly George, an associate professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, said in a telephone interview. “She had many poems and many interviews where she talked about the oppression of the marriage, and then others where she talked about her husband and how much she loved him and how much he loved her and how much she missed him when he died.”
Critical opinion of Ms. Das is similarly hard to pin down. Some critics hail her as a major figure in world letters; others dismiss her as a comparative lightweight whose work is solipsistic at best, salacious at worst.
“The male critics saw her as titillating, writing this trashy stuff,” said Professor George, who has written studies of Ms. Das’s work. “And the feminist critics said, ‘No, she’s protesting patriarchy, and the sexual content is part of this protest.’ ”
Ms. Das was born on March 31, 1934, in Malabar, a region in South India. Her maiden name, taken by tradition from her mother’s side, was Nalapat. Her father, V. M. Nair, was a journalist who became an automobile company executive. Her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma, was a distinguished Malayalam poet, as was a maternal uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon.
Reared mostly in Calcutta, she was educated privately before her marriage to Madhava Das, a bank official. She began writing seriously in her 20s and for years afterward, as she recounted in “My Story,” sat night after night at the dining table, long after her husband and three sons had gone to sleep, writing “until it was 5, and the milkman clanked at the gate, with his cycle and his pails.”
Ms. Das’s husband died in the 1990s. Survivors include their three sons, The Times of India reported.
Among Ms. Das’s short-story collections available in English translation are “Padmavati the Harlot” and “The Sandal Trees,” whose title story centers on a tender, decades-long love affair between two women. Her poetry collections include “Summer in Calcutta,” “The Descendants” and “The Old Playhouse and Other Poems.”
Like her prose, Ms. Das’s poetry often concerned desire and its discontents. In “Herons,” from the 1960s, she wrote:
On sedatives
I am more lovable,
says my husband …
My speech becomes a mistladen terrain
the words emerge, tinctured with sleep,
they rise from the still coves of dreams
in unhurried flight like herons
and,
my ragdoll limbs adjust better
to his versatile lust.
He would, if he could, sing lullabies
to his wife’s sleeping soul,
sweet lullabies to thicken its swoon.
On sedatives
I am more lovable,
says my husband …
SOURCE: The New York Tines: http://www.nytimes.com
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NORMAN BRINKER, DEVELOPER OF CHILI’S CHAIN
By ANABELLE GARAY Associated Press Writer © 2009 The Associated Press
June 9, 2009, 5:28PM
DALLAS — Norman Brinker, a restaurant mogul who popularized the salad bar and built a worldwide casual dining empire that includes Chili’s Grill & Bar, died Tuesday at age 78.
Brinker died at a hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo., said Robin Rymer at the Swan-Law Funeral Home. He suffered complications related to pneumonia while on vacation visiting family, Brinker International, Inc. spokeswoman Stacey Sullivan said.
Before retiring as chairman of Dallas-based Brinker International in 2000, he had built the chain of more than 1,000 casual-dining restaurants. The company now has 1,700 restaurants in 27 countries, according to its Web site.
While Brinker wasn’t necessarily a household name, he had a high profile in Dallas and Americans have enjoyed his eatery concepts that fit somewhere between fast food and fine dining.
“My goal is to wipe out dining room lights across the country,” he told The Associated Press in a story published in 1996.
A former Olympic equestrian who competed in the 1952 games, Brinker was born in Colorado and grew up poor on a Roswell, N.M., farm. He attended New Mexico Military Institute, joined the Navy and later graduated from San Diego State University, paying his way through college.
Brinker moved to Dallas in the 1960s with his first wife, tennis great Maureen Connolly Brinker, who died of cancer in 1969.
In Dallas he started a coffee shop before developing the concept for Steak & Ale restaurants — a chain he established in the mid-1960s where he’s credited with popularizing the salad bar and casual dining.
He sold Steak & Ale to Pillsbury Co. in the early 1970s and went to work for Pillsbury’s restaurant division. While there, he established the Bennigan’s chain and became known for creating a “fern bar” restaurant concept intended to attract single people.
In 1983, Brinker purchased Chili’s, which had started as a single restaurant in Dallas and now has about 900 company-owned restaurants and more than 550 franchises. He took Chili’s public and in the 1990s renamed the chain Brinker International.
Among the chains Brinker International has bought and sold are Corner Bakery Cafe, EatZi’sMarket and Bakery. It now operates On the Border Mexican Grill & Cantina, Maggiano’s Little Italy and Chili’s. Brinker also holds a minority investment in Romano’s Macaroni Grill.
“His people in those restaurants not only admired and respected him, they loved him,” said Brinker’s friend, billionaire businessman and former presidential candidate Ross Perot. “He had a tremendous ability to inspire and motivate other people to do great things.”
Brinker was a polo buff who started the Willow Bend Polo and Hunt Club in suburban Dallas in 1972.
In 1993, Brinker was seriously injured when a horse fell on him during a polo match in Boca Raton, Fla. For 14 days a mechanical respirator kept him alive. He was in a coma for three weeks and was paralyzed on his left side for nearly three months but recovered and eventually walked again.
Doctors said it would take at least a year for a meaningful recovery, but four months after his accident Brinker was back leading his company.
“I’ve never known anybody with a more indomitable spirit,” Perot said. “It’s just amazing how he would bounce back.”
Brinker was divorced from Nancy Brinker, a former U.S. ambassador and Republican fundraiser, who last month was named the World Health Organization’s “goodwill ambassador” to raise cancer awareness. She is the founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast cancer charity named for her only sister who died of the disease at 36.
Norman Brinker served on the Susan G. Komen for the Cure board since the organization’s founding in 1982.
“The world lost a great man in the passing of Norman Brinker,” said Nancy Brinker.
“Norman was one of the savviest business and philanthropic leaders our time, and I, along with the entire Susan G. Komen for the Cure family, are indebted to him for the wise counsel, sage advice, mentoring and support.”
He was the father of five, had six grandchildren and lived in Dallas with his wife, Toni.
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Associated Press Writer Terry Wallace in Dallas contributed to this report.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 