But it's still '07 and today, Woof woof, once again. Hugh Massingberd, the brilliant, blunt and often bizarre obituary writer for the London Telegraph, has died and so it's time for other papers to run obituaries of him.
An obituary of an obituarist who is remembered for changing the form of the obit itself. A perfect opportunity for something at least a little bit unusual. I mean, really. How can any self-respecting writer not do something at least a bit self-referential with an obit about a great writer of obits?
The New York Times obit, the work of Margalit Fox, is almost entirely about Massingberd's sardonic, warts-and-all style - the work of the most unusual obit writer of our time, as a matter of the writing - and yet Fox never once does honor to Massingberd's memory by doing a little of this in this writing. And it would have been honor. And it's in my view a dishonor not to do it. Do what? Write the writing so that it's (at least to some small degree) about the writing.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
