obituary

David Foster Wallace, a postmodern writer and Atlantic contributor, hanged himself Friday.

Kurt Vonnegut, a novelist who practically begged to be put on suicide watch, thought that writing novels was a treatment for depression, if not an outright cure. Blues music, he suggested, was analogous: a way of palliating an intolerable condition by transmuting it into art. A clinical study at the University of Iowa supported the theory that depression runs in the families of writers, and a wide array of anecdotal evidence (I would cite the film Crumb) suggests that practicing an art can, if the artist is lucky, save him from the fate of his relatives.

Novelist Thomas M. Disch killed himself in his New York apartment on July 5.

Endzone, Disch's blog, was one of the Web's cheeriest and one of its darkest. It derived its cheer from a reckless, desperate wit, often expressed by ridiculing, lampooning, or harassing enemies and professional associates who had crossed him. The ancient blogger wisdom about counting to a thousand before posting a personal attack seemed not to have reached him, and the effect was amusing and bracing. When an editor at FSG rejected an introduction he had written to the poems of Allen Tate, Disch responded with a short verse-cycle, childish and pissy, denouncing the editor, quite unfairly, by name. (Disch could write well about other people's poetry, but he was an eccentric choice for a Tate introduction.)

NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert died Friday. He was 58.

With Russert's passing, the country loses one of its most influential journalists -- host of Meet The Press, debate moderator, and trend-setter. He was a model for other, lesser hosts. Russert's signature innovation was to ditch the staid, respectful interviewing method implicit in a title like Meet The Press (as if the program were a social brunch) in favor of a more aggressive, at times bullying, in-your-face style. With the shift in approach came a change in style -- away from the classic television personality's search for patrician authority in favor of a newfound quest for working class authenticity.

Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent died Sunday at the age of 71, a half century after he rocked the fashion world as the wunderkind successor to Christian Dior.

In a career that peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, Saint Laurent produced many striking collections and pieces, including his tentlike "trapeze" dresses for Dior, his 1966 Mondrian minidress, and his opulent Russian-inspired 1976 collection. But his most important contributions were the least individually memorable -- the innovations that became so much a part of fashion that we hardly notice them. To much controversy, he took turtlenecks and leather jackets out of beatnik subculture and made them high fashion. He turned pea coats and safari jackets from utilitarian apparel into recurring expressions of style. Above all, he made pants suits normal feminine attire, neither transgressive nor intrinsically casual. When in 1970 my elementary school finally decided to let female students and teachers wear pants, we could thank Yves Saint Laurent.

Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood fixture for three decades as a director, producer, and actor, died Monday at 73.

As an actor, Sydney Pollack did one thing -- play the rumpled, cynical man of the world, with an avuncular exterior and a sinister streak -- and did it exceedingly well. As a director, he did one thing -- turn out middlebrow star vehicles pitched to grown-up audiences -- and all too often made a hash out of it, especially in the dud-riddled later stages of his long career. Pollack referred to himself as "Mr. Mainstream," a moniker that served as the jumping-off point for Bryan Curtis' memorable Slate takedown, which lamented the director's ability to "take any scenario -- from the ridiculous to the horrific, from Streep to strife -- and mold it into benign mush." But if Pollack's films were sometimes case studies in everything that's wrong with middlebrow entertainment, he left behind one shining example of how mass-market cinema for grownups ought to look. I speak, of course, of Tootsie.

The United House of Prayer for All People (TUHOPFAP) interred its charismatic leader, "Precious Daddy" Samuel C. Madison, today in Washington, D.C.

In Washington, this is a week of two Christian passages: Pope Benedict XVI's celebration of his 81st birthday, and the burial of Bishop S. C. Madison, leader of TUHOPFAP for seventeen years. One of the largest and most powerful of the "black holiness churches," TUHOPFAP is known for its street brass bands, cheap and delicious soul food, and mass outdoor baptisms, which involve fire-hoses and huge tanks of water imported from the River Jordan. This morning, members packed TUHOPFAP's D.C. church, known as "God's White House," to bury Bishop Madison and mourn his passing. Many of the women wore white -- a sign, perhaps, of the celebratory mood that the church seems incapable of casting off, even at the somber farewell to its beloved leader. In the cafeteria, Saint's Paradise ("Where our Main Ingredient is Love"), no one cried into his grits, and the church's signature brass piped its music, major-key, in over the intercom. But a question remains: Who will lead the Church next?

Nikolai Baibakov, Russia's last commissar, died last week at 98, and Yakup Satar, the last WWI veteran of the Ottoman Empire, died at 110.

If the phrase "Soviet commissar" has a vaguely old-fashioned ring -- like "icebox," "suffragette," or "antimacassar" -- then "Ottoman foot-soldier" has a near-ancient one. The two deaths this week consign both categories to history, and give an occasion for reflection on the passing of two eras.

The Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella died yesterday at 54.

Minghella won his Oscar for The English Patient, a gorgeous, literary, faintly silly epic that cross-pollinated Casablanca with Lawrence of Arabia and reduced those moviegoers too snobbish to weep at Titanic to tears. But his best film by far was his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, which remains criminally underrated almost a decade after its release. MORE

Arthur C. Clarke, the celebrated science fiction novelist, died earlier today.

Clarke was best known for anticipating the advent of telecommunication satellites and for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, later adapted by Stanley Kubrick into one of the most innovative and well-regarded films of all time. But more than that, Clarke was a dissenter, a cosmopolitan visionary who saw conventional patriotism and religious belief as a dangerous plague; only by doing away with both, he ofted argued, could humanity reach its full potential.

Actor Patrick Swayze, celebrated star of Red Dawn and Ghost, has pancreatic cancer, and may have only weeks to live.

Swayze lived rough. In 2000, when he crash-landed his plane in central Arizona, many thought he had been flying drunk. Later, he blamed the fatality-free crash on impairment brought on by his smoking habit, at the time three packs a day, or about one cancer-stick every 15 minutes. That's a jones stronger even than Dalton, the enigmatic cooler he played in Road House.

William F. Buckley Jr., America's most celebrated conservative intellectual, died Wednesday at the age of 82.

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it." So wrote Karl Marx, and William F. Buckley Jr. was no Marxist. But few American intellectuals have lived up to Marx's injunction as completely and impressively as Buckley. He was the intellectual paterfamilias to a movement that rose from obscurity to govern the United States, and a man whose efforts -- both as the founding editor of National Review and as a tireless proselytizer in books and essays and television interviews -- helped make once-unfashionable ideas seem first plausible, then persuasive, and finally obvious to countless Americans. There probably would have been some sort of successful right-of-center movement in late-twentieth century America without Buckley, but his Catholic-libertarian perspective shaped it, and it owed its immense success in no small measure to his wit and charm and indefatigability. MORE

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement and spiritual icon of the last several decades, has died in the Netherlands.

Was he a cult leader?  The Maharishi's army of consciousness-expanders regards him with the slavish devotion, and they impute powers to his teaching that bear no relation to reality.  "Yogic flying," one of several cases in which TM supposedly lets practitioners suspend physical laws, closely resembles hopping around on a mat, not "flying" in any common use of the word.  The much vaunted claim that TM caused violent crime to drop in the District of Columbia by 18% is total hooey.

Meditation does seem to yield real and impressive effects for many who practice it, but the Maharishi demanded dangerous levels credulity -- specifically, faith in his own status as the exclusive fount of spiritual knowledge.  Nor was he entirely forthright with his followers (some of whom quit their jobs and moved to Iowa) about his intention of using TM to introduce them to an intense variety of Hinduism.  He was, in short, a domineering religious megalomaniac who tricked good people into dropping everything and following him.  If he wasn't a cult leader, he was certainly getting there.