Tucker, Elizabeth (2011). Review “Late Friends: Remembering Michel Foucault, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Wassily Leontief, Alan Lomax, William Kunstler and Others Who Changed Tense”. The Journal of American folklore (0021-8715), 124 (491), pp. 119-20.
Review of Bruce Jackson, Late Friends: Remembering Michel Foucault, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Wassily Leontief, Alan Lomax, William Kunstler and Others Who Changed Tense. Buffalo, NY: Center for Working Papers, 2005.
Extract
In this book of essays, Bruce Jackson offers character sketches of twenty-one remarkable individuals who “changed tense” (passed away) between 1976 and 2005. Only a few of them are folklorists. Others include writers, political activists, a baker, an economist, a film historian, and four memorable dogs.
Jackson observes that as we grow older, we find ourselves engaging in “constant communion and conversation with the dead who are gone but who are not only not forgotten, but not, in our heads, the least bit silent” (p. 102). Two such deceased folklorists are Richard M. Dorson and Benjamin A. Botkin, whose feud has resonated in the annals of folklore scholarship. In his tribute to Botkin, Jackson suggests that “Dorson’s proselytizing was institutional; his mission was institutional. Ben’s proselytizing was personal: to the other person in the room, to the recipient of the letter, the reader of the book” (p. 14).
Foucault News 