Ninety+ year olds in the news: RIP, Alice Munro who died at 92. I haven't read much of her work but have enjoyed the stories I have. She won a Nobel Prize and had two movies adapted from her stories, and 92 is pretty good. A career any writer would envy but it's always sad when a good one passes. At least I wasn't reading her work when she died.
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| Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie in Away from Her, Sarah Polley, 2006. Based on "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" by Alice Munro. The cast is terrific. Nice to see Olympia Dukakis and Michael Murphy. (Murphy and Christie were in McCabe & Mrs Miller and Nashville by Robert Altman. – trivia-minded SQRL) |
The Paris Review emailed a link to a 1994 interview with her if you want to get to know Munro a little better.
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The AP writes about ninety year old Ed Dwight:
Ed Dwight, America’s first Black astronaut candidate, finally rocketed into space 60 years later, flying with Jeff Bezos’ rocket company on Sunday.
Dwight was an Air Force pilot when President John F. Kennedy championed him as a candidate for NASA’s early astronaut corps. But he wasn’t picked for the 1963 class.
Dwight, now 90, went through a few minutes of weightlessness with five other passengers aboard the Blue Origin capsule as it skimmed space on a roughly 10-minute flight. He called it “a life-changing experience.”
It's not like he idled those sixty years away. From The Guardian, 28 May 2015:
An engineer by profession and by the 1970s an IBM sales executive and successful construction entrepreneur, Dwight occasionally “built things with scrap metal”, but harboured no serious artistic intent until Colorado’s first black lieutenant governor, George Brown, asked Dwight to create his statue for the state capitol building in 1974. When he finished the job, at age 45, Dwight enrolled at the university of Denver to earn an MFA in sculpture and embark on a second career memorialising black heroes – a role that hadn’t yet been filled as the US emerged from two decades of civil rights unrest.
His sculptures are impressive, most of which are dedicated to Black history as far as I've seen. I like some of the musicians he sculpted:
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Someone on Pinterest named this one Dizzy Gillespie, but that can't be right. I've no idea what it's called. Apologies. |
He could have flown on a Gemini or Apollo mission but "left in 1966, he said, after racial politics forced him out of Nasa and back into the regular officer corps," and Bezos flew him into the upper atmosphere (ALMOST SPACE, the final almost frontier) in a nice PR win for Amazon. Dwight isn't complaining though, he's better than that.
“I thought I really didn’t need this in my life,” Dwight said shortly after exiting the capsule. ”But, now, I need it in my life .... I am ecstatic.”
Funny thing about that flight is that a hedge fund bro and a craft brew bro were fellow passengers. What exciting seat mates! The discussions! Hasn't this man suffered enough? All that's missing is a drunken woman trying to open the hatch and a howling baby attacking the crew.
Couple links to his monuments:
Have a great evening, people.
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