By Jeff Simon for the Buffalo News Arts Blog:
Sad word has reached us today of the death in San Diego Tuesday of one of Buffalo's most beloved cultural figures--novelist, poet and critic Raymond Federman, long a fixture of the State University at Buffalo French and English faculties.
He retired and left Buffalo in 1997 but until then Federman was close to a ubiquitous presence at cultural events in Buffalo--jazz concerts, literary readings, art openings. He was the subject of many Buffalo tributes, in particular an all-day Federman@80 last year which concluded with a packed house reading at Medaille College by Federman, along with friends and colleagues (including Ted Pelton, Christina Milletti, Charles Bernstein and Federman's daughter Simone.)
The singularity of Federman, both as a writer and a cultural presence, is that he was about as paradoxically delightful a man as you could encounter. He was both a forbidding avant-gardiist and a writer of raucous humor. He was, at the same time, a man friendly with Samuel Beckett and Michel Foucault and a completely compassionate and democratic professor to his students at UB.
In 1999, he told an audience at the Jewish Community Center in Getzville about the formative event in his life, at the age of 14 in his family's Paris apartment.
"The German Gestapo was coming upstairs to arrest us. My mother pushed me into a closet. I listened to my mother and father and sisters go down the stairs to their extinction....I believe I've spent the last 40 years writing and trying to understand my mother's decision to push me into the closet."
At the same time as he's capable of writing from such stark and somber remembrance of horror, if you go to his blog, the first thing you see from the writer, who was dying of cancer is this: "Federman's Blog (the laugh that laughs at the laugh.)
"Laugh: yes because when some guy weeps somewhere in the world, there is always some other guy who laughs somewhere else: happy balance!....Laugh or cry it all comes out the same in the end."
He loved golf. And he loved gambling. And you could always count on him, as a writer, to double down on oblivion. Seldom will you ever encounter a committed literary experimentalist as funny as Federman.
He was a singular-looking man with a nose so prominent Ghirlandio would have loved it. (Said Federman once of his essay into performing "I played Cyrano with my own nose.")
His writings could be titled. "The Voice in the Closet" but also "Double or Nothing," "Take It or Leave it" or "More Loose Shoes and Smelly Socks" (a miscellany).
You'll also find on his blog an "Obituary" written in Federman style by his daughter Simone including this inarguable proposition "Raymond Federman means many things to many people. Hundred, if not thousands of people, love him very much, will mourn his passing with profound sorrow."
A personal reminiscence by one of his students, R. D. Pohl, will be posted on this site very soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment