last event in Melbourne

Jon Roffe had a lot of great questions for me tonight, and it was an attentive crowd. My appearances in Melbourne are now finished, and Sydney is coming up in a few days.

We’ll miss Melbourne. It’s a lovely city.

in memoriam: Gerard Sparaco

Yesterday I learned from a classmate that one of my best friends of undergraduate days died young of a heart attack– on February 20. The news itself is disturbing, as is the delay in hearing about it.

Gerard, or “Gerry” as we knew him, came from a working class background on Long Island. He first stood out because of his almost incredible knowledge of Roman history, even as a 19-year-old. Not too many American high school students read Plutarch and Suetonius for fun, but he was one of them.

We really bonded over baseball (he was an enthusiastic fan of the New York Mets), a topic where his knowledge even exceeded my own, even though I was headed for a brief sportswriting career a decade later. On my first summer in Germany in pre-internet 1989, he was kind enough to cut out baseball stories and mail them to me from Annapolis, Marlyand; I really looked forward to those occasional envelopes.

We somehow fell out of touch after I moved to Egypt, apparently because he wasn’t much of an emailer. But it seems that he had become a prominent personality in his corner of the music blogosphere, which I only learned about yesterday after hearing of his death.

It’s always tough news to take when someone dies of a heart attack at age 45, but especially so when we have such vivid memories of the person.

We read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at St. John’s, but Gerry was the only one I knew in our class who was so excited by Hegel that he immediately went on to tackle the Science of Logic by himself. On top of that, he had serious interests in theology, and had shifted from the Catholicism of his youth towards Lutheranism, in which he became a member of the clergy.

I’m unable to track down his young wife Jessica, who seems to have lost her father as well, just a year earlier. (I was best man at their wedding in 1998.) I hope to find her to express my shock and my condolences. Maybe she’ll run across this post.

“Congratulations! Bells and Whistles is now published.”

I just received an automated email from Zero Books beginning with those two sentences. I’m not exactly sure what it means, since I received my author’s copies on October 20, and several people I know received copies from Amazon weeks ago. Maybe it simply means that this was Zero’s desired publication date (Amazon is famous in the publishing industry for unilaterally jumping the gun and shipping books from their warehouses before the publishers desire to do so).

In any case, it is now an officially published book.