The cause was a massive subdural hematoma suffered after he fell on ice and hit his head on Tuesday outside his home in Warren, Conn., said his wife, the writer Francine du Plessix Gray.

*******************************

... in 1999 [he] received the Wallace Stevens Award, which carries a $100,000 prize, from the Academy of American Poets.

A Wallace Stevens Award,
in Seven Parts:

  I.  From a page linked to in
      Tuesday's entry White Christmas:

"A bemused Plato reasoned that nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? In our own day Martin Heidegger ventured that das Nichts nichtet -- 'the nothing nothings' -- evidently still sensing a problem."
-- W. V. Quine in Quiddities

 II.  "As if nothingness
             contained a métier..."
      -- Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"

III.  "Massive subdural hematoma"
       -- Three-word poem
           performed on Tuesday
           in Connecticut

IV.  mé·tier n.

An occupation, a trade, or a profession.

Work or activity for which a person is particularly suited; one's specialty.

---

[French, from Old French mestier, from Vulgar Latin misterium, from Latin ministerium. See ministry.]
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

July 16, 1992: Splendor and Miseries, review of

Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 by Alain Corbin, translated by Alan Sheridan

La Vie quotidienne dans les maisons closes, 1830–1930 by Laure Adler

Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France by Charles Bernheimer

Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era by Hollis Clayson

From a Log24 entry of Friday, December 3, 2004:

"Anything but the void. And so we keep hoping to luck into a winning combination, to tap into a subtle harmony, trying like lock pickers to negotiate a compromise with the 'mystery tramp,' as Bob Dylan put it...."
-- Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
    New York Times, Oct.  26, 2004

From this morning's New York Times:

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn., Dec. 8 (AP) - Ralph Blizard, a renowned fiddler who began his career playing on the radio, died here on Friday [Dec. 3, 2004], according to a funeral home in Kingsport. He was 85. Mr. Blizard started playing at age 7. He began his career on the radio in Tennessee's tri-cities area with his band, the Southern Ramblers. In the 1950's he stopped performing, taking a 30-year break to raise a family. In 2002, Mr. Blizard was inducted into the American Fiddlers Hall of Fame.... [He] was a founder of the Traditional Appalachian Music Heritage Association.

In memory of Mr. Blizard:

From Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier, 367-368: They consulted and twisted the pegs again to make the dead man's tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of Bonaparte's Retreat, which some name General Washington's tune.  This was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death.  When the minor key drifted in it was like shadows under trees, and the piece called up something of dark woods, lantern light.  It was awful old music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture and is the true expression of its inner life. Birch said, Jesus wept.  The fit's took them now. None of the Guard had ever heard fiddle and banjo played together in that tuning, nor had they heard playing of such strength and rhythm applied to musical themes so direful and elegiac.  Pangle's use of the thumb on the fifth string and dropping to the second was an especial thing of arrogant wonder.  It was like ringing a dinner bell, yet solemn.  His other two fingers worked in a mere hard, groping style, but one honed to brutish perfection.  Stobrod's fingers on the fiddle neck found patterns that seemed set firm as the laws of nature.  There was a deliberation, a study, to their clamping of the strings that was wholly absent from the reckless bowing of the right hand.  What lyric Stobrod sang recounted a dream -- his or  some fictive speaker's -- said to have been dreamed on a bed of hemlocks and containing a rich vision of lost love, the passage of awful time, a girl wearing a mantle of green.  The words without music would have seemed hardly fuller in detail than a telegraphic message, but together they made a complete world. When the song fell closed, Birch said to Teague, Good God, these is holy men.  Their mind turns on matters kept secret from the likes of you and me.