Neil Worth (1948-2016)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CLbF5ymhXXp/?igshid=1k0hj08v0gbe8

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In the 80s when I lived in the Bay Area, Neil Worth was a regular sometimes exhausting interlocutor. After work I’d drive over to the City where we’d spend hours tirading about the injustices of world history.

He was remarkably talented, fluent in Russian and conversant in several other European languages, as well as a defender of the California #Chumash people in particular. He never found what society calls a place in it. I just learned for sure what I had long suspected: he passed several years ago anonymously on the streets of San Fransisco.

Here he is in his book-strewn apartment in the Haight in the 90s reading me his notes on some atrocity perpetrated by Western #imperialism.

He loved the sonnet I wrote for him, which begins with an echo of Osip #Mandelstam’s “Insomnia. Homer.”

You can find it here: @closelyshavenpoems or here: https://alteritas.net/pastis/shrines/

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https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Insomnia._Homer._The_rows_of_stretched_sails

https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/insomnia-homer-taut-sails-by-osip-mandelshtam/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CLbF5ymhXXp/?igshid=1k0hj08v0gbe8

 

 

 

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