death has undone so many

Literary and cultural critic Paul Fussell has died.

If you're at all interested in the First World War, or modernity, or the ways we conceptualize war in general, you should read his classic The Great War and Modern Memory. I also recommend his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," if only because it will make you think, whether you ultimately accept Fussell's argument or not.

Oddly enough I started reading his Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War just a couple of days ago. I have some issues with it, which I'll talk about more in a later post, but it's still tremendously useful for the social history of the war. And from it I have learned the wonderful fact that in one Japanese-run POW camp, there were so many same-sex relationships that one of the doctors started a "marital relations clinic" to help the couples stay happy and therefore drama-free. (If you're interested, Fussell's source is a doctor's account--not the doctor who ran the clinic, alas--included in Donald Knox's Death March: the Survivors of Bataan.)

That's the second writer I really admired who has died this year (Reginald Hill was the other). I do not like this trend.