It is with great sadness that I heard the news from a close friend of mine that Dr. Richard Macksey, the extraordinary professor from Johns Hopkins, had passed away yesterday. In the 70's while I attended Hopkins as an undergraduate Macksey provided inspiration and intelligence to my soul, guiding me and nurturing my hunger for books and knowledge and, of course, direction. I am fortunate in that I live here in Baltimore so I have been able to maintain a dialogue with this incredible man through the years visiting his great library or going out to see a film, eat at a restaurant and it was always a great adventure to enter a discussion with him as his stories would multiply and would lead us to the most unexpected places. He was a friend to everybody and one of the most optimistic people I've ever encountered. His memory will live on. Here is a memory of him from an article I recently encountered about him:
The lore around Macksey and his library has an air of myth—some alumni describe knocking over a sheet of paper to discover original correspondence with D.H. Lawrence (who died the year before Macksey was born), while others swear there was an original Picasso sketch in his bathroom at one time. Four-foot Chinese scrolls, tiny model skeletons, antique theater binoculars. The valuable pieces are no longer in the house; they have been locked up in Special Collections on campus. One time during class, I myself picked up the nearest book and discovered it was an inscribed advance copy of his friend Oliver Sacks’ book, Seeing Voices. The objects in his house speak to his interests, which is to say he is interested in everything.
That is not an exaggeration.
“When you listen to him talk, he begins in one place, and then it’s as though he’s crossed the room and gone to a different section of the library and pulled out a book on a different topic,” the author Jessie Chaffee (Florence in Ecstasy) noted. “He’ll take you down a path that is surprising, and then another, and another . . . until you realize that they’re all connected.”
He still speaks this way. I asked what he believes is lost in the digital humanities, aside from the physicality of books. “We no longer have to worry about memorizing things,” Dr. Macksey said. “Previously, the mark of the scholar was the ability to quote the text.” Easy for him to say. He is a polyglot with a photographic memory, so he does literally remember every single quote he’s read, and its location in the book, and the book’s location in his library.
“I think a hell of a lot is lost: the ability to see [a subject] as something more than a list of names and themes and topics.” He went on to describe Charles Sanders Peirce, a prominent figure in Hopkins’ history whose theory he finds delightful for applying to detective fiction. “He says, it’s not all induction, it’s not all deduction, it’s rather what he calls abduction, which is a combination of both, which sometimes is just guessing. He has a lot of different names for the notion of abduction.”
Right, but how does this “abduction” relate to scholars not spending as much time with their texts?
“I realize now my reading went from being too fast to too slow, without any good meeting in between. Much of our reading we don’t read the whole word, we see a syllable or perhaps two syllables. We have a context, so again it includes making a guess, a very quick guess. If you don’t read slowly, you’ll miss some of the surprises that are there.” Conversations with Dr. Macksey never cease to surprise, because he’s able to relate things like detective fiction to one’s experience perceiving language, as we’ve just witnessed.
“There was always this rumor that when he was up for his PhD and doing his orals, they couldn’t stump him on anything,” the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, a former student, said. “Finally, exasperated, one of his interviewers decided to ask him about 16th-century French cooking or something and he goes, ‘well that’s great that you should ask that question, because it happens to be one of my hobbies.’”
A foto from the 70's in Macksey's library- I'm sitting on the floor and Bruce Jaffe to the right of me standing and lecturing on film. Macksey is in the back with a tie and his legendary pipe.