Core Dump 2.0

Some sad news – blogger extraordinaire, Alan Sullivan, has died after a long battle with lymphoma. I encountered Alan’s blog, Fresh Bilge, through Brendan Loy’s weather blog around the time of Hurrican Katrina, and have been reading it avidly ever since – it’s up in the top group of my Google Reader list.

Alan was a true polymath – a poet, sailor, novelist, expert on topics as diverse as weather, volcanoes, and cooking. He was also gay and politically conservative, an odd combination I thought, but he was completely at peace with his convictions. Most of all, he was an extraordinarily gifted writer, and although some of his opinions made me grit my teeth, his blog was always one of the first I turned to each day.

I’ll end by quoting an excerpt from Brendan Loy’s appreciation of Alan’s life – it seems appropriate, since it was through Brendan Loy’s blog that I discovered Alan Sullivan’s.

But before long, I found myself drawn to more than just Alan’s hurricane coverage. Here was a highly intelligent and thoughtful man, a superb writer with a keen intellect and a broad array of interests that he eagerly blogged about — weather and other natural disasters, yes, but also politics and religion and culture, not to mention the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ideologically, we could hardly have been more different. But Alan challenged me and fascinated me. Even when I thought he was absolutely dead wrong — wronger than wrong — his commentary and analysis was always worth reading. And so was the lighter fare: Alan was a person who loved aesthetic beauty for its own sake, whether in the form of scenic vistas or pretty pictures or beautiful prose and poetry. That came through in his blog, too. So did his love of the sea — Alan was an avid sailor, until his declining health turned him involuntarily into a landlubber; his blog nickname was “seablogger” — and of nature and God. He had a unique perspective: a gay man who came of age in the ’60s as a liberal, but became a staunch conservative and, ultimately, a deeply religious Catholic, fully at peace with himself and his beliefs. He did not fit neatly into any “box” or stereotype. He was his own man, always, to the end.

All of which adds up to the broader conclusion that, as I wrote in May, Alan was “a near-perfect blogger, with a remarkable knack for weaving in captivating discussions of his own life, alongside political flames, alongside miscellaneous thought-provoking posts about assorted and sundry topics, all without seeming narcissistic or navel-gazing in the slightest. In short, he accomplishes something I was once accused of: ‘Thousands of bloggers have failed to make themselves interesting enough to cause virtual strangers give a hoot about their lives, but you pull it off effortlessly.’” I can’t speak to whether I ever deserved that praise, but I know Alan absolutely did.