Mike Rogin

To: Retort
5.xii.01

Dear Friends,
Some of you may not have heard the news of the sudden death, the Sunday 
before last in Paris, of Mike Rogin - friend, comrade and Retorter. After 
seeming to recover well from his cardiac surgery in 2000, he caught 
hepatitis (perhaps in Russia in October), which led to kidney failure, and 
within a few days a liver transplant, and a fatal blood clot. It is almost 
unbearable - the thought that Mike is gone and his voice stilled. He was 
going to dispatch us a 'Letter from Paris' before returning to California 
in the New Year, but it is not to be.

His book Blackface, White Noise (working title, "Uncle Sammy and My Mammy") 
bears, as epigraph, the last words on a plaque affixed to the wall of 
Norwich Castle by the socialist city council in 1949 to commemorate the 
four-hundredth anniversary of Kett's Rebellion, the great uprising of 
commoners against enclosures at the dawn of modernity, which took a 
mercenary army of Hessians to crush.        "...To escape from a servile 
life into the freedom of just conditions."      Mike's work as a radical, 
psychoanalytically informed, political scientist (rarissima avis) - on 
Jackson and patriarchy, McCarthyism, Reaganite demonology, the politics of 
burnt cork, film history esp. the role of Hollywood Jews in the white 
supremacist project, and his late reviews and essays for the LRB - were 
profound and fearless distillations of a brilliant mind, and will remain a 
beacon to light the long journey towards "the freedom of just conditions."

Our thoughts are with Ann, who will stay at home in Paris until the New 
Year, before returning for the Berkeley semester. Tim trained up from 
Rome for the cremation ceremony on Monday. Here is a brief account of it 
from *** via ***:

I just arrived in Brussels from Paris, where I attended the funeral at Pere 
LaChaise. The ceremony was very simple, half an hour long, with about two 
dozen people, maybe 30. The ceremony opened with a blues song that Mike, I 
assume, had been fond of; his coffin was there; and a picture on top: in 
it, Mike was posing with his hands in his pockets, his head slightly 
cocked, in front of a seascape of some sort--and there he was looking as he 
does, smart and defiant and playful all at once. Francoise Verges (a former 
student) read from Mike's book on Jackson, a woman spoke in French about 
her connection to Mike, Ann's sister spoke, and so on: there were about a 
dozen short testaments. The most moving one for me was Tim Clark's. He gave 
a wonderful description of what it was like to have Mike as a friend, what 
it was for Mike to bring out your thoughts--to understand all at one with a 
rush of his hand to his forehead that half-baked idea that you had been 
trying to explain to him (this was Tim's image). The final word was a 
reading of Mike's last published piece while he was alive--a piece on 
September 11 and post that appeared in the London Review of Books (I 
think). Then everyone made the final round around the coffin, hugged Ann, 
and we went to the 'Mur de Federes,' which is a plaque to the communards 
who were massacred in the 1870s. It was a favorite place of Mike's and 
Ann's, from what I understood. Then everyone met up again at Ann's and 
Mike's house to eat and talk more.