William Willeford (1929-2015)

摘要

William Willeford was born on 28 October, 1929 in Detroit, Michigan, and passed away in Atlanta, Georgia, on 19 November, 2015. He participated in the larger life of the world through continuing unstrained attention to and interest in what the moment was giving. On his father’s shoulders in Detroit one day, he heard his father say ‘Look and remember’, and he saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressing the crowd. Later, he and his parents moved to Tulare, a small California town he loved for its sparsity, and which he looked back to, writing to a high school friend years later. Recordings, friends, bands drew him into live music at Berkeley as he was studying anthropology and English literature; he played trombone, became friends with Dave Brubeck, entered the blues, sought mother, felt abandonment. He fell into the whirling of Kenneth Burke’s philosophical questioning, later wrote The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience, and much later studied Hegel’s dialectic.