Losing Fascinating Thinkers: RIP bell hooks and Anne Rice

Like much of the world, I felt stunned yesterday to hear of the death of bell hooks and how strange that it happened in the same week as the death of Anne Rice.  Oddly, I started reading both of them at the same time, for only a brief time, in the mid 90's.

Yesterday I saw everyone's grief spilling over on social media, everyone posting their favorite quotes and remembering the first time they read their favorite hooks book.  I felt that odd, left out feeling:  by the time I discovered her work, I had read other important works of intersectionality (race+gender+capitalism/clss), so her work didn't seem that radical to me, even as I understood that if I had discovered her when she was first published, I would have seen her as boundary breaking.  I remember buying a few of her books, underlining some passages, but later culling those books when I did one of my periodic purges.

Similarly when Anne Rice died earlier this week, I thought about how much she meant to so many people I know: Hank Stuever wrote a wonderful tribute article in The Washington Post that covers this territory so beautifully. I thought about how she challenged us to think about gender and sexuality in different ways, and how she will likely not get credit for that feat by scholars and critics in the way that say, Judith Butler gets credit.

Perhaps as time goes by, bell hooks will get more credit for her the ways that she explored intersectionality.   Yet she, like Anne Rice, explored popular culture, and in academic circles, that's a sure way to guarantee that one will lose out on some of the rewards that can come with serious academic study.  I realize that there are many reasons why bell hooks was at Berea College in her last years, but she didn't have a position in the Ivy Leagues, the way that some of her colleagues who explored similar territory (Cornel West, Toni Morrison) have had.

As I have watched the tributes pour in, I have been struck by how bell hooks continued to give back to a variety of communities, many of them underserved.  She probably could have had an Ivy League teaching job, but she went to Kentucky.  I love the pictures of her reading to children and the fact that she wrote books for children.  

I'm also struck by her willingness to follow her passions and interests outside of what various communities surely must have told her she should have.  It doesn't take much searching to find her writing on various music icons, but those are less interesting to me these days.  No, these days, I have loved reading about her encounter with Thich Nhat Hanh, for example, in this text.  

The world needs more of these kinds of interesting thinkers, like Anne Rice and bell hooks.  Let me sharpen my metaphorical pencils and get to work.