From: owner-jangle-poets-digest@smoe.org (jangle-poets-digest) To: jangle-poets-digest@smoe.org Subject: jangle-poets-digest V8 #7 Reply-To: jangle-poets@smoe.org Sender: owner-jangle-poets-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-jangle-poets-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk jangle-poets-digest Monday, January 23 2006 Volume 08 : Number 007 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [JP] Just Like Henry David (fwd) [Nieldsforever@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 20:15:47 EST From: Nieldsforever@aol.com Subject: [JP] Just Like Henry David (fwd) Obituary from the Boston Globe of noted Thoreau scholar Bradley Dean, who apparently was "Just Like Henry David." Bruce ================================================== Bradley Dean, 51; brought Thoreau's unfinished work to modern readers, scientists By Scott Allen, Globe Staff January 20, 2006 When Henry David Thoreau died, the famed naturalist and social critic left behind an unfinished manuscript that many researchers believed was too messy to be published: 600 pages of crimped handwriting and incomplete thoughts that had become seriously out of order in the 140 years since his death. But not Bradley P. Dean, a ponytailed, motorcycle-riding Thoreau scholar at the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln. Relying on clues as subtle as the pattern of tears Thoreau made in pages when he pinned them to his wall, Mr. Dean painstakingly reorganized the manuscript and decoded Thoreau's sometimes-rough notes. The result was "Wild Fruits," a widely praised book published in 2000 that proved the American icon remained highly ambitious even as he was dying from tuberculosis. Mr. Dean believed that the book, a scientific yet almost religious look at the nuts and berries of Concord, should rescue Thoreau's reputation from those who claimed that his work went downhill after "Walden" in 1854. "I owed Thoreau a big one," Mr. Dean said in a 1999 interview, explaining that Thoreau's writing had given him strength while he was briefly in a Navy brig in 1974 for refusing to get a haircut. Mr. Dean, who died of a heart attack on Jan. 14 at age 51, was, on the surface, an unlikely academic: a self-described "beer-swilling surfer" in high school whose first exposure to Thoreau was the Cliffs Notes version of "Walden." But in spirit, friends said, Mr. Dean was much like the man he devoted his career to: meticulous, endlessly curious, and a rebel at heart. Some joked that Mr. Dean was obsessed with Thoreau, reading the books Thoreau read, walking the trails just as he had, spending his days -- and nights - -- poring over the Transcendentalist's handwriting. Mr. Dean could laugh about it, too, but his immersion method worked, allowing him to produce three "new" books by a long-dead author, including "Faith in a Seed" and "Letters to a Spiritual Seeker." And Mr. Dean wasn't finished. At the time of his death, he was working on Thoreau's unpublished "Indian Notebooks," which examine Native American life. "He never got to the point where he felt like he knew everything. It was always that process of discovery . . . that real intense passion that drove him," said Jayne Gordon of The Thoreau Society in Concord, where Mr. Dean served as editor of the bulletin. Born into a military family at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, Mr. Dean went from an indifferent high school student to a Navy mechanic to the manager of various motor inns in the Pacific Northwest before he found his calling as a researcher. He received his doctorate from the University of Connecticut in English in 1993, writing his dissertation on Thoreau's "Dispersion of Seeds" manuscript. The Thoreau Institute, founded by rock musician Don Henley, gave Mr. Dean a major break in 1998, hiring him as director of the media center, set inside a grand Tudor-style mansion on land where Thoreau once went berry-picking. Overseeing the world's biggest collection of Thoreau-related materials, Mr. Dean began publishing books and articles that made the case that, in his latter years, Thoreau was coming into his own as a scientist, expressing ideas about evolution before Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859. "Thoreau has become a much bigger subject in the history of science" in part because of Mr. Dean's work, said Thoreau biographer Robert D. Richardson. "Forty years ago, scientists would sort of snicker about him as a naturalist." Mr. Dean and his wife, the poet Debra Kang Dean, moved to Bloomington, Ind., last year to teach. Mr. Dean accepted a position as research associate in the English Department of Indiana University, where he planned to continue his writing on Thoreau. "He was such a force in Thoreau scholarship. He will be sorely missed," said Kathi Anderson of the Thoreau Institute. Gordon said the parallels between the lives of Mr. Dean and Thoreau were striking, down to the fact that both died young while immersed in major projects. She said a tribute that Ralph Waldo Emerson paid to Thoreau applies equally to Brad Dean: "The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance." In addition to his wife, Mr. Dean leaves a son, David P. K. of Redwood City, Calif.; his mother, Ida Mae of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii; his father, Frederick P. of Florence, Colo.; four sisters, Cynthia Miller of Raleigh, N.C., Diana of Loveland, Colo., Lori of Denver, and Wendy of Spokane, Wash.; and two brothers, Gregory and Herb, both of Kailua-Kona. Services were held earlier this week in Bloomington. Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company Check out the Kennedys' Official Home Page: http://www.KennedysMusic.com/ Fab photos, the Official tour diary, dashboard Buddha haiku, groovy merchandise...what more could you ask for? ------------------------------ End of jangle-poets-digest V8 #7 ********************************