Michael Sprinker

Clifford Siskin Michael Sprinker Shortly after moving to Glasgow last fall, I received the following e-mail from one of Michael's graduate students: Even now I cannot come to terms with the deep irony and absurdity surrounding Michael's death. It isjust totally unfair that a decent and respectable professor like him should die so young while people far less worthy sit in their comfort chairs, earn big salaries, and do nothing but pursue self interest. In my paper [she went on], I was trying to tell Michael that irony is a very limited political project and that laughter is more of a problem in itself rather than a way of criticizing modern problems, but I was struck wordless to see how in this case irony is so much the descriptive truth in an age in which neither Truth nor Justice exists. As I see people use laughter to replace the uneasy and embarrassing absence of Truth and Justice, I find it so hard to find a proper way to mourn for his death. I didn't have a proper answer for this student back then, and I still don't have one now. Thanks to Midiael, however, I at least had something to write bade to this student, for she happened to be the very one who occasioned Michael's very last e-mail to me: "I am in a benevolent mood toward students," wrote Michael, "in whose redemptive capadty I continue to believe ." Whatever the excrudating ironies surrounding Michael's death, that was the good and informing irony of his career; that through sheer force of will and talent he could take institutions like Stony Brook and make them into the tools to realize that belief. That effort was the primary context for my own friendship with Michael. But there were also other universities, humanities institutes, the world of publishing, MLGs, poker games. Michael was always working the System, but the System assumed many forms. Thafs why many who knew Michael are strangers to each other. Michael was and is our only link—a link that does give us something to share, for Michael's personality and professional conduct were startlingly consistent across all contexts. All of us have had that strange experience of feeling a certain pleasure in being told that we were "wrong"—in watching eyebrows being raised at neighboring tables as Midiael's voice rose. And of having ourselves and our work taken seriously —that is, taken the way we hoped it would be when we first entered the academy. This shared knowledge, however, is primarily about how Michael affected our lives. What each of us knows about his, however, is far less uniform, so I'd like to start by materializing its object in the way he would have—with some facts: dates and numbers with whichwe can begin to construct a history. By themselves, the dates tell one cold fact about the life: it was short. Born in Elgin, Illinois in 1950, Michael never made it out of his 118 the minnesota review forties. In conjunction with some other numbers, however, another word besides "short" comes to mind—a word to which Michael gave his own ironic twist. A fellow poker player once asked him, recalls Dick Ohmann, how he was doing. Michael said "I'm dying." "We all are," said the player. "Yes," replied Michael, and then charatferistically stripped that humanistic platitude bare, "but I'm doing it faster." Michael wasfast, as anyone who slipped into platitudes, played squash, drove the autobahn, wrote an e-mail, turned in a dissertation chapter, got on his nerves, or asked for help, quickly discovered. He was always right there, right away, for you or against you. Whatever else attracted people to Michael, there was this one mesmerizing fact—he didn't screw around—he got things done, meticulously done. This was so compelling and so refreshing not only because ifs so rare, but because in Michael's case it wasn't a neurosis; it was an intellectual position he occupied, a political commitment he made. Michael was committed in thought and in practice to the value of labor. He did not think of being...