Archive for May, 2025
LeAnne Flaherty
A few days ago I had the good fortune to chat (via Skype) with advanced undergraduate students at Brooklyn College. Our topic was “parapsychology.” The gifted and nimble instructor of Psych 3585 was LeAnne Flaherty, who was a student in that same class the last time I was invited (by my genius brother-in-law Frank Grasso).
It is such a good class and important topic to study and discuss.
The syllabus says, “Students in parapsychology will learn and practice the concepts and methods of critical thinking used in the science of psychology. Parapsychology is a branch of empirical psychology that has made controversial and not widely accepted claims about the nature of the human mind and human mental abilities. … Through the critical examination of the peer-reviewed parapsychology literature and lectures on the history and methods of parapsychology, students will develop the background knowledge and use skills psychological scientists and scholars use to judge the evidence for extraordinary scientific claims.”
This is a superb way to teach some of the most important things you need to learn at university: critical thinking, the scientific method, and intelligently and ethically communicating findings and argument across disciplines and cultures. …
Brooklyn College knows how to do it right. Thank you to Leanne Flaherty for the invitation and to her students for being so involved and amazing.
LeAnne passed away a few weeks ago. Her friend Daniella wrote on the GoFundMe page she set up for LeAnne: “We all loved Lea so much and will miss her terribly. Let’s carry on her spirit of love, kindness, and silliness in our hearts as a way to keep part of her with us, and to help navigate a world that can be so unfair and difficult.”
I found LeAnne to be a charming and generous and truly friendly person – a terrific colleague, too. I liked her very much. And I could see how much her students loved and admired her.
She was still young. This really hurts.
Marilyn Suriani
From 2016 (a post called “Big Art”):
“What gets installed in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” My friend photographer Marilyn Suriani is preparing a huge installation there – the largest piece is 54-feet wide. It’s beautiful, a continuation of this remarkable phase in her career, which sees Suriani creating nature- and waterscapes in shimmering, rhapsodic colours. This work feels both abstract and earthly.
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I learned a couple of weeks ago that Marilyn had passed away, in Atlanta, where she had lived and worked for decades. Marilyn was a Sicilian live-wire originally from Philly whom I truly really loved. I had acquired her photo-book Dancing Naked in the Material World in 1991 or so, in my Buffalo, New York publishing days. We got to know each other over the phone; listening to her voice made the sun shine; and she taught me a ton. At my desk right now, I face seven photographs by Marilyn on the wall.
Hers was the first photogallery published in my old e-zine Ellavon, in 1998 or so. You can find a wider array of her work (scanned and printed at a much higher res) on SurianiPhoto.com.
I remember when you said …
Long-time friendship provides glorious blessings that young people, no matter how precocious they are, can ever attain. I love reminding my friends of things they said to me, seeing their incredulity (when they can’t remember) or their widening eyes (when they can). Once, when I was impoverished and truly heartbroken, I was crashing at a dear friend’s place in Manhattan. One afternoon we were watching the Buffalo Bills on TV and eating Chinese food and whooping and yelling. He saw me smile and said, “Yours is the best possible miserable situation.” I have used that phrase hundreds of times over the decades.
Yesterday a friend and I were talking about times you have to cut things off with a loved one. He reminded me of what I had told him once: “The only decision you have to make now is whether to close the gate softly or to slam it shut.”
That was another good one.
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