The bold, warm, funny experimental fiction writer Gilbert Sorrentino has died. I had been waiting, with dread, for this to happen. I threw the rest of my unread New York Times away this morning and kept only my torn-out obit page as soon as I saw it, so I could focus just on my former professor, a salty guy who was in love with William Carlos Williams, metonymy, dada, Kathy Acker, and William Burroughs. Unfortunately, the obit did him no favors.

Sorrentino introduced me to concepts whose names I can’t remember but that I still love (novels written without a certain letter, such as Perec’s W, and the insertion of that letter in a single place as a deliberate mistake, for instance). I took every class he offered, including Generative Devices, whose premise was that rules were a better starting point for poetry than psychological plumbing. (We all came up with some weird shit by building lines with congruent vowel sounds.) I used to sit in his office with him, with the blinds drawn against the relentless sunshine and joke about how, as native New Yorkers (I’m from Albany, he was from Brooklyn, and a place like Palo Alto can make those two spots seem terribly alike), the Californians around us felt like pod people. I bought all of his novels at the campus bookstore and didn’t finish a single one. Still, I recommend Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Tonight I’m going to start over with them. Some great audio clips of him reading his work, and some appreciations for his major contributions to 20th-century letters are here.

Slightly depressing for entirely different reasons is Damien Hirst’s latest stunt, a human skull cast in platinum and covered in 8,500 diamonds. According to the Guardian, it will be the most expensive work of art ever made, costing between 8 million and 10 million pounds. It will be called For the Love of God.