Good good-bye to Anthony Bourdain,

Who hanged himself this morning, age 61, probably in a final drunken fit of auto-suspensive masturbation, in the way that so many fine, alcoholic, no longer beautiful gentlemen do take their leave of us (reminding us that, even in death, they were epicurean connoisseurs)--though none will, of course, even if he knows or suspects it to be true, say so.  Still, I gotta say, too bad: I liked the son of a bitch. I have read several of his autobiographical accounts of himself-in-the world, and, sadly, I have foreseen that this is what it would come to: Bourdain was, in the first place, an open, unrestrained alcoholic. In the second place, if you dig even a tiny bit into him, you perceive the gnawing sexual vanity of one who was beautiful in his young manhood, and who was crushingly humiliated by the decay of his good looks in middle age.  I think it goes no deeper than this, though the exquisite poise and balance of his prose (In my humble estimation, he was the best writer of English of the last half century) makes one wish that there had been more to him than that. Without the alcoholism, there might have been.