Published in the (Charlottesville) Daily Progress on September 24, 2010
Mario Taboada, 53, died Sunday, September 12, 2010, at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, of a heart attack.
Mario was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1989, was a Post Doctoral Fellow at Cornell University, and a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He moved with his family to Charlottesville in 1997 and ran Orbis Language, a translation company.
For the last year and change, Mario and I have been co-moderating the Rara Avis discussion list, a YahooGroup these days for the discussion of hardboiled and noirish crime fiction and related matters. We'd been among a small group who'd been quizzed by founder and long-term moderator Bill Denton if we'd take it over, as he had other matters demanding his attention. We two felt we could, and did so, with Mario continuing to be a lively presence on the list, a passionate man who loved to turn a joke at any reasonable and a few unreasonable opportunities, and with a deep love of the literature. I was more likely to take care of the behind the scenes matters of running the list, particularly as my life had been hectic, to say the least...while still keeping a hand in on the list discussion.
And then in September, not for the first time but certainly for the first time for so long and without explanation, Mario wasn't replying to email nor participating in the list discussion...I assumed he was tied up with other matters. Turns out I was incorrect. A member of RA who was also a member of a classical music list with Mario passed along the obituary information to our list today.
53. Much too young.
9 comments:
Sorry for the loss of your friend, Todd. I didn't know you were "in charge" of Rara Avis. I sometimes go there to find information on a writer.
Thanks, Patti...though it's indicative of how things go these days that I, for example, didn't know how Mario made his living till I saw his obit. Meanwhile, I'm the moderator of the Rara-Avis discussion list (and William Denton still is, officially, as well) but the Rara-Avis site-- http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ -- is still completely under the control of Bill...though I see he hasn't updated much of it for a while now.
All the good ones go too young, regardless of their age.
I also knew not your Rara Avis connection, I slid away from it more than a decade - perhaps 2 - and didn't even know it had gone the Yahoo route.
Heart attacks are so often not fatal these days, too...but Mario (and we) were not so fortunate.
Rara-Avis the discussion list was established in 1997, and went over to YahooGroups in 2004...but I can sympathize with the approximation of your years in and out of it. I'm not sure at the moment how long I've been co-moderator.
I guess I was in from late 1997, it was pretty new when I went in, until sometime in 1999 when I dropped all fandom activities as work got pretty overwhelming, leaving me no time or energy for anything else but reading and sleep. I was thinner then too.
I'm so very sorry to hear of this. My condolences.
Rick, that all sounds familiar, somehow...as applied to some other person's life, now if I could just think of whom...
Thanks, Kate. It's been an odd week.
Reference, from the DAILY PROGRESS obit, to Mario's family has been removed from the quotation above.
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