Mac Miller (1937–2026)

Mac Miller, Foster Father

Mac Miller passed away Friday, 2026-08-28, as you've probably already heard.

Mac was my New College academic adviser and thesis sponsor. He was my mentor, the without-which-not of my subsequent intellectual, academic, and professional existence… and a foster father. (I sent him Father's Day cards. He'd lost two sons, I lost my dad. Seemed fair.)

Beyond a peradventure of a doubt, I would not be sitting where I am and typing these words (not even hearing our dog growl for attention) without him.

When I was at NC, Mac understood me better than I understood myself.

From my commonplace book:

You are a person both blessed and cursed in living in a continual flux of ambient information, each element of which is significant.

— New College of Florida Professor Emeritus LTC A. McA. "Mac" Miller, USAR (Ret.), Ph.D. to me, in a thesis meeting, Sarasota, Florida, November 10, 1993.

That, six years before I was diagnosed as autistic, and many years (and that, after I'd worked as a librarian for well over a decade) before I realized that my autistic special interest was information.

As Mac understood.

As we say in Judaism, from Proverbs 10:7, in memory of the righteous: May his memory be for a blessing.

Two Essays (mostly) about Mac

I've written two essays about Mac:

The speech I gave at his retirement roast, in February 2004 (with two photos added), and "Keep Writing," an essay that won the Pooling All Artists competition (a joint project of Fort Lauderdale’s Thinking Cap Theatre, of which I'm a Company Member and the Research Librarian and Miami’s The Krane arts and theatre organization), February 10, 2014. The essay is more about Mac as my other writing influence, Spalding Gray (despite the title).

(For those who notice: the PDFs are hosted at agman.us. It's an old site of mine, so named for "Ag," the chemical symbol for silver. My father once had "AGMAN" as his Florida license plate.)

Please let me know what you think.

Affection-Seeking

My dear New College alum, most dog-forward friend Colleen Powell just adopted a dog, a cute, smallish (about 40 lb) pit bull, Josephine (named, as I understand it, after Jo from Pride and Prejudice—Colleen, please correct me if I'm wrong.).

(Edit: My law librarian comrade and mentor and comrade Mary Whisner texted me immediately to tell me that it was Jo from Little Women, and that the heroine of Pride and Prejudice was Elizabeth. As Mary said, "Guess you weren't socialized as a girl!")

(Also edit: Catherine got anxious that I wasn't paying her enough attention, even though she's half asleep. so she's shifted herself around to make sure I'm paying attention to her. Witnesseth:)

(Picture dark because taken with Night Sight.)

(Colleen, could you please give me a picture of Josephine to add here? I would love to do that; I'd be happy to edit the post.)

Colleen was very specific about wanting a dog that was smart, but not so smart that they would cause trouble in order to be rewarded/incentivized to stop the trouble, as with a treat. 

Catherine (as always the subject of my blog posts) is a very smart dog, with her own approach. (Assertiveness, maybe a bulldog thing.)

She craves affection. Perhaps it's because of, or part of, our bond. As I say a lot, I would not have adopted a bulldog—but she adopted me. That's how I wound up adopting a dog from our neighbors across the street. I dogsat Catherine during the day 5 days a week, for almost a year before I adopted her. (Perhaps I needed the dog sitting more than Catherine did.)

So this afternoon, after breakfast [sic[, Catherine growled, as usual, telling us she wanted to go outside and poop. When we came in, I sat down again. As she came down our front hall, she was growling, and barked softly a couple of times. Then, when I could see her, she looked at me, and barked. Not an angry bark, not a guarding bark, but a happy bark. (I know her well enough to know this.) Not softly. 

She doesn't do this at meal times. She just guilts us. And when we feed her from the table (yes, I know, but it's fresh fruit, or peanut butter—I always check the AKC website first) she'll growl a little, then give up. 

So anyway, Colleen, count your (secular) blessings. 

(Capitalization, punctuation, and other errors due to using speech-to-text dictation, and inability to edit on my phone with one hand on Catherine, throughout.)