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.