I am the guilty one for bringing up the concept of "Dean of Mark Twain Studies"--but I do not feel bad about saying that I considered Lou Budd to be that person. Lou has left us, so I suppose we can leave the dean chair empty for a bit. When I heard of Lou's passing a week ago, I was finishing my MLA paper and citing him on Mark Twain and the election of 1884. It was a bit sad to read that brief quotation this morning, but it also felt good to honor him in that small way. I remember at an ALA in Washington in the early 1990s when we had a dinner and Lou was the keynote speaker. In his remarks, he mentioned me by name and said something like, "And we can thank John Bird for telling us much that we did not know about Mark Twain and the telephone." I was astonished but incredibly pleased that he recognized me--but Lou Budd gave many younger scholars that kind of thrill. As a legacy, we should all try to emulate him in that. Who knows how many people he has nurtured with his generosity and intellectual humility? My small payback to Lou was to end my book "Mark Twain and Metaphor" with a nod to him. My concluding argument was that however we see Mark Twain, we see him as a metaphor, and we must recognize that we are only constructing a metaphorical vision of him and his work--but that we should be aware of what that metaphor is. I concluded with a long quotation from Lou Budd's "Our Mark Twain," in which he wrote of Twain's "rounded uniqueness." I think I wrote, "Rounded uniqueness. There--that is a metaphor we can build on." As I think about it tonight, that is a metaphor I could apply to our departed friend, Louis J. Budd. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ John Bird [log in to unmask]