Ruth

Lucille Clifton, a National Book Award-winning poet and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after a long battle with cancer and other illnesses. She was 73. Clifton had been ill with an infection, her sister, Elaine Philip, told the Buffalo News. She had undergone surgery to remove her colon on Friday, but the exact cause of death remains undetermined. In 2001, Clifton won the National Book Award for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000."

In my life, 2009 was a year of milestones. I sent my last child off to college, started over again with a new puppy and became eligible for the senior citizen specials at Denny's. I expect 2010 to be the year when time speeds up, when I finally come to understand what the old folks meant when they used to tell me, "Time just goes by so fast." It didn't seem fast when I was in the midst of it all, juggling children, career, friends and romance. The days and weeks seemed interminable, filled with tasks that never got done.

Ruth Lilly, a prolific philanthropist who was the last surviving great-grandchild of pharmaceutical magnate Eli Lilly, died Wednesday in Indianapolis, a family spokesman said. She was 94. The cause of death was not released. Over the course of her life, the reclusive Lilly gave away the bulk of her inheritance from the Eli Lilly & Co. fortune, donating an estimated $800 million, mainly to Indiana-based charitable and arts institutions. In 2002, she gave $100 million to an obscure but influential literary association based in Chicago.

My acquaintance with Ruth Seymour over the years had been fleeting. But inevitably when I saw the KCRW radio general manager, it would provoke reminiscences about the days long ago when I worked with her daughter, Celia, on the newspaper at Santa Monica High School. Maybe that obscure connection gave Seymour license to heap extra incredulity on me a couple of months ago. It was the last time I interviewed her, and I had deigned to ask whether, based on the latest Arbitron ratings, KCRW-FM (89.9)

When Ruth Seymour arrived as a consultant for KCRW-FM (89.9) in September 1977, the station was operating out of a building at John Adams Middle School in Santa Monica and had the oldest transmitter west of the Mississippi. "There was one typewriter, and it didn't work. If you opened the door, you were on the playground of a junior high school," Seymour said. "There was no place to go but up." Seymour helped transform KCRW from a small outlet with a weak Westside signal to the National Public Radio flagship in Southern California, broadcasting to Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and Orange and Ventura counties.

"Buddhas of the three worlds gobbled up in one mouthful." Bruce Coats is translating the Japanese inscription on "Frog and Snail," a painting by Zen master Gibon Sengai. The "three worlds" are the past, present and future, he says. "Zen often talks about the oneness of all things. The inscription is saying all time can be eaten in one mouthful." As for the image, "it's wonderful," he says. "Here we have the frog looking at the snail, about to eat it. The shape of the frog is repeated upside down in the snail in a sort of yin yang arrangement.

Ruth Duckworth, a noted modernist sculptor and muralist who created abstract ceramic forms for pieces breathtakingly large and charmingly small in her studio in a renovated Chicago pickle plant, has died. She was 90. Duckworth died Oct. 18 at a Chicago hospice after a brief illness, said Thea Burger, her agent. She was both a master of ceramics and of escaping easy definition, the Washington Post said in a 2006 article on a traveling retrospective of Duckworth's work, which was shown at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery.

At a drinks party in London last summer, Ruth Rendell seemed to let slip to a reporter from the Telegraph that "The Monster in the Box" would be the last in her long series of detective novels featuring Chief Inspector Reg Wexford. The report seemed credible -- not only because of the new book's retrospective character, but also because Rendell, a writer of striking breadth and ambition, in recent years sometimes has seemed to regard Wexford as the sort of fictional burden Holmes became to Conan Doyle.

Ruth Ford, a onetime member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre who appeared in numerous Broadway plays and in films and television, has died. She was 98. Ford died Wednesday of age-related complications at her home in New York City, said her lawyer, Karin Gustafson. On Broadway, Ford appeared in plays such as "No Exit" (1946), "Miss Julie" and "The Stronger" (1956), a revival of "Dinner at Eight" (1966) and "Poor Murderer" (1976). For a 1959 Broadway production of "Requiem for a Nun" by William Faulkner, Ford costarred with her husband, Zachary Scott.

Bernard Madoff's wife, Ruth, can't spend more than $100 on herself without telling the trustee liquidating her husband's investment business, a bankruptcy judge ruled. An order freezing Ruth Madoff's assets and putting in place a monthly report on expenditures was signed Friday by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Burton Lifland in Manhattan. The order applies to a $2.5-million settlement the U.S. government will give Ruth Madoff as part of a deal in her husband's criminal case. Trustee Irving Picard sued Ruth Madoff last week, seeking the return of $44.8 million allegedly transferred to her from Bernard Madoff's firm over a six-year period.