5/18/2023 0 Comments Wordperfect 2020The rest were jokes or plaintive cries in the night, the sort of lamentations suitable for the darkest hours. I imagine other friends could say the same. “So clear, graceful, and smart.” Since he was not an avid sleeper, in the morning I’d wake up and find six, seven, eight emails from him, and as many texts, sent at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, and half of them, again, music videos. Off-the-cuff truths: “Syllabus writing is a hateful operation.” It feels like every third email was a link to an obituary, as we were both fanatics about great obituaries, especially those written by Anne Wroe, of the Economist. “Bad Lip Reading from the NFL” was sent without comment. Most of the texts and emails I received from him-I’ve spent a great deal of time rereading this posthumous work-are clips of his favorite songs from YouTube, with a few sentences explaining why he was sending this song now-or not. This though both of us were writers, and taught in the same program. All we can know is what didn’t happen and never will, because if one thing in life is certain, it’s that the dead can be depended on to contribute very little indeed.īut the thing is, our friendship didn’t have much to do with writing books. This doesn’t mean that it ever would have been finished or live up to that potential. To make matters worse, many writers leave some manuscripts “in progress” behind when they die, sometimes work of great potential. Our books, posthumously, will be on their own. Think of midlist authors (like me, for instance) who really aren’t all that terrifically popular when they’re alive, spending their careers clamoring (as only the living can clamor) for whatever attention they can get. No novel is ever judged purely on its own merits: Marketing follows us into the afterlife.įew want to publish a dead author’s book if that book’s prospects will be lessened by the fact that he will not be around to go on tour. It’s impossible to know how much work is left behind by the dead, and of that, how much is work that’s “worthy” of posthumous publication, work to which attention should be paid.
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