If there ever was a Pulitzer Prize for blogging, then certainly Jake Seliger would have won it hands down for this year’s blogging….
On August 7 Jake Seliger died of cancer at the age of 40. He had been fighting it for a while and last summer he made the shocking announcement on his blog that the cancer was terminal and acting quickly. Amazingly, Jake and his wife were able to get experimental treatments to prolong his life, but this outcome was (by his own admission) preordained. Before last summer’s announcement, Jake was a frequent blogger who blogged about literary and social topics. Amazingly, despite his ailments, he blogged harder and deeper than ever before. Some of those posts from the previous year are about his illness — and somewhat hard to read — but often he blogged about the usual topics — as though cancer were just a figment of the imagination. I’ve been busy catching up on his old blogposts — he’s been blogging for over 17 years and will be uncovering some great posts from years past. Here’s a thoughtful post from exactly a year ago — before Jake would travel down that long and harrowing roller coaster ride.
One of the most amazing things about this year is that in addition to all the writing, they have regularly taken selfies of themselves during these awful times. They are a beautiful testament to their marriage and fidelity. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that Bess is pregnant with Jake’s baby. They are at the bottom of their blogposts.
I left a long message on his final post:
This last year has been an amazing year of blogging! You have gone to places which I never thought possible (and yet you still have thrown in some “normal posts” as well). If there was a Pulitzer Prize for blogging, then certainly you would have won it hands down for this year’s blogging….
…
Back in my late thirties, I was still pretty gungho about web technologies and working in IT. Recovering from a romantic breakup, experimenting with different kinds of storytelling, impatient with the retro-conservativism of the Bush Administration (lord, if only I knew what would be coming later). That was where I was at during that stage of life. I certainly wasn’t pondering mortality or stoicism or anything philosophical. I was rewatching the Blues Brothers, playing around with Python and cameras and trying to read Petrarch. It was shortly after that time that my reading dropped off significantly, though I have picked it up again in the last 5 years or so). In comparison, I feel as though you have traveled around the world several times (metaphorically speaking) while I was still learning how to walk. Of course, nobody could have predicted or sought out your path, and frankly good health and time is a luxury that people take for granted until they can’t.
…
I’m glad to hear that Bess is expecting a child. How promising. I’ve been watching the charming TV series on Apple+, Lessons in Chemistry. One of the main characters dies unexpectedly in an early episode while the girlfriend is pregnant. By the end of the series, the baby grows up into a precocious little girl who is driven to find out more about her father (and stumbles upon some amazing insights into the man without ever meeting him). You’ve certainly led a full life — and your wife certainly will preserve your memories. I’m sure that will be enough material offline and online to appease your child’s curiosity about you when she grows older.
As I said, I know that hospice is the next logical step (and yes, the final one), but from the perspective of a reader and fellow blogger, I feel as though my contact with you and your writing is only just beginning. I can see by the comments how many people your life and words have already touched (and WILL TOUCH). Thanks for generously sharing this last year with readers like me — even when it must have been painful and harrowing and exhausting. Please enjoy the rest of your time as best as you possibly can.
I am glad I had time to give that final message — which hopefully Jake was able to read. It’s funny. I’ve been blogging for a few years longer than Jake, but I admit I never really felt obligated to post regularly. Sometimes weeks — and even months — have gone by without my posting a thing. In fact I have sometimes questioned the value of spending too much time on the blogging thing. (Similarly, I don’t post too much on social media even though I have streaks where I simply don’t shut up online). Part of the reason is that nobody really reads bloggers anymore (perhaps they never did), and blogging is something you do to document recent intellectual discoveries. I’ve going to be saying a LOT more about this topic in a longer post — stay tuned. Ha, ha, it will be a while before I write this post, but I’m pretty sure I will title it, “The Itch that must be scratched”.
A year ago I started digging into Jake Seliger’s blog archives, but frankly, it will take a long time to go through everything.
In the meantime, I’ve been digging through Jake’s blog archives — there’s a lot to discover or rediscover. Eventually I’ll do several megaposts on some of Jake’s literary stuff (which were always interesting and fun to read).
I’ve been working on a music playlist to give people after I die (hey, do I have anything better than to do?) I imagined it as a kind of final gift to the world, but what’s preventing me from making the list today?
It’s a good playlist, a compilation of favorite tunes with a lot of emotional range and nostalgic touches. But lots of other playlists do that too. Nothing is really unique about the one I have been cobbling together.
I do like the idea of a musical playlist. These are less about my creative expressions than the auditory artefacts I have stumbled upon during my life. I have always needed music to keep me going. It’s hard to imagine a life before a person could listen without interruption to recorded music or listen. Digital music comes with the tradeoff that we have to deal with global warming, a carnage of birds, rapidly declining biodiversity and noise pollution that people a century never had to deal with: leaf blowers, car horns, jack hammers and the incessant trodding on highway concrete. Before the era of digital music, people played musical instruments or sang or recited poetry or went to the theatre. A few hundred years later our multimedia will become more ornate and sophisticated and autonomous, but I suspect people will still be listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor and Beethoven symphonies and Machaut motets. So a musical playlist — while not as creative as a novel or diary — will still be able to display a person’s personality and emotional timbres from that person’s life well beyond one lifetime.
It is a nice fantasy to imagine one’s own funeral. Who would be there, who would be fraught with grief, etc. Actually, over the years I’ve heard about many people whose deaths were unremarked upon and practically unnoticed. This is practically a given for any author who hasn’t won an international prize. No matter how prolific your output was or how committed you were to the artistic craft, if it didn’t make a lot of money or bring a national prize, your literary output will probably count for nothing at a funeral. Your family will still have to pay for it and write your obituary.
Probably the best way to have an eventful sendoff after death is to be married and have children (or grandchildren). This is proper because family-oriented people make sacrifices to their offspring; having a decent funeral for them is the least one can do. If you can’t do that, it helps to be married or at least in a long term relationship. What this means at the age of your death is unclear. The people who stayed with you for this long may have done so for reasons more practical than romantic or spiritual. In those later years, your siblings have to take up the slack. And what if you have only one sibling or none at all? What if they all died before you? Frankly, old age is terrifying for people who are single or unattached. Who’s going to clean up your mess? Manage your financial affairs? Manage your health care decisions when you are unable to?
I currently live with my mom. At 80 she is still reasonably healthy, but frankly her healthfulness is diminishing; it’s unclear how quickly little issues will become big issues and (one day) fatal issues. I cannot comment about that, but I’ve noticed just how stressful the financial aspects of health care can be for her. The bills are inscrutable, the sticker prices are ridiculous, and it’s time-consuming to get a question answered. A visit to the doctor or hospital can spell financial ruin. And she’s not really experiencing any serious medical problems! I’ve long been an advocate for health care reform for financial reasons, but practically speaking it would reduce stress levels and the energy one has to expend just to understand the financial responsibilties.
In addition to having children and grandchildren, it helps to be rich because it makes it easier to accumulate a retinue of assistants and recipients of your charity. People active in the church probably are going to have good funerals as well (in a way that morticians and funeral parlor directors are going to make their final farewells tasteful and appropriate). Religious people are already aware of the importance of ritual and future salvation.
Helping professions often get good send offs. Doctors, teachers, social workers, nurses. These are tough professions to have during their time on earth. Grateful recipients of their care will be in heavy attendance. It also helps if your peers and cohorts are still alive. People under 30 will almost always get a good sendoffs — if only to console parents and siblings. A funeral for people of that age is an acknowledgement of the enormous potential never realized. A 20 year old dead from an auto accident or cancer will cause people to wonder what the person would have made of their lives if it were allowed to continue a few more decades.
Many an old person finds that a majority of his friends are no longer alive — many are randomly scattered across the country. When you get over 50, even if you feel relatively young and healthy, depending on your job situation and social life, you can spend a lot of time around people significantly younger than yourself. You end up wondering, Is this anecdote I’m going to tell about X going to resonate with this younger person? Or will it simply call attention to the age gap and reveal my different perspectives and priorities? You learn to omit discussing your past — on your resume, dating profile and cocktail party conversations; instead you focus relentlessly on the latest TV shows and music. The hard lessons you learned in your 20s or the overseas travel you took to Africa several decades ago might have been meaningful to you, but it may not be relevant or interesting to someone in their twenties now.
I mentioned before that single people don’t make out particularly well at funerals. Poor people too, but these two groups can overlap. I read somewhere that on average a single person in USA has a shorter lifespan than a married person. (The statistic has been disputed somewhat). From my youth I assumed that I would always get married and have kids, but things didn’t turn out that way, and I’m fine with it. I just can’t figure out how single people manage death and dying. I am mainly talking about finances; perhaps single people retire with more assets to help them than married people do, but that definitely won’t be true for me.
Poor people often have a wide circle of friends and family to help out during critical times. Frankly though people have become more relaxed about funerals, calling them “celebrations” and scheduling them like ….whenever. I like that. There’s no longer any urgency about a funeral or cremation. My friend Jay died and then had a celebration of his life months later. That allowed friends to fit it in their schedule so more people could attend. It turned out to be a very memorable occasion. Sure, we were all bummed out that Jay had left us so early, but we had already had time to process our grief and frankly, everyone was up for a little party. (Jay was a wild character too with many friends, so it made for a very good mix of people).
The obvious thing is that if you are dead, the self or soul that is you is completely indifferent to what happens afterwards. The you who lives in the current moment cares a lot more about your legacy than the mass of decaying cells (or its burnt remnants).
I remain hopeful that during my lifetime it will be possible to transplant my memories into a machine. But who knows? Maybe the best I could hope for is a chatbot whose speech/language patterns resemble my own. Then again, I’m a writer, so it’s not hard to make such a thing. Most people don’t write all that much, so the best one might hope for is an avatar made of a composite of photos, videos and audio.
I remember an episode from the TV show Cheers where someone announces the death of someone and the people in the bar give a cheer. Apparently there was a stipulation in someone’s will that the last surviving relative would inherit some massive amount of cash, and one by one the relatives were dying off, leaving only two people remaining. I found that amusing and actually thought it would be a good idea to have some kind of door prize for any funeral or life celebration. Doesn’t need to be as crass as cash, but maybe some heirloom with more than merely sentimental value. I’ve read that much of what people leave behind is worth significantly less than it was when purchased — even rare items like jewelry and furniture. Sometimes an item may hold the potential to be sold as an antique, but most of the time, it is too much trouble to locate a buyer willing to pay a fair price. Speaking only of books, I haven’t tried to collect rare or valuable books, but my collection is pretty great, and there’s a fair number of semi-rare books that I’ve gathered over the decades. Still, my family has no love for the books or even an appreciation of its economic value. Indeed, later generations find books less relevant, just bulky souvenirs from a time when almost nothing was digital. I fully accept that my books will be disposed of in as painless way as possible. What else do I own — TV, computer equipment, a phone, a digital music collection? Perhaps those would be suitable doorprizes for any funeral — and an incentive for people to show up at least.
Other events might be scheduled to make the evening special.
Of course, there will be no gravestone, but a symbolic gravestone might be set up in a remote area of a field somewhere so anyone (but presumably male) who wanted to could piss on it (one at a time, for the sake of privacy).
Perhaps two funeral separate funerals could be held — one for people whom I didn’t particularly like. This alternate funeral could feature things that I despised or drove me crazy. People could watch the football game together, or eat hamburgers from an overpriced restaurant, drink Starbucks coffee or sing karaoke or make videos for social media. Lots of alcohol could be served and a Trump imitator could be invited to talk about how great a person he (meaning Trump) really is. Perhaps everyone could get together and do housework or mow the lawn in the blistering heat. Perhaps everyone could visit the gas station to fill their tanks with gas (assuming that those things are still around). There will be a reading of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and perhaps even the Bible. The event would end with a marathon playing of the card game Uno (I feel certain that the devil himself will insist that all of hell’s inhabitants play this game nonstop).
A certain tasteful ceremony of remembrance will be scheduled for ex-girlfriends and those who regretted never becoming romantically involved with me. They should be able to pose with a life-sized cutout of me, perhaps making lewd gestures or mock kisses. At the end all attendees should be presented with a certificate (signed by me) thanking them for their affections and offering my heart to them for an eternity. This certificate should be written in a way to avoid having to specify the name of the woman, and yet despite tinges of light-heartedness and silliness should have no hint of satire or mockery (but be totally sincere).
A trivia contest will be held to test their knowledge of my life and tastes in TV shows, food, books and music. The winner should receive a check (signed by me) for 10 billion dollars.
A reading of the will be scheduled, but with imaginary poetic assets instead of actual ones. (“My literary license which has provided endless hours of entertainment will go to X;”). It would only be appropriate to conclude with a showing of the Saturday Night Live sketch called Betty Davis Video Will starring Bette Davis’ (Jan Hooks) family watches the long, rambling video will she created before her death. [SNL Season 14, 1989]
A 3 mile bike ride will be scheduled at a cool part of the day to visit the local library (or its current equivalent). Afterwards, there would be a pool party at a nearby swimming pool, with watermelon, veggie burgers, Diet Coke.
The evening part of the ceremony will feature the showing of several comedy movies I enjoyed: My Cousin Vinny, Hear My Song, Daytrippers, Breaking Away, Life of Brian, Les Comperes, Withnail and I, Stranger than Paradise, Clueless and Talladega Nights.
20 years after this party, there will be an academic symposium to discuss my books and perhaps my influence on future generations. Big announcements will be made in publications and social media, and venue space will be rented — a ballroom at a fancy hotel for instance, with catering and break out rooms. Then, when nobody actually shows up, the local homeless shelters will be notified, letting people without means have a nice catered meal and a nice air-conditioned room to relax (for the day at least). And maybe rewatch My Cousin Vinny ….
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Postscript: As of May 2026, for my “death playlist” I have created a Spotify playlist containing 460 tracks, totaling 32 1/2 hours. To tell the truth, this list contains mostly pop songs. I still haven’t added classical music or jazz to it. These songs are very personal to me; I doubt that others will enjoy them half as much as I did.
(About my uncle who passed away earlier this year).
Boy, Uncle Thomas was the world’s greatest uncle!
While growing up in Houston, Texas, I didn’t get to see him except on special occasions. Uncle Thomas was good about visiting our family in Houston, but it’s hard (and expensive!) to keep in touch over such long distances. While I was growing up, my dad told me stories about Thomas and Ginnie and Eileen; it was clear that my dad and Thomas had a deep and caring relationship and had been through a lot together. As someone who grew up as the oldest among 4 kids, I guess I can appreciate the everchanging dynamics of a household with 4 children. To borrow an image from my dad’s imagination, I could imagine all four Nagle siblings on opposite corners of a boxing ring at Madison Square Garden. At the bell, Aunt Ginnie rushes forward to get the first punch but ends up tripping over her feet; Aunt Eileen resolutely stays in her corner to protest the rules; My dad comes out “dancing like a butterfly’ but fakes being knocked out in order to win a bet, and Uncle Thomas tries valiantly to play referee and convince everyone to end the fight until Ginnie swings a wild punch at him and brings him down good. Now that’s an event I’d pay good money to see.
As luck would have it, I ended up visiting New York a lot during the 90s. For the first two times, it was for work-related reasons, but later I took multiple trips overseas and made it a point to stay an extra 2 days or so in NY so I could visit Uncle Thomas and Aunt Eileen.
Uncle Thomas, me on Uncle Bill’s boat on Long Island (Uncle Bill is in the back). 1998
The first trip was in 1993. I had no idea what to expect, but Uncle Thomas met me at the train stop and went out of his way to take me around town. We did the usual touristy stuff — visiting the Cloisters, the Brooklyn Zoo and the Empire State Building and taking the ferry around the island (I’m sure that was not the first time for him!). Thomas also made sure to show me the neighborhood where he and my dad grew up and other important landmarks. We visited St Patrick’s Cathedral (where my dad proposed to my mom, for example). Thomas talked about their youthful summers and Uncle Curley and the practical jokes the kids played on one another. Of course, my dad had told stories with the same cast of characters, but Uncle Thomas had different stories and a memory which seemed inexhaustible.
Surprisingly, I learned from him that my grandfather was an excellent cook. In contrast my dad could hardly cook anything except steak and hamburgers — Uncle Thomas never seemed to cook either; he struck me as the type who would rather invite invite someone over for sandwiches or have seafood at a nearby restaurant. But I was certainly a good cook, and my brother Tommy was an outstanding cook, so this led me to speculate that the Nagle cooking gene must always skip a generation in the males.
Donald Nagle (my dad) and Thomas Nagle, San Antonio, TX, 2005
Both my dad and Uncle Thomas were great at telling stories, but their styles couldn’t have been different. My dad liked to be outrageous and embellish at the edges –anything for a laugh. Uncle Thomas told stories earnestly and almost as if he were under oath. At the same time, Thomas always felt compelled to tell everybody’s backstory, causing some of the stories to go on and on. But I never minded. My dad talked about wacko clients from his law practice, while Thomas talked about crazy things which King Kullen workers were trying to pull behind management’s back. Thomas’s stories were funny too, but there would usually be an insight or lesson at the end.
Like Uncle Thomas I spent a lot of time at supermarkets. Having worked as a supermarket cashier for seven years during school, I regarded supermarkets as familiar territory. Every time Thomas visited Houston, he made sure to visit the same supermarket I worked at — partly for professional reasons, but also just to walk around and talk with people and find out how people did things in Texas. For some reason, I’ve shared this fascination with supermarkets and often thought that you can tell a lot about a society by what goes on inside its supermarkets. When I travel anywhere, I always enjoy visiting the local supermarkets to get a feel for what the people were like. I’m sure Thomas would approve.
Before I started visiting New York, dad and Uncle Thomas once visited me in Baltimore for graduation ceremonies. That was 1989. I was never really into sports, but that year my school (Johns Hopkins) had a phenomenal men’s lacrosse team. I suggested that we go see the finals (which was in College Park, Maryland, about an hour away). Dad and I took one car, while Uncle Thomas tagged along in his rental car. This was in the days before cell phones and GPS; as luck would have it, I took a wrong turn on the freeway, and it took about 45 minutes to recover from that mistake (mainly because we had to make sure that Uncle Thomas was following us when we retraced our steps). As a result, the rest of the ride was hellish. Dad was furious and berated me nonstop for not paying attention to road signs. For dad, being late to a sporting event was like being late to church. But once we arrived at the stadium, I remember Uncle Thomas’ expression; he was actually chuckling at my dad for giving me such a hard time over something so trivial. There is no more welcome sight to a young man being yelled at by his dad than the eyes of a sympathetic uncle.
(By the way, the lacrosse finals were great. My school’s team won, and we all had a great time).
One of the more memorable NY visits came when I returned from Peace Corps in 1997. My country Albania had actually experienced a kind of civil war, and so all the volunteers had to return home in a rush. When Uncle Thomas met me at the airport, I was still in shock. I had lost most of my belongings and barely had more than the clothes on my back. After that misadventure, Uncle Thomas was literally the first recognizable face I saw in the United States. The first thing he did was bring me to a department store to buy me socks and underwear and maybe an extra shirt. “Just go ahead,” he said, “Buy anything you want.” Later he brought me to an Italian restaurant for a sumptuous dinner. It was so surreal. One day I was living in a country threatened by anarchy and civil war; the next I was wearing awesome American underwear and eating delicious fettuccine with my fantastic uncle. At such a moment, I felt on top of the world.
During this and subsequent visits, Uncle Thomas and I did other touristy things. We visited a Dr. Seuss art exhibit, saw a great Broadway musical, did dim sum in Chinatown and visited the TV & Radio museum. All great and fun things. But what insanity! For an out-of-towner it seemed incredibly stressful and expensive. The signs, the traffic, the noise! Perhaps these things might be less likely to bother a native New Yorker, but Uncle Thomas had a knack for going with the flow — refusing to be bothered by $12 an hour parking or waiters who took forever to bring your sodas or traffic lanes which inexplicably closed.
Even though I was born in New York and my spent half his life there, ironically all of my New York memories were spent with Uncle Thomas rather than my dad. Perhaps it would have been better to visit New York with my own dad; my dad would have shown me all his personal landmarks, as well as any important place which had importance in baseball or boxing history. But as we all know, my dad moved to Texas, while Uncle Thomas stayed put. One Nagle brother wanted a change of scenery (and profession), so he moved to a place where Yankees were vilified. Don’t get me wrong, Dad was a proud Yankee — he never touched a jalapeno or went to a rodeo of his own free will. But Uncle Thomas became for me a symbol of a man who was content to stay in one geographic area and soak up its rich history and culture. Uncle Thomas certainly loved to go places — and it’s good he had multiple opportunities to do so over his many years. Certainly having children …. and grandchildren … gave him plenty of excuses. But I always got the sense that Uncle Thomas was perfectly happy retiring in the same place he grew up in, close to his family, surrounded by great sports teams, phenomenal bagels and supermarket chains which almost seemed like home.
Mildred Nagle (grandma) with her two boys Donald and Thomas, 1934-5?
Teresa and Donald Nagle, Bill Farrell and Eileen (Nagle) Farrell, Thomas Nagle, 2005. San Antonio
GUILDERLAND – The family of Thomas F. Nagle issued the following information following his passing on January 31, 2014. As a business executive and community leader, Nagle’s work touched the lives of many and his contributions left a positive mark.
Thomas F. Nagle was born in Brooklyn in 1928, raised in Jamaica, Queens and spent most of his life in Hicksville, until he moved to Guilderland in October 2012. He graduated from Fordham University with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1951. Nagle enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1950, was drafted in 1952 and completed his training on Parris Island, distinguishing himself as an Expert Marksman. He served in Nara, Japan during the Korean War. Nagle moved to a Levitt home on Blueberry Lane, Hicksville with his wife and infant daughter in December 1954. Nagle welcomed four more children, two girls and two boys, later becoming a grandfather nine times and a great-grandfather twice. He was a leader in the community. His life ended on January 31 in Guilderland, New York at age 85. He was preceded by his parents Thomas W. E. and Mildred, his brother Donald and sister Virginia. He leaves behind his sister Eileen Farrell (William) and sister-in-law, Terry Nagle, five children:Norine Nagle (Kerry Johnson) Roberta Spinosa (Dan), Ellen Hughes (James), Steve Nagle, Michael Nagle (Diane); nine grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews and their children.
Nagle had polio as a child and was not expected to live, but in typical fashion, he beat the odds and his slightly weaker leg never slowed him down. He competed on organized football and bowling teams, and was always up for a pick-up game of basketball. Even after he stopped playing sports, he continued as a fan. He would bring his children and grandkids to Mets games, and despite their dismal history, he remained a fan. Watching a game with him at home made you feel like you were at the ballpark cheering the Mets, and learned about his insights on the players.
Nagle worked in supermarkets. He started as a store manager for First National Stores (Finast) in 1956 and worked his way up to Director of Labor Relations in the late 1960s. He eventually left Finast to return to King Kullen Supermarkets, in 1979 as Director of Personnel and Labor Relations. King Kullen was where he had his first job at 16 that had continued through his college years. He retired in 2004 and continued to consult and advise for a few more years.
Nagle remained committed to giving back to his community. He was first elected to the Hicksville School Board in 1968 and served for two decades in various capacities until the mid-1980s. In 1969, he helped found H.A.D. – Help-Aid-Direction, Inc. – a program committed to educating Hicksville residents about drug abuse and helping those with problems. He was an active member of Holy Family Church (Hicksville) where he volunteered as a church usher, lector, and member of the booster club. Within the church, Nagle was involved with the Nocturnal Adoration Society, Legion of Mary, and Holy Name Society. He was also a member of the Holy Family School Board.
A phrase you could always hear him say was, “You meet the same people on your way down that you meet on your way up.” It was truly the phrase which defined his life. He treated others with respect and dignity no matter their walk in life, and looked for ways to quietly help others. He never wanted accolades, and worked to make the lives of others better, a true reflection of the Jesuit values he held. Without a doubt, Nagle’s kindness, generosity, and hard work left a mark on the world. He will be dearly missed by his family, friends, and neighbors.
A lot is going on at the moment in my life (and plus there’s a lot of half-finished pieces lying around). I need to find a job pretty quickly, so that’s on my front burner now. I post fairly frequently on my Google Plus account –— which I’m not particularly enthusiastic about, but certainly like better than Facebook (here’s why).
More: I’ve had a pretty good correspondence with Jack Matthews over the four years I knew him. We definitely were on the same wavelength about lots of things. I am not sure, but there’s a good chance that I might have received the last email ever written by Jack Matthews (I had asked him to write me a brief reference for me — which he did). (Update: After talking with his daughter, I have learned that it was certainly not the LAST but one of his last). His mind was still sharp, but he fatigued quickly, and emails are such effort (for me as well as him).
Here’s a late-night email I sent him last April. The first paragraph is an excerpt from his book Collecting Rare Books for Pleasure and Profit. It’s a quirky and interesting book with lots of fun parts, although his essay collections which he published in the 1980s are much more important.
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Sunday, April 07, 2013 1:05 AM
Dear Jack,
It is a similar silliness to pretend that buying books “as an investment” is incompatible with scholarship or the true love of literature; Quite the contrary; it is the man who divides his love of literature from the material life who is the true heretic, using only the public library or the niggardly functional paperback for the leavening of his sensibility, and investing his money in Ford Motor Company and AT&T stock. What a dreary divarication is this, and how schizoid and truly mercenary is the man who plays such a nasty game against himself! To invest in books does not imply that the collector intends to sell them; he merely buys them with the conviction that his taste in honoring them will be validated by posterity and that – with effort and know-how comparable to those of other investors – this validation will have a dimension of financial profit. The investment aspect of collecting is utterly fascinating, for it carries with it the excitement of competition in skill, expertise and taste. Often, too, there is the added excitement of the chase, in the auction room, the book fair and in the “field,” tracking down literary manuscripts, letters or rare titles. (CRBFPAP, p 6-77)
A really fun passage. Even though I quoted it before in one of my essays, I just now enjoyed the language and style of it (“true heretic””AT&T stock” “leavening of his sensibility”, “divarication” etc. ). It is one of the sad ironies of time that it takes so long while for even diehard fans to catch up with enjoying the subtle artistry’s of another author’s language — to say nothing of scholars and general readers. I pick this passage for no particular reason, merely to remind myself that long after you have bitten the dust, I (and hopefully others) will be admiring (and chuckling over) oodles of similar and yet-to-be-discovered passages, but be unable to send these trivial late-night notes of appreciation to the living- and-breathing composer of them.
That, I guess, comprises the silly comedy of the writer’s profession……
It just so happens that I met Aaron once. The meeting was short and trivial, certainly no big deal. I was at Bruce Sterling’s End of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive party, talking to random people. I think it was 2005 (or maybe 2004). I had been using a cocktail party question that year, “What’s your passion?” (or maybe it was “what’s your thing?”, I can’t remember).
At parties like this I pretty much end up talking to everybody for at least 3 minutes; I even ended up talking to Cory Doctorow – who, hilariously enough, had laryngitis! I was vaguely aware of the people who attend SXSW (who’s a blogger, who’s a coder, who’s a designer, who’s a business person, etc). I certainly knew who Mr. Swartz was; he was the guy who invented RSS feeds, python guy, attending Stanford and helping Larry Lessig with various creative commons/political projects.
He also seemed horribly out of place there. Now SXSW can generally be intimidating, and half the people there are socially dysfunctional, so there is no shame in being a wallflower. When you’re 18 or 19 (as Mr. Swartz was), you tend to be uncomfortable and resort to your geek persona (whether it be coder, music collector, political junkie, literary snob, etc). Aaron wasn’t really socializing – perhaps he had merely run out of steam or was tired. Who knows? So I swept in, introduced myself and asked him my cocktail party question.
In response to this kind of question, most people would hem and haw and then say something off the wall. I didn’t care what kind of reply you gave; I just needed something to start the conversation. But with Aaron, after I asked the question, he just fell into silence. Clearly he was flummoxed; it was a combination of believing that the question was childish and thinking that it was hard to boil his passions down to a single statement. I started talking a bit, and then after a minute or so, he gave a reply that was abstract, but inelegant. Something like, “My passion is emergent technology and how to harness it for businesses and organizations.”
That sounded good enough to me (“emergent technology” was the buzz phrase of the conference, and I remember thinking that it wasn’t particularly original, although coding geniuses were never really known for being profound or eloquent). After that, the conversation just dwindled away; I tried to ask him some more questions, but he didn’t want to continue; maybe he didn’t like small talk, or perhaps wanted to talk to the girl next to him. No biggie, some people are like that. Besides, he was the youngest person in the room (and he looked REALLY young), so he gets a pass.
Aaron was adopted by the copyright reform group, and he soon found himself working with various projects highly visible in the geek world. He was also a moderately interesting blogger who was on the cutting edge of web technologies. And then what happened?
He dropped out of school to work for various Internet companies. He went into political activism (which I’ll be blunt – doesn’t come naturally for most geeks). There comes that point where every wunderkind has to manage and survive and accept that his personal world has limits. That’s called “learning about the real world.” Before it happens and you have settled into some comfortable bit of manageable mediocrity, it’s easy to get into trouble. It’s easy to do fun and stupid things (Yes, I had that phase once upon a time too).
Some might call it a “fall from grace.” I would not be so melodramatic, but simply describe it as adapting to one’s circumstances. But maintaining a full time job just doesn’t sound as cool as the things one did at the university. The youthful world of hacking and breaking a few rules no longer attracted attention. Even your peers (if they even knew who you were) regarded you as “old hat”. Suddenly getting a salary and maintaining a full time job seemed uninteresting and pointless and also very hard.
Also, there were the legal problems. Aaron tried some wacky trick of downloading zillions of academic articles from a site behind a paywall. It’s the kind of thing you know you shouldn’t do, but the challenge of doing so plus the certainty that professors don’t REALLY want their articles behind a paywall only encourages you to do it. One thing ingrained in programmers is looking for ways to circumvent the system, and that’s what he did. And succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
As it happens, the journal database and DA wanted to throw the book at him. Aaron was in a heap of trouble. Surely, it’s likely that this thing would have been plea bargained to community service at some point, but the process can be grueling and demeaning. In a way, his infraction would command respect and awe; at the same time some of his friends might say he had gone over the deep end, and people who did not know him would automatically assume the worst. Things like filling out job applications and applying for credit cards and renting an apartment would require a complete disclosure. Suddenly you have a past that you ought to be embarrassed about.
I honestly have no idea what drive him to the edge. It’s likely that the charges aggravated his state of mind – though if he had reasonably good coping skills, he would have been able to deal with it. Idealists tend to lose in a big and grandiose way.
The tragedy of his life is that he lacked perspective. He was a brilliant programmer who had received lots of breaks early in life. He could learn new technologies effortlessly and was eminently employable. He had lots of friends in big places and an overall good reputation. I tend to doubt that the charges drove him to suicide (although it must have convinced him of the utter absurdity of this world). Perhaps his lack of perspective came in part from being a victim of his early successes and being trapped by his own high expectations.
This case reminds me somewhat of the death of author Daniel Foster Wallace. A philosophical postmodernist author with a generally good reputation and slightly older than myself. I was not in love with this author (I found his prose style ponderous), but I had read selected things he wrote and found them great. This guy was manic-depressive, but at the same time had managed to win lots of awards. He had also gotten published, made some good money and found some tenure track jobs (which are practically impossible to find in the humanities, much less creative writing). A few years before his death, Wallace gave a pretty wild commencement address, and let me quote a significant part:
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
I’ll give Mr. Wallace the benefit of the doubt and say that he was exaggerating the horrors of mundane life to make a point to his audience (as inappropriate as it was for a commencement address). But I couldn’t help but be struck by the contrast between his academic success and his sense of suburban anomie.
Mr. Wallace, did you realize that many people are homeless? Many are out-of-work. Many have to struggle just to make ends meet. Many don’t have health insurance or even the ability to seek treatment for psychological disorders. Even among writers, many would kill for the opportunities Mr. Wallace received. Many lone geniuses struggle with making ends meet and winning a modicum of respect in an indifferent or absurd world.
Both Mr. Swartz and Mr. Wallace were sick and probably lonely people. But both still had the intellectual potential and social resources to make a rich and fulfilling life. They had talent and good physical health, and yet they threw it all away for a runaway feeling. What a loss! And what a waste!
Perhaps genius does not recognize or accept the urgent necessity of coping with disappointment. Ordinary people have to deal with disappointment all the time. It does not have to strike a mortal blow unless you are willing to realign your view of what you need to do to remain a part of it.
Postscript. I remain amazed at how much media coverage this person’s suicide has received (CNN, PBS, NYTimes, Slashdot, etc). Granted, there was politics involved, and the crowd Aaron hung around with were tech-savvy and media-savvy. I find it interesting how many people have focused on the criminal charges and not on the aspect of personal tragedy. The question should not be: “Why did the DA’s decision to press charges cause this person’s suicide?” but “Why did this well-liked and multi-talented individual decide — after getting a bum rap — that there was nothing else to live for?” This is one live lost, but he is hardly the only person lost in this manner and hardly the most significant. I have always felt that you don’t need to be a genius to have your voluntary exit from life be mourned by all.
Postscript 2 (2019). About two years ago I wrote a much longer version of this blogpost (like, 3 or 4 times as long) which I will publish eventually in full form. I just wanted to point out that when I wrote this in early 2013, I was really hurting financially and in a pit of poverty that would bring anyone into despair. Things only become worse as the year went on. 2013 was absolutely hellish. That partly explains my anger — yes anger — I felt about these two brilliant people who had so many gifts and privileges giving up so easily. Aren’t humans made of sterner stuff (even when we are grinding our teeth in despair)?
Postscript 3 (Feb 2024). Just remembered that I never finished this blog post (11 years later!). Ha, ha, ha; I even had trouble remembering how to find this blogpost. I did a substantial rewrite in 2016-2017, and I’ll probably put finishing touches on it by the time it appears in my 2025 essay collection (titled Noncrappy Things from my Blog)
My father died on the morning of Tuesday May 4,2010. He lived a very happy life. (More photos and information about the funeral will be under the fold. (It may take a while for all the photos to load).
While America grapples with the death of actress Brittany Murphy, I am grappling with the death of the cartoon character she played in King of the Hill: Luanne Platter. The wikipedia description of her character is a laugh riot. Just the mention of the idiotic “Manger Babies” makes me laugh. Initially the character annoyed me, but her obtuseness grows on you…especially because you know how much she needs other people to protect her.
More seriously, Brittany Murphy made a splash in Clueless (and was a perfect foil for Alicia Silverstone). Her role as the lead female in 8 Mile was compelling too. She is utterly charming and radiant in her 2008 interview with David Letterman. She has a childish inarticulateness that is charming and hilarious.
