Damn.
Steve Gillard died five years ago today and the medium he mastered has changed so much in the last five years that it really isn't the same animal anymore.
The aggregators arrived in force and on horseback. Eyeball-bundling entrepreneurs moved in. And every news outlet that wasn't picked clean and sold off by vultures sprouted whole mushroom-farms of in-house J-school bloggers and social networkians with minors in SEO and upcool, or repurposed legacy product (now allowed to grow their hair a tad beatnikier) or they just bought their Google-street-cred off-the-shelf.
Poke through Gilliard's old archives -- past the vanished videos and broken graphics -- and you will find Bill Kristol's firebreathing demands for more Americans-other-than-Bill-Kristol-or-anyone-Bill-Kristol-knows to be fed into his Neocon meatgrinder war (and Juan Williams sitting right next to him fawning and pleading with his buddy Bill to be nice) but you won't find the word "Facebook".
You'll find snapshots of the pasty, nocturnally-feeding Frank Luntz slithering between commas and semicolons trying to find just the right word to make you vote to slit your own economic throat, but there is no "Twitter".
Five years ago I was living a very different life; one with a good job doing important work that provided me with extravagant baubles like "health insurance" and enough of an income to pay my bills, sock a little away and still hit Steve's tip jar hard on a regular basis. All of that is gone now, but I am not particularly nostalgic for those days -- not for the "things" of those days anyhow.
I do, however, very much miss some of the esprit of those times: the sinewy vitality, the urgent presence of shared peril and a sense of intelligent, passionate, focused purpose of those days. Which is why I am nostalgic for the muscular writing of Steve Gilliard: it was the crisp, clear fife and drum of our battles.
His archives sit silent as a digital crypt, vast and unmoving, undisturbed now by any except the few of us who still stop by to read and ruminate, and a few data-gathering algorithms trying to figure out what the Hell a "Fitzmas" was. Some people made a great show of doing a book -- maybe many books -- but that did not materialized because those things never do. There was a grand multimedia site launched with a flotilla of writers that fizzed along for awhile, then died, then relaunched sort of, then died again.
In the busy marketplace, very little writing lasts beyond an author's (or executor's) ability to publicly and persistently beat a drum on its behalf.
This is the way of things, but it still grinds my gears that the world's libraries contain so many shitty books by Tom Friedman and not a single, slim volume containing a selection of the collected works of Mr. Steve Gilliard.
21 comments:
Me.
I miss a lot about the greatest five-tooled blogger of all time.
But most of all, I miss all those beer can chicken recipes.
And, of course, the stories that were layered around them.
.
Thanks for this. I was a big fan of Steve's and it's important to keep his memory alive. He was a brilliant, no-bullshit fighter, who inspired me in the dark post 11/04 days.
He's a "spiritual ancestor" for bloggers with sites like yours and mere Kos diaries such as me.
-- Upper West
Gilliard was the single best blogger there was, or at least that I've ever read. I base the claim on the fact that he more than anyone else wrote appropriately for the form, i.e., for the blog as a blog, rather than a cheap way to publish prose better suited to print media or, conversely, as a cheap way to use others' prose to recycle content.
When Gilliard died, there was talk about collecting his work into book form, and this has not happened. I wanted very much to read his book, but the truth is that he didn't write one. I go back occasionally to re-read his work, and it is, word for word, mostly quoted text. This probably is the reason that it hasn't been anthologized.
The last time I went back to his site, I thought of Walter Benjamin's pet idea to have a work made up entirely of quoted material, the originality of it lying in the choice and sequence of the material. My memory of the blog was of Gilliard's own writing, because his insight was so clear and his indignation so righteous and humorous at the same time.
This is why he was the best. The blog as form functions best in quick responses to stimuli, in Gilliard's case, news stories. Large quotes interspersed with brief interpretations allow that flow to flow quickly. This is what he did, yet my memory is entirely of his own words and personality.
Best. Blogger. Ever.
Fuck the fucking Yankees.
Many years from now when you log onto the Internet using one of many fine Internet Access services (available from media corporations everywhere), I'm sure there will be many poignant essays on the hay days of the Internet, and we will finally learn that Steve Gilliard was a closeted champion for Wall Street. Pictures will surface of Steve at a Yankees game, and President George P. "The Brown One" Bush will steal quotes from The News Blog in support of our invasion of Gaza.
But in some dark corner of the internet, the truth will endure and Steve's real legacy will live on.
Just because we've never won a round doesn't mean we should stop fighting. Steve Gilliard always answered his emails, and was always encouraging to us lesser bloggers. But mostly, he spoke truth (with footnotes) to power.
I only became aware of Gilliard after his death, but it says something about him and his output that, while most blog posts have about the same shelf-life as fresh fish, his archives are still great reading. I heartily recommend spending some time there.
Dg,
I'm volunteering as an editor if you want to try to publish the book.
We can go the route of asking permission to publish the quotes, paraphrasing the ones that can't be quoted in full.
Don't let this effort die.
Love your work! (Hi, Fran!)
S
I can't help but think that right now Steve is sitting somewhere in some higher realm torn between relief that he no longer has to deal with this nasty plane of existence and feeling badly for those of his family and readers who still do. Scoff if you must at my intuitive sense that such realms exist and await us, but it's one of the few things that keeps me from succumbing totally to gloomy piss-and-vinegar.
I do, however, very much miss some of the esprit of those times: the sinewy vitality, the urgent presence of shared peril and a sense of intelligent, passionate, focused purpose of those days.
What's changed, beyond the digital marketplace, is that the country managed to overcome Karl Rove's dream of permanent Republican majority. Thanks to the elections of 2006 and 2008.
And now we have a Democratic president blowing foreign kids in the "war on terror", persecuting whistle-blowers and journalists, spying on all of us, and protecting the banksters.
The peril remains, but the shared sense of what to do about it is a casualty.
~
He didn't have to write books. He made us better writers and better thinkers. When we think clearly and write well, we pay him the best tribute we can offer.
Thank you for this. I'm one of those people who visit his archives; five years after his death I still have some of his phrases rattling around in my head. There are so many times when I wish I could click on that site and read Steve Gilliard commenting on the latest ghastliness in our media, our politics, our so-called national priorities. I never met him, I never even commented at his site. But I miss him terribly; and when I meet up with certain other bloggers, we drink to his memory, and always will.
He was a genius. One of my regrets is that I didn't stumble into the blogosphere until after he had died.
Steve's "Fighting Liberal" post is copied and saved onto my hard drive and I have forwarded it on over the years. More importantly, its been reread many times, particularly in down times (2010 elections in Wisconsin -losing Feingold and getting Walker stand out).
I can't remember how I got to the News Blog -Fucked Company maybe, I don't know. Or even when, maybe 2004 just before the election. I remember landing in the middle of a history lesson (over many posts) about Europe and Iraq/Tunisia/colonialism. It wasn't just that Steve knew his history, but how he made an argument and pointed out lessons that should have been learned. And made me laugh out loud, try beer chicken (failure) and buy an expensive rice cooker (cherished to this day).
From the News Blog, I got hooked on the Whiskey Bar, and found DailyKos and Driftglass.
Drifty, you'll always be a reminder to me of Steve Gilliard. You do his legacy proud.
Thank you for remembering Steve. He was the primary reason I began reading blogs. His illness and death were as if I was losing a family member or a childhood friend.
Your personal salute is deeply appreciated.
Thank you from me, too.
I can't believe it has been five years.
I wish I had accomplished something so I could say out loud, to Steven's memory, "See? At least we've got...." but sadly, things are not as or where I intended, back when I had the energy to intend for things to be a certain way, and for me, and by extension my family and country, to be in a certain place.
I think they call it "running on fumes".
It has to get better; it just does. It is not lost on me that those phrases sound suspiciously cogs-against-wheel and nastily, victim-blamishly I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can-I-know-I-can-I-KNOW-I-Can.
And I'm still waiting for Fitzmas!
no need to approve this comment, just didn't have email handy.
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I didn't know of Steve before reading about him here, my condolences to those who did.
Spending a lot of time, commenting on the internet is hazardous to your health. Bloggers have a life expectancy of NFL linemen, so push away from the computer often, and press the flesh in the analogue world.
I stumbled onto Steve around late 2001 - early 2002 via The Smirking Chimp (ironically a very early aggregator of left-leaning articles), one of the sources of news and information I cottoned onto after the collective brainfart of the US electoral system that put Dubya in charge.
I knew nothing of the blogosphere at the time, but I did know that the contributors were by and large very intelligent and gifted writers (including E.J. Dionne and Matt Taibbi), but Steve's writing had a unique blend of intelligence, incisiveness and visceral anger that hooked me and before long I was mainlining from The News Blog at least once a day right up until he was taken ill.
His writing had a way of lighting a fire in the belly that I have never encountered elsewhere and the more I read and the more I learned about Steve the more I came to like and respect the guy. When we lost him I felt genuinely bereft and it was weird. In the aftermath I came to realise it wasn't weird at all, because here was a man who was loved and lionised by countless folks who he may not even have known by name - and not only was he a superb writer, but a genuinely gentle man.
To say he is missed is the understatement of the century.
Steve was awesome. You help keep his spirit alive every day.
I once wrote to Steve about Taibbi's being forced out of the NY Post (?). "Good," he replied (he always did BTW), "Now maybe he'll get e real job." LOL And his outline of European colonialism is something I revisit often.
I recall, in my imperfect mind, a podcast where you observed the 'evolution' of the blogesphere (from memory, but doubtless paraphrased): "I remember when Digby was a man and Steve Gilliard was white." What a long strange trip it's been... :-)
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