Another victim of 2016 · 4:49am Nov 27th, 2016
No, not Castro. Wish I'd got this out before then, actually.
No, this week, we lost Scott Eric Kaufman, better known as SEK: a great member of the blogosphere, one of the men who helped to legitimize it as a forum academics could participate in, and someone whose life attracted weird shit at every turn.
I can't hope to eulogize him in the way so many others have; I was never anything but a reader, to my knowledge, not even a commenter on anything he ever wrote, much less a colleague or fellow-traveler. But there are enough of those, from his recent employer, Salon, to Inside Higher Education covering his defense of blogging as a legitimate pursuit, to his cobloggers at Lawyers Guns & Money.
What lives on his his work, including notably his longstanding discourse of visual rhetoric* (I particularly recommend his posts on Watchmen). Sadly, there's little that I remember that is directly relevant to this venue's focus; much as I love words on a page, and as well as SEK did them, I don't recall as many cases of him writing about them. If nothing else, I can repost his words on some dialog from Deadwood, and the poetry of the word "cocksucker."
You deserved better, and may you rest in peace. And if there's a heaven, I hope you don't find your room occupied by undergrads unhappy to be interrupted while trying to have sex. Or St. Peter telling you of a false, weirdly incomprehensible accusation of racism from a member of the KKK, belief you're a drug dealer because you were getting cat food from your car at 4AM, a gang-banger because of your hat, staring at women's breasts because you were looking at their lips while they were talking because you were deaf . . .
Or, maybe, given you took it upon yourself to find the chances for life to be absurd and make the most of them, maybe, it would all be for the best if that's what greeted you. If nothing else, it'd feel like home.
*Think shot composition and how it communicates information and tone in movies, TV, and comics, or how scene transitions affect the content.
[Edited to include the name of the deceased in the body of the post. Oops.]
It wasn't clear whom you were speaking of until I saw your hashtags at the bottom, to me.
4319701
Thanks. That was kind of a severe oversight on my part: I had it as part of a joke in a subtitle, but removed it after deciding it wasn't as funny as I thought at first. Didn't remember to replace the informative content, though.