"Invisible Blogger" (Profile of Steve Gilliard in NYT)

[Cheney Killed Bambi]

A really touching tribute to Steve Gilliard in the NYT Magazine's "The Lives They Lived"

The sidewalks of Harlem’s main thoroughfares are wide and inviting, and in the 1960s the kids playing “boxball” shared the asphalt squares with some of the greatest orators in creation. The most famous spot for speechifying was the “Speakers’ Corner” outside Lewis Michaux’s bookstore on 125th Street, where Malcolm X delivered his lectures on race and politics. On weekends or after work, fathers took their boys down to the corners in Harlem to watch any number of would-be firebrands engaged in emotional debate over Vietnam or the state of race relations or Bobby Kennedy’s political future.

Steve Gilliard was born into this Harlem and took it all in, but he wouldn’t find his voice on the corners. He was quiet, bookish, overweight. He won entrance to an elite high school, where he passed his time reading obscure military histories, then studied history and journalism at New York University. He found his true calling, though, on the Internet. In 1998, when he was 34, Gilliard joined a new site called NetSlaves.com, whose blogger-reporters chronicled the misadventures of the new high-tech work force, and there he discovered his own kind of incendiary oration. It was by the dim light of a computer screen, rather than on the sunlit corners of Harlem, that Gilliard took to expertly excoriating the moneyed establishment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/magazine/30gilliard-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[Cheney Killed Bambi]

1. Kick

People should really read this, as Gilliard was truly one of the great bloggers.

[Donnachaidh]

2. I miss Steve

He was the best. Sorely missed.

[Cheney Killed Bambi]

3. One last kick

For Steve.

[Dudley_DUright]

4. Nice reaction by James Wolcott to the Gilliard Obit

<snip>

Of all the losses in 2007, Steve's death is the one that suspends lowest from the ceiling, pressing downward force. Other deaths were saddening--Norman Mailer's, Hilly Kristal's, Elizabeth Hardwick's--but they led full, productive lives and left complete inheritances of accomplishment. Steve was still a mind in motion, a power transmitter still extending his reach, and to be deprived of his voice is a neverending series of what ifs and what might have beens and what would Steve have said about this? A sense of incompletion will always nag, in part because no one has been able to fill the role he left behind and probably no one ever will--he left so much behind, but he took so much more with him.

more...

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2007/12/i-make-it-a-poi.html