James Wolcott on Steve Gilliard

Where did that voice go? Not his literal voice, his voice in person or over the phone--he and I only met once. I mean his voice on the screen page, his blog voice, which was a fiery broadsword in its wrath and softly contemplative in its grief and understanding. Ben Yagoda wrote a superb book about literary voice called The Sound on the Page, and nobody made a more resonant sonic boom than Steve at his best, misspellings be damned. It's so hard to fathom that that voice is now gone. Like a lot of Steve's readers, I would wonder during his weeks in the ICU how he would have responded to this piece of news or that; how he would have jubilated in those Betty masks in the stands as A-Rod came to bat, or scoped out Moquada al-Sadr's latest maneuver--such was his range. Nobody but nobody was more prophetic about how the invasion of Iraq threw open the gates of hell than Steve--he got it right when nearly everyone in the mainstream press and the entire rightwing blogsphere got it so triumphantly wrong. Somewhere somehow that voice must still be out there but it's no longer for us to hear, which is why his friends and readers can only mourn and give thanks for what we once had and have now lost.