September 9, 2004

Long Live Uppity Negro

This was first posted at c u l t u r e k i t c h e n: Long live Uppity Negro.

===============

My heart is heavy. Aaron Hawkin, editor and writer of Uppity-Negro.com has passed away. The details of how, where, why and when have not been posted yet, but his passing is already being felt throughout the blogosphere.

ALLABOUTGEORGE.com: Hiatus is such a strong word, pt. 2.

still spewing emotional vomit on a daily basis.

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Move the Crowd: R.I.P. Aaron, a.k.a. Uppity Negro

DebWire » R.I.P. Aaron

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Ursula's Not So Secret History: Good-bye My Blogging Friend

Negro, Please: Cold Blooded: Aaron, Me, & The PPG

On a path: What Needs To Be Said

ej flavors: damn, Aaron.

Prometheus 6 | Aaron

How do you react to a person's passing when you only knew them by their work? As I went out to smoke a cig and shed some tears, I explained to Napier, how it is different for me Aaron's passing, than the passing of a favorite book writer.

Some days pass without a post and you think, "oh, a lull" or "hmp! vacation? bitch". Other days, there's more than one post in a day, and it's like Christmas. Yes, checking NetNewsWire a couple of times a day for that, "Oh, there's a new post!" moment is Christmas. Each post in a blog is a gift to the world and Aaron was one of my favorite Magis. His was the gift of spice, bringing biting and laugh-out-loud wit to the news of the day.

Then there is the intimacy; even if it is the sometimes orchestrated sort of 'transparency'. You do get a sense, with every passing day, that you know the author better and better; that you and the blog writer are growing together. This is where blog and blog writers will always be different from their paper counterparts. Books, magazine & newspaper articles : they are all products. A blog is a living thing : An extension of their creator(s) voice. A good blog writer will have a 'voice' that'll reverberate within you.

I did not read Aaron for as long as others and I did not meet him personally. His style of posts was a joy to read. Go to his site and devour it all.

A Star. Fantastic. Satirist. Genial. Wit.

I hope Aaron's blog will be kept in perpetuity, as a monument to the man who wrote it and as an example of excellence to others.

May you rest in peace.
May you outwit forever in cyberspace.

Some links to the master:
Uppity-Negro.com: In Memoriam: Yes, there's a brief advertisement

Uppity-Negro.com: In Memoriam: I saw my baby, crying hard as babe could cry

Uppity-Negro.com: In Memoriam: I believe it would be an invaluable learning experience

Uppity-Negro.com: In Memoriam: Jury of One

Uppity-Negro.com: In Memoriam: Give me crack and anal sex

Uppity-Negro.com: In Memoriam: static, a whisper on another line

Uppity-Negro.com: In Memoriam: Say my name (I)

Posted by liza at September 9, 2004 8:11 PM

What a tragedy! Aaron was one of the most consistently witty and sharp bloggers out there.

Now I feel the need to know the details, but the fact of the matter is it's just a shock.

Posted by: xian at September 10, 2004 7:08 AM
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