Sad Writer’s Death

Eulogies Fly out the Window 

For a smart writer,
ipsodefenestration
is forever linked.

One rather long word
will be his life’s legacy?
That’s so indistinct.

Well, he might have had
a little sentence instead
which would be succinct.

UPDATE I:  see Matt Hayden’s “Peter Roebuck the latest ‘tortured artist’ to die tragically”, wherein I posted this comment:

Roebuck was a far better writer than most journalists—but that’s not saying much.  He did write fluently and expressively, with perceptive judgements, but he also had stylistic faults (in the columns I’ve read, at least).  For example, he put too little effort into choosing his conjunctions: he used “and” too often to express a contrast or consequence, say, when “yet” or “so” would be more appropriate choices, and he would even use “and” as a subordinating conjunction.  He was also ill-served by his sub-editors: in the last paragraph of his last column, for instance, “ironically” and “however” need to be followed by commas (and “ironically” is used in a journalistic, catachrestic sense):

“Ironically Johnson, a bowler, is the most likely player to be dropped.  However the team for the first Test against New Zealand has become harder to predict.  Mind you, a lot can happen in a week.  It just did.”

The liberal praise of Roebuck as an awesome writer of sublime genius may indicate how poorly read his contemporaries are.

UPDATE II (18 November):  see also “Your sick acts humiliated me: Roebuck’s alleged victim speaks out”, by Hedley Thomas, in The Australian.

UPDATE III (21 November):  and see Tim Blair’s “Unknown Roebuck”.