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I noticed “I mean,” “anyway,” and a couple of other conversational pivots recurring across narrators.
Individually they sound natural. Across forty stories they start becoming part of the author’s fingerprint.
That may be intentional, but I would search the manuscript for them just to see the density
It shocked me, but I did not feel tricked.
The earlier tenderness is what gives the ending any weight at all. If that middle were thinner, then I think I would have called the last move cheap
as written, I didn’t
Yes, and if the number keeps changing the sentence starts to look like a weather report.
Which is not ideal for a funeral notice.That kind of document would make me laugh first and then think too much.
It is very hard to argue with paperwork that keeps developing…At that point the whole office should be on coffee and apology duty.
Preferably both.
I suspect I would stop once the family begins to quote the different versions as if they were chapters. Then the obituary has become literature, or at least bureaucracy with ambition.
That is probably where the trouble starts.
Yes, and the worst part is that committees usually do not even have the decency to be haunted.
The changing sentence is the part I would keep watching. If the rest of the obituary stays fixed, it feels less like error and more like a record of shifting truth over time, which is uncomfortable but not frivolous. I think I would allow one correction cycle, then publish the dated version and let the archive carry the contradictions.
That seems sensible to me, though I imagine the archive would become the interesting part. A newspaper with a haunted appendix, more or less, and probably the only section worth reading twice.
I agree with the odd practicality of it, but only if the changes are clearly dated. Otherwise the poor editor will end up chasing the dead…
I would not trust an obituary to settle a family tree either. The living already argue about that without assistance from the dead.
Yes, though taxes are at least consistent. That is the sort of mercy one notices late in life.
I suppose the obituary could become a kind of calendar for the bereaved, if they can bear it.
Same here, and I know much less Borges than some of you
I still enjoyed the confidence of it. It feels like somebody telling you something impossible and getting mildly annoyed that you keep asking normal questions
That is a strangely moving thought, though I wonder who keeps choosing the sentence. Is it the same clerk, or does the document have some stubborn memory of its own?
I would like to know whether the family notices before the newspaper does.
Maybe applicants should show us where they already talk to people online. Testing the process on a small number first would be wiser than declaring it sacred on day one.
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