I’ve just heard that Gregg Margarite, my good friend, and a friend to humanity, has died.
Here are the facts as I’ve been told them.
Gregg died of a sudden heart attack on Friday morning (March 23, 2012).
__
I’ve never used an emoticon in a post on SFFaudio. Emoticons, I thought, were for when words couldn’t be easily employed. And I figured that was never.
I was wrong.
If there ever was a day for a frowny face that day is this day.
:(
I became a friend of Gregg’s after listening to his recordings on LibriVox. I said to him that I wanted to be his friend because he was narrating so many of the audiobooks that I wanted to listen to. I told him that meant we had to be friends. And he believed me. And so we were.
We did several podcasts with Gregg. All of them were really fun. And, we were planning more. My last communication with him was about Philip K. Dick’s The Short Happy Life Of The Brown Oxford – which he wanted to narrate. Gregg wrote:
“I have 3 holy grails when it comes to PKD short stories, Brown Oxford, Electric Ant (not gonna happen in my lifetime) and Not By Its Cover.”
I was also waiting to hear his thoughts on the first episode of Black Mirror. I know he got it, but I don’t know if he saw it. I guess I’ll never know.
I told Gregg I had started listening to his narration of the novel Couch by Benjamin Parzybok. He asked that I tell him about it after listening. I won’t get that chance now.
Gregg was also planning on narrating The Ganymede Takeover, a novel by Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson. I don’t think he’d actually started it yet though as I hadn’t yet sent him my copy.
The last update on Gregg’s site says that he’d recorded 205 hours, 58 minutes, and 30 seconds of audiobooks. Most of that was for LibriVox. I figure that’s one hell of a legacy.
In the many times we spoke I learned many surprising things about Gregg. He said he used to build “surrogate penises for Ronald Regan”, he was a musician, he was an artist and he was a fiction writer too (but under pseudonyms). I never learned his pseudonyms.
Gregg’s website, Acoustic Pulp, offers no comments section. So I invite anybody wishing to communicate any kind thoughts with Janine, Gregg’s wife, to comment below.
Update:
Mark Nelson has started a LibriVox forum thread.
Posted by Jesse Willis