Prehumous

Ormandy, who gave the Philadelphia Orchestra a chinchilla echo, and who is an ideal conductor of Johann Strauss, as well as a specialist in posthumous music such as Tchaikovsky’s Seventh (and even in such prehumous music as Webern’s Im Sommerwind);[…]

ALEX KATZ edited by Bill Berkson and Irving Sandler. Praeger. $12.50 / Very little book for the price, unless you are passionately interested in the work of Alex Katz — or, rather, the gossip that seems to flow endlessly out of, within and around Katz’s close circle of admirers, many of whom are contributors to this prehumous eulogy.

Penetrating the battalion of poetic portrayal, when he reached across the threshold of the Padmini of utterance, he discovered to his dismay, that she had become Sati by subjecting herself to the prehumous cremation of cogitation.

Prehumous bequests should be made to the Hon. Club Undertaker, R. Gall Inglis.

My further presupposition is that the future of Christian theology will demand of us a God who does not grant one eternal life to remedy an earth beyond divine control, and who did not grant Christ resurrection in posthumous vindication of some prehumous abandonment.

It was deemed vital to one’s posthumous career to be as certain as possible that no unwarranted black marks appeared on the Heavenly record of prehumous deeds.

Does the De Vulgari not mark his term in Hell — in a metaphorical and prehumous Hell, to be sure, but a Hell where his suffering must have been no less painful than that reputedly inflicted in the real and posthumous one?

The fact that my profession gives me a prehumous funeral is not important to the main point, and there is nothing that you can do about that because the job is already done.

Thus, according to the French geneticist and sometime Nobel prizewinner, the late Jacques Monod, our prehumous autobiography is written into our genes, and there is nothing we can say or do to modify or change one title of the inexorable unfolding.

Just as Article I of our Constitution now bans the granting of titles of nobility by the United States, so this amendment will ban, in such cases, the granting of pride of place in the TV or newspaper headlines to members of our pop, political, and industrial elites, while the rest of us nobodies retain our "prehumous" anonymity as units toted up in a two-digit number.

All too often we have to wait until a quiet genius like [Saul] Steinberg dies before we read a tribute to his life and work, and that is a shame. Like Ronald Searle, Al Hirschfeld, and Edward Gorey (to name three of his brethren), he is more than deserving of—to coin a word—pre'''humous homage.

We have heard of posthumous compositions (published, not written, after the composer’s death), but up to now we have not encountered prehumous compositions.

This, I divined, was Bob Carr’s prehumous bedside manner, his own private system of glad tidings when visiting the doomed, or their grieving widows.

The culmination of Trimalchio’s morbid desire for a prehumous taste of posthumous flattery is his staging of a mock-wake: “Pretend I’m dead and say something nice,” he bids his guests, adopting an appropriate position.

Such an approach has its advantages, if not for the historian, then for the author, as we are told by Robert Musil in the introduction to the slender volume of unpublished writings he assembled under the title Nachlass zu Lebzeiten, or roughly, “Prehumous Papers.”

No other Black man in history has pulled off such a “prehumous” accomplishment (as distinct from a posthumous elegy).

I’ll risk it anyway. I’ll publish prehumously. Why not call it: Prehumous Unpoetic Poems?

[…]my Opus -I, my Opus Prehumous if you want, if you will, Schneidermann he said:[…]

I copied page after page of these works in longhand into my working notebook, Prehumous Writings, and they had a profound effect on me.

Posthumous papers may come with the connotation of having been abandoned and therefore of being disorderly, involving a lack of control by the writer; they may, then, seem like a ‘more complete’ archive in one way, as the death of the author might preclude any destruction of parts of the papers. Contrary to that, ‘prehumous papers’ (as it were) strike one as involving more care, since the process of donation is a voluntary one, and therefore might give the impression that the author’s consent is evidence of candour.