I have a lot of ground to cover, which is exactly the sort of thing that happens when you disappear for a week.

1. Flavorwire ranks the 10 best-dressed authors.

Yes, Tom Wolfe is on the list. I’m not going to insult his Kentucky-Fried wardrobe. It is, after all, dapper. But how is it stylish to always wear the exact same thing? If I play the same note over and over can I claim to be a good songwriter?

But I can’t knock the list too much because it includes Oscar Wilde, whose fashion sense influenced figures as disparate as Batman and Scooby’s friend, Fred Jones.

2. Meanwhile, TresSugar lists 10 famous unfinished novels.

Some big names — Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Jane Austen — appear but all of them are trounced by The Canterbury Tales.

Canterbury Tales might be the only book written in the English language that could not be more popular or influential if it were finished. Chaucer’s entire reputation is based on this book (and his willingness to write in English when French was the chic language) and he didn’t even finish it.

3. Editor & Publisher has fired its editorial staff.

According to a memo from its owner:

Editor & Publisher magazine will be utilizing more individuals for the print edition who are experts in their individual fields as opposed to reporters who track down experts and put the expert’s story into the writer’s words.

Communications are also expected to improve over a department that previously was spread over four states and three time zones.

Perhaps I’m being cynical, but I read that as “Get ready for a lot of recapitulated press releases.”

4. Finally, The Plain Dealer is reporting that local legend Harvey Pekar died of an accidental overdose from antidepressant medication.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

I prepared a post about the symbiotic relationship between writers and alcohol.

It’s written. Sites to be linked are listed in my browser’s favorites.

Then, Harvey Pekar died.

Pekar wrote American Splendor. If you don’t know it, Google it. Better yet, borrow a collection from your library.

R. Crumb, another Cleveland comics legend and one of the many artists which with Pekar worked, said, “He’s the soul of Cleveland. He’s passionate and articulate. He’s grim. He’s Jewish. I appreciate the way he embraces all that darkness.”

I’ve already said that Pekar is the closest thing Cleveland has to a laureate. If you hear the words used to describe the man, they could be talking about the city itself.

For example, Crumb called Pekar’s work “so staggeringly mundane it verges on the exotic.”

That’s not an insult to call Pekar or Cleveland “staggeringly mundane.” If there is joy in repetition, then there is beauty and truth in the 99 percent of our life that we don’t bother to tell our friends at the bar after work.

Anthony Bourdain — who featured Pekar on No Reservations when he visited Cleveland — has written the best eulogy I’ve seen for him so far.

He was famed as a “curmudgeon”, a “crank” and a “misanthrope” yet found beauty and heroism where few others even bothered to look. In a post-ironic and post-Seinfeldian universe he was the last romantic--his work sincere, heartfelt, alternately dead serious and wryly affectionate. The last man standing to wonder out loud, “what happened here?” ...

As Joseph Mitchell once owned New York and Zola owned Paris, Harvey Pekar owned not just Cleveland but all those places in the American Heartland where people wake up every day, go to work, do the best they can--and in spite of the vast and overwhelming forces that conspire to disappoint them--go on, try as best as possible to do right by the people around them, to attain that most difficult of ideals: to be “good” people.

And Pekar was the epitome of those “good people.” After the Letterman appearances, after the fame, he still worked as a clerk for a veteran’s hospital until he retired.

Tony Mazur, a local sportswriter and blogger, tweeted, “First it’s LeBron, yesterday it was Harvey Pekar, and today it’s George Steinbrenner Certainly not a good week for (former) Clevelanders.”

I don’t want to make this about LeBron or Steinbrenner. I just want to point out the differences. All three of them are local boys. All of them made good. But only one of them is the quintessential Clevelander.

And being quintessentially Cleveland isn’t always a blessing. Pekar’s art, like our city, thrives on a mixture of optimism and masochism.

Pekar once said, “I wake up every morning in a cold sweat, regardless of how well things went the day before.”

What a Cleveland thing to say. We live in a city in which we expect bad weather and heartbreak from our sports teams.

When we did lose LeBron, (once again, this is not about him) I received a text from my friend that read, “Well, this will keep us busy until the next heartbreak.”

Well, the next heartbreak is on us. We have lost the man who understood us best.

Rest well, Pekar. You’ve earned a bit of peace.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Really, erudite?

If I’m so erudite, why did I need a dictionary to know that was a compliment?

Grisham? Patterson? Mark the date. At 2 p.m. on April 15, Executive Editor Tricia Ambrose decided it was time to pander to the masses.

If you want something newer and popular, may I suggest “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. If you don’t like that, I offer “Handle with Care” by Jodi Picoult.

But one of these days we’re reading “Welcome to the Monkey House.”

Just so we actually talk about something book-related, I have a question for you.

Who is Cleveland’s poet laureate?

While reading “Dubliners,” I wondered, “Who could capture the facets of our city as James Joyce did with his?”

Toni Morrison is from Lorain, and she’s talented enough to be anywhere’s laureate. But, while “The Bluest Eye” and “Sula” were based in Ohio, she has never written anything that struck me as a Cleveland story.

To me, the person who best qualifies as Cleveland’s writer is Harvey Pekar.

Sure, he writes comic books and not Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. Maybe he’s as likely to win the Nobel Peace Prize as be named poet laureate. But the man understands the city.

He got booted from David Letterman’s guest list for insulting General Electric. He worked as a clerk at a veteran’s hospital, after he became famous. He once said, “It makes you feel good to know that there’s other people afflicted like you.”

I say this with all due affection. This man’s the epitome of a Clevelander. In fact, I suggest we adopt the city motto “afflicted like you.”

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com