Seriously, seriously, I thought I was doing well. I mean, not great. Not epic. But, well, well.
Well, enough.
I got two paying blogging gigs. I get enough blogging students to get by. The immoveable object in my living room appears to be moving towards movement, or making a move towards moving towards movement, which is what at least a nanophysicist would call progress, of a sort and if only relative.
And he’s not even a relative.
But there are always those, according to various Desiderati, who do it better.
Better. Stronger. Faster.
And now, it appears, there are even those who do it for a larger and more loyal audience despite being dead six months.
Writer/artist Theresa Duncan, subject of a January Vanity Fair cover story (among plenty of other coverage), is updating her blog from beyond the grave. Cries for help: now available months after they’d be useful. Duncan—whose intentional overdose on pills last July led to the suicide of her partner Jeremy Blake a week later—had become, according to acquaintances and friends interviewed by Vanity Fair, increasingly erratic, paranoid, haggard, hard-drinking, and depressed in her last year or two. She was convinced that Scientologists were harassing her and Blake, trying to sabotage her stalling career (movie and TV projects that never got off the ground, including one that was supposed to star erstwhile friend of the couple and famed Scientologist musician Beck) and his ascending one (a scheduled retrospective of Blake’s work at Washington DC’s Corcoran Gallery ended up going on posthumously). So: what does a dead woman blog about? Dick Cavett, Sherlock Holmes, and T.S. Eliot.
So, pretty much no change there, if she were a book-blogging Typepad type, of which she was only 50%. Come to think of it, this isn’t the first time we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have been out-blogged by a dead woman, although the circumstances of the last time were quite different.
The last post that appeared when Theresa Duncan was alive posted on my birthday. Aw, thankies! Since then, she’d set two autoposts: a spooky, Basil Rathbone one for two days before Halloween, and one for New Year’s Eve. Perhaps she’d miscalculated the date of All Saint’s Eve, or maybe her calendar simply had a faulty October? Or maybe there’s a deeper meaning (there always is, with conspiracy theorists).
October 29th is Saint Narcissus’s Day.
raincoaster 
Hi Rain,
That is amazing! I guess with blogging software giving you the ability to publish on any given day in the future, this might become a suicide note trend: for further updates on why you’re finding my body limp and lifeless, visit http://www...
I also have a theory that everyone who says bloggers are narcissists has got it all wrong. A true narcissist – I’m talking about the disordered, malignant kind – would never blog, because in order to blog successfully, I believe you have to put yourself into it. And true narcissists have no self, only their idealised, confabulated fantasy self, which changes every time they meet someone new. Just my musings, maybe a nascent post.
But read her blog: she did nothing but quote other people and put glamour shots of herself up. THAT is why I wrote it this way. When you look into the blog of Theresa Duncan, the void looks also into you.
Yes, I’m sure there are a lot of thoughts on this I’m only beginning to thunk…I read the VF article, and it seemed hollow, too. The earliest Gawker post I thought hit the nail on the head; chemically-induced paranoia.
Sad about the woman though. She was “increasingly erratic, paranoid, haggard, hard-drinking, and depressed in her last year or two“? That really does describe many mothers I know, one or two who are on Prozac.
I put up posts to be published on a future date and always have this creep out factor in the back of my mind when I do that, what if I die and the blog just keeps posting on without me?
Philipa, I think in the case of the women you know, the Prozac probably came AFTER the depression and paranoia; in this case, the substances came BEFORE.
max, sulz at bloggerdygook has a post on this post-necrotic blogging thing. The whole thing creeps me out.
Ok, what’s the dealio. I thought this whole thing was a farce. Didn’t it become decided that the jig is up? It was a ‘game’ and a bunch of folks fell for it, still are it seems? The sitemeter is always available too. You can go see yourself. hahaha…
If I lived where you are, I’d be paying bookoos of money for you to guide me.
Just don’t call me Grasshopper.
Unless I have good beer before hand.
Then …
No, this whole thing is real. She set the autoposts before she died; some people set autoposts for certain holidays whenever they happen to find something that works for them. Since she’s dead, she’s not taking the sitemeter down, of course.
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