The late Theresa Duncan is still blogging
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.
The first posthumous post reprinted a ghost story Dick Cavett shared on his New York Times blog. It's called Basil Rathbone's Ghosts, and its story of communication from the great beyond ("Moments after Rathbone's friend is killed in a car accident along with his beloved hunting dogs, the actor receives a phone call from a psychic who says she's received a ghostly message. 'Traveling very fast. No time to say good-bye. There are no dogs here.'") is a clear, if not quite obvious metaphor for Duncan's own updates from that great Starbucks in the sky.
The second, and presumably final post, reprints the fifth stanza of T.S. Eliot's "East Coker." About the "20 wasted years" and the impossibility of communication in this nutty world and the whole thing is depressingly MySpacey for a spooky art star suicide note (it also gives a bit of credence to the "lordy, lordy, look who cannot handle turning 40" theory of her motivation). The final lines of the poem (not quoted by Duncan): "Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."
When we go, we'd like our last post to just be a crying-face emoticon.
