Memorial Pause

Jeremy Blake (Oct. 4, 1971 -- July 17, 2007 )
Theresa L. Duncan (Oct. 26, 1966 - July 10, 2007)

Theresa Duncan, from a Nov. 21, 2006
post on her blog, The Wit of the Staircase.















Jeremy Blake pictured at the Vanity Fair opening party for the 8th Annual Art Auction Benefit, "Portraits & Polaroids" held April 23, 2007, at New York City's Milk Gallery. The piece behind him is his Dope & Guns Party. For more on his innovative new media work, see Kinz,Tillou + Feigen.

Theresa Duncan, image from
The Wit of the Staircase entry, January 3, 2006,
"Horror Vacui in Venice," about the fear of empty spaces.

Greetings, billion-eyed audience. I've not directly addressed you in some weeks, and I apologize for temporarily drawing the curtain upon the present Richmond fantasia serial. I ask for your indulgence as I return for this entry to another of the Blue Raccoon's ongoing obsessions.

This filigree of quotes and images concerns the second anniversary marking the deaths of artist Jeremy Blake and writer/bloggist Theresa Duncan. I've reprised in part here a post of July 10, 2008.

During the summer of 2007, I fixated on the couple's suicides and their back stories. I wrote a series of interlocking posts called as a group "Seven Kinds of Denial Just to Get Out of Bed." I've noted through recent visits to the Sitemeter that a few people have returned to that series, mostly, I think, to mine the site of Blake-Duncan images. Fair's fair. But what I tried to do then was map "The Blake-Duncan Effect" through the blogosphere. That is, the rounds of speculation, grief, calumny and rank bad taste that metastasized through the Internet in the days and weeks following their demise.

Then, of course, the blogosphere for the most part moved on; to the Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue to-do, and the deaths of Heath Ledger and David Foster Wallace, and, oh, some election thing, and, two wars and economic collapse.

It's not news anymore, but novelist Bret Easton Ellis was mentioned in Vanity Fair about his writing a screenplay pertaining to the Blake-Duncan liebestod. I dragged Ellis into my dissertation that compared the cruelty and melodrama of Weimar culture with our own, and how all that related to Blake and Duncan -- at least to me. But Ellis has plenty of other things going on including his use of Twitter.

I suppose that it's appropriate that Ellis assay the story, especially considering Glamorama. But William Gibson could equally manage the task, especially in his Pattern Recognition/Spook Country mode. Or even Don DeLillo of Underworld and Cosmopolis.

During the past year, when my random-access thoughts fluttered upon this story, I've thought of the changes in the culture even since that summer of '07. The ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter weren't then full-on established. And the dread government she and Blake so hated and, ultimately, couldn't live with underwent at least one significant alteration. But here were times in that summer when even I despaired of ever seeing that reign of misrule end.

Had Blake and Duncan hung on another year, what might their worldviews morphed into? How would the use of these "social utilities" figured into their creative lives? And in terms of how they processed the outside world, would a diet of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and the Huffingtonpost have somehow turned them around? Who knows, but I doubt it. Something was broken in those two. Whatever happened, it was serious, and deep-seated, and perhaps beyond the reach of anybody to correct.

In the summer of 2007, a number of those within the chattering blogosphere who concerned themselves with matters Blake and Duncan became the thing they beheld. Their attempt to untangle the real/imagined conspiracies against the writer and the artist generated wild speculations. Some of them sounded as nutty as heir subject's latter screeds. It was like at the end of a cable science or history mystery show where there's a screen shot of a field of stars or scary Mayan hieroglyphs and the sonorous announcer says, "Perhaps, really, the more we explore these mysteries, the more we are really delving into ourselves."

The epic lengths of commentary about these deaths proved, too, that in the summer of 2007, members of this eclectic tribe -- "The Children of the Staircase" -- had way too much time on their hands. Including, apparently, and obviously, me. I went from writing about the tears of my wife who mourned the loss of artists to having those same eyes squinted at me and she saying, "Now, you're part of the problem."

Out of all the epic verbiage to which I voluntarily subjected myself, two quotes stand out now, and I've used them more than a few times:

"There exists in the heart of a NYTimes-reading humanities graduate a capacity for nose-upturned covetousness which people don't talk about. It's a horniness for the blessings of another man's life. Not for his health, not for his wife, or for his Ferrari... And not even for the career, exactly, just for the odor of his resume... For his reputation of fulfillment."-- Crid, August 4, 2007, commenting in Amy Alkon’s Advice Goddess blog, to "Making It Up As She Went Along."

"Mental illness is a politically-convenient myth that transposes the cause of destructive behavior away from social constructs and onto the individual. In truth, suicide is not a randomly-occuring chemical imbalance with no external cause (no more so than a malignant tumor metastasizes without prior exposure to carcinogens) but rather the lawful consequence of intelligent organisms struggling to survive in a modern capitalist democracy. The depressed choose to kill themselves because analysis of the data available suggests that to die solves otherwise insoluble problems. If the mental health industry were honest, it would admit that the consequences of freedom are aimlessness and anomie, and that a consequence of the market economy is a lifetime of consumerism culminating in death without meaning. If this life is a hell for some, the world we have inherited is why...Of course, if the mental health industry were honest, nobody would buy their happy drugs anymore; and everybodies [sic.] gotta make a living -right?" -- Manna, on Gawker.com, August 20, 2007.

Then, speaking of native Richmonder Xeni Jardin, there was a New York Times article this past summer about her and the Internets, and concluding with these observations by writer Noam Cohen:

"For all the damage to reputations the Internet can cause, perhaps the greater anxiety from online communication is the weightlessness of it all. The whole World Wide Web can seem like a hall of mirrors — nothing tangible, no binding, no watermarks, no notary public seals. Where, exactly, is it? How do we know any of it is true?

Ms. Jardin said she did not sign up for the heaviness of being a publication of record.

“It’s still kind of punk rock,” she said. “The part that still freaks me out is that it is such a huge thing. Part of what people love about Boing Boing is that I can post whatever I want. It’s super fast-moving.” She added: “The huge impact it has, the whole thing that makes it this thing, is that it is so lightweight.”

Yet it seems so important at the time.

"American Ruins" segment from Blake's digital video piece Winchester, April 16, 2006.


From Blake's Reading Ossie Clark, in the Daily Serving, August 27, 2007.

Blake and Duncan in 1997, by Michael Levine/CPI, via New York Magazine web site post, August 20, 2007.

Duncan and Blake, pictured Sept. 17, 2007, on the "St. James Version" of the World of Wonder, taken at an art opening in the fall of 2006.

"She is gone, and he is gone, a play set up in the privacy of love, a stage set in the intimacy of public longing for details." —Jonathan Perez, July 26, 2007, “Ode To Jeremy Blake” at The Palm At The End Of The Mind.

"…Whatever interests they may have had, the suicides are not really all that astonishing. I talk to people who have tried it every single working day and the explanations are usually very mundane and sad. As for the “paranoia”, please consider some alternative explanation.

There are plenty and maybe they’ll show up in the toxicology report.” – CB, July 31, 2007, DreamsEnd (blog)

“I think we all want this to be more than it is for a myriad reasons. I think we’re all creative and smart and that means we read into things and enjoy it and our brains work on overdrive. We quickly pass over the obvious or the banal because we assume it has just GOT to be more than what it appears to be; this simply CAN’T be all there is. We want to believe that, so whether we know it or not, we fuel and perpetuate that. I posted once before that I’m sure if I died suddenly or mysteriously, lots of things would come to light about me that people would be surprised of and never knew. We all have skeletons in the closet and things that happen to us on a daily basis that we keep to ourselves. Mystery loves company. Without us, there’d be no wonder, no romance, no crypticism. Right?” — GothamInsider, August 1, 2007, onDreamsEnd, (blog)

“Paired paranoia is particularly pernicious. * SIGH *”
--Scottynuke, Washington Post, August 1, 2007, “Achenblog,”

"But like the best bloggers, she created an illusion of intimacy with her readers. Most blogs are simply unedited confessions for the blogger or for close friends, posted where they might be found by strangers (as, I imagine, the diarist dreads but also desires). And still other bloggers hope for anonymity, only to deliberately push its bounds by revealing too much — when readers know all but one secret, they’ll search for it, and find it." —Swati Pandey, August 1, 2007, Los Angeles Times Opinion Daily.

“Beauty. Brains. Bonkers. The question now is, what the hell was going on in Jeremy Blake's head?” -- August 2, 2007, SoMA: Society of Mutual Autopsy (blog), “Theresa Duncan Upsate.”

“She was bright and polished apple with a rotten core.”
--#15.”Guest” commenting August 4, 2007, Laist, “Staircase to Nowhere.”


"The saddest part of the story is the implication that she may have finally realized that she wasn't special, that she was talented but normal, and rather than see the collapse of her house of lies as an opportunity to finally grow up, she chose to die. What a waste of her creativity and passion."--- from comment by "wf," August 6, 2007, on SLOG, the blog of Seattle, Wash.'s The Stranger alt-weekly, "The Latest on Theresa Duncan"

"Since their suicides last month, the sadly foreshortened life stories of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan have passed beyond their control and are currently passing through the distorted mirrors of projection, grief, anger and a sort of perverse, bicoastal peer review by New Yorkers and Los Angelenos who are stumped as to why a talented and beautiful young artist couple who had been together for 12 years took their own lives, despite seeming to have the grail of professional and personal success firmly in hand."-- August 7, 2007, New York Observer,“Art World Shivers After Lovers’ Double Suicide.”

“The lilly-livered, packaged conclusions that have been drawn about this woman, attempting to do the impossible (explain human complexity in about nine sentences), are falling short of doing anything but making me want to hit someone.” --Alison Tuck, August 7, 2007, Women and Children First, “Dead Artist, Beautiful and Brilliant, Cops Further Beatings” (blog)

"Duncan was a pioneering digital artist/entrepreneur who did not have any mentors (if any) to be her guide in the digital arts world. Her work was distinctive, wonderful and she will be missed."-- Katherine K., commenting, August 8, 2007, on the New York Observer article, “Art World Shivers After Lovers’ Double Suicide.”

“Duncan portrayed herself as a Freudian and a fashionista, an intellectual and a stoner, a political radical with a perfume fetish, and a groupie in a 12-year monogamous relationship. Because of the pliancy of her mind, these seeming contradictions could coexist. She was hungry for knowledge, for answers, for beauty, and she created an online space that was essentially a map of her discovery process -- a "web log" in the truest sense."--
– Steffie Nelson, August 12, 2007, the Los Angeles Times, calendarlive.com

"Just like every other piece on the duo so far, this is about "why" they killed themselves. Not unexpectedly, no one as yet has an "answer." I do! You know why they killed themselves? Because they were fucked in the head. Just like everyone else who's ever killed himelf. Probably not their fault, either—surely the fault of natural chemicals or other chemicals that they put in themselves. Because you know what else is weird? All these profiles talk about how erratic the twosome became—they were paranoid,convincedthat the CIA and the Scientologists were out to get them, erratic with friends.... You know whatthat sounds like? Hi, crystal meth. They sound like everyone who's ever done a lot of stimulants; tinfoil on the windows, water glass to the door, looking for secret cameras. Lots of those folks do themselves in too."-- Choire,August 20, 2007, Gawker.com, suicide is painless"Why Did Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake Commit Suicide?"

Louise Brooks in G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box

Seven Kinds of Denial Just to Get Out of Bed

III. “The Worms and Passions Writhing Within”

There is something in the air these days. It is as if the air hates beauty, creativity, spirit... all you read these days in the news, in comments online, and all you hear in friends conversations [is] hate. Everyone hates everyone. The air is heavy with hate and dullness…As I work to achieve what I consider beauty-- the functional beauty of technology-- I hear the voice of the Zeitgeist…whispering in my ear "do it!" "do it!" It is, of course, encouraging me to kill myself.__The age does not want creativity to happen. We are all supposed to surrender.__I know that if I stopped my work and became a cubicle drone as the age wishes me to become, the voice would go away.
-- ”anuma” commenting on the blog Rigorous Intuition about the Duncan-Blake deaths.

When writing about German culture on the eve of World War I, historian Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower, described its cultural preoccupation with violence and unease coupled to complacency. Mark Twain remarked that history doesn’t repeat itself, but if often rhymes, and The Proud Tower period is reminiscent of our own time and place.

Historian Edward Stillman wrote of the period, "Something strange lay beneath the stolid prosperity of the Hohenzollern Age -- a surfeit with peace, a lust for violence, a belief in death, an ominous mystique of war. 'Without war the world would quickly sink into materialism,' the older Von Moltke, chief of the German general staff proclaimed in 1880; and he, his nephew the younger Von Moltke, and the caste of Prussian militarists they represented could presumably save the world from that tawdry fate."

The gigantic ominous orchestral tone poems and bloody operas of Richard Strauss and the viciousness of characters in Frank Wedekind’s plays have evolved in the contemporary United States into the blood and gore fest films that strive for greater, sickening realism, and public humiliation is offered up on television as spectacle. Art, freed from constraints, delves into the psycho-trauma-sexuality of the maker.

Tuchman describes how French writer, critic and pacifist Romain Rolland viewed Germany in 1899. He felt that the nation couldn’t remain all-powerful and maintain its balance for long. “Nietzsche, [Richard]Strauss, the Kaiser—giddiness blows through her brain. Neroism is in the air!” Rolland considered the German “meme” of the day was Disgust. He sensed it in the compositions of Strauss and in their invariable gruesome conclusions, a German “sickness hidden beneath the strength and military tautness.”

Stillman writes, “The malaise was evident everywhere—in the new cults of political violence; the new philosophies of men like Freud, Neitzsche, and Pareto, who stressed the unconscious and the irrational, and who expose the lying pretensions of middle-class values and conventions; and in the sense of doom that permeated the avant-garde arts of the prewar years. Typical of the spirit of rebellion was the manifesto set forth in 1910 by the Italian Futurist painters: it declared that “all forms of imitation should be held in contempt and that all forms of originality glorified; that we should rebel against the tyranny of words ‘harmony’ and ‘good taste’…; that a clean sweep be madeof all stale and threadbare subject matter in order to express the vortex of modern life – a life of steel, pride, fever, and speed…”

Tuchman observes how the “undercurrent of morbidity…increased in proportion as Germany’s wealth and strength and arrogance increased, as if the pressure of so much industrial success and military power were creating an inner reaction in the form of a need to negate, to expose the worms and passions writhing within that masterful, purposeful, well-behaved, orderly people.”

* * *

During the first decade of the 20th century the staple of the German theatre was tragedy. “Social comedies with happy endings were not a German genre. German fun was confined to buffoonery, either painful or coarse.” Sounds like Jackass to me, and a whole slew of films and programs that put the audience into the mind of enjoying the pain of others, but with the not-so-subtle implication that you could be next.

There is the entire subgenre of video games which, in many, but not all cases, are voyeuristic invitations to mayhem. (Duncan was during the 1990s a designer of narrative-driven video games with girls in mind, Chop Suey being the most notable; in his later months, Blake was employed as a graphic designer by game studio RockStar “the house that Grand Theft Auto built,” as one commentator has described).

German theater’s tragedies, Tuchman explains, were not so much curative, as Ibsen’s, nor compassionate like Chekhov’s, “but obsessively focused on mankind’s cruelty to man, on his bent toward destruction and death.”

A cognate of Wedekind on today’s stage can be found in the works of Neil Labute, His characters possess outward sophistication that belie an interior bruitishness. Of interest to this discussion is Labute’s 2003 The Shape of Things. Set at a university, Evelyn, a graduate art student seduces Adam, an English major, into becoming, unbeknownst to him, her thesis project. She alters his appearance and identity until he is almost unrecognizable to his friends and himself. It is Pygamlion in reverse; Evelyn doesn’t love Adam, and wants him just for the length of her experiment.

[In the aftermath of the Duncan-Blake deaths, film producer Bradford Schiel was quoted as saying of Duncan that she'd realized her paranoid behavior had nullified all of Blake's working connections to the art world. "Jeremy was her creation. And she was killing the thing she created, this great, terrific artist. Se realized what she had done. To let him live, she had to go. But in a symbolic relationship, one couldn't last without the other."]

In The Company of Men involves two corporate button-down types who destroy a deaf woman, and Your Friends and Neighbors involve the sexual and psychological dynamics and emotional barbarism of self-absorbed couples. In a similar way, though adjusted (but just) for mass consumption, was the long-running comedy series Seinfeld. Here, thoughtless people committed atrocious acts against one another and strangers without learning anything from their behaviors. Subsequent programs featured individuals more despicable in more bleak situations (Arrested Development, Always Sunny In Philadelphia, etc.), but played for disconcerting and sometimes successful laughs.

These themes flowered in the “Dickensian” Sopranos, which followed the exploits of a murderous but lovable New Jersey crime boss who had sought out psychotherapy to treat depression. In the concluding episodes, the shrink realizes Tony Soprano is just using her to sharpen his rationalizations for his sociopathic tendencies and she throws him out. Like the characters of Seinfeld, by series end, though the Soprano family has had tragedy visit those close to it, the audience is left believing that the characters have grown little, and won’t alter their behaviors because in a greater world that is even more monstrous than the Sopranos, their family values blend in, just like the serial killing investment banker of American Psycho.

* * *

Two novels by Bret Easton Ellis, which operate in the kind of rarefied world that Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake moved in, also strike similar chords to how Tuchman describes German culture prior to World War One. The misogynist killer of 1991’s American Psycho, and “well dressed man” for whom, as ZZTop insists, the girls go crazy, is more interested in getting a good table at a trendy restaurant than human life. He performs heinous acts against many people and gets away with it even after admitting his crimes. The character’s descriptions of an unbelievable horrendous nature isn’t taken with any seriousness – even by his lawyer. His one means of distinguishing his life from those of others whom he abhors, proves false.

The underlying cruelty of the celebrity and quasi-celebrity haute monde is further explored in the 1998 novel Glamorama. Here, models and actors are recruited by a mysterious cabal to commit acts of terrorism. The effects of bombings and torture are described in detail. The premise was played for laughs in Zoolander. A drug and mental-addled haze permeates both American Psycho and most particular Glamorama, which casts doubt on the actions of the characters. Is their universe “real”? It’s a novel, of course, so it isn’t really “real” at all.
Much less violent, and more believable in its tragic elements, is Wilton Barnardt’s 1998 Show World. Barnhardt uses the lives of two women college roommates to show the intersection of politics and entertainment. These books are downright prescient when re-read in the context of 9-11, stolen or tampered elections, the predominance of reality television, celebrity obsession and the erosion of reliable news and information into just more platforms for the loud distractions of bloviating blowhards.


Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, aren’t anything new, but gross latter day iterations of opinion shapers and propagandists aided by advanced technology. Tuchman introduces “the feared and fearless” Maximilian Harden, editor of the newspaper Die Zukunft “of which it was said that everything rotten and everything good in Germany appeared in its pages.”


Harden was on intimate terms with the “malice, intrigue and private vendetta” in the Kaiser Wilhelm II’s circle. When Harden went after somebody, he used the private files of political operative and German Foreign Office diplomat Frederick von Holstein, who “in the method of Byzantine courts exercised power without nominal office. He regarded all diplomacy as conspiracy, all overtures of foreign governments as containing a concealed trick, and conducted foreign relations on the premise of everyone’s animosity for Germany.”


Harden and Holstein sought to bring down a group of the Kaiser’s advisors who were, in their view, more peaceful in their political views, and therefore harmful to Germany. Wild accusations of homosexuality and perversion were made, and from October 1907 to July 1909, the “Eulenburg affair” dominated German newspapers and café conversation. Stage center was the luckless Prince Philip Eulenburg who was condemned for leading a gay coterie among the Kaiser’s advisors. The elaborate, bewildering and dramatic trials resembled a Wedekind plot, with the disgraced Eulenberg wheeled into his final trial on a hospital bed. The whole thing rather backfired as the prestige of the Wilhelm II and his court suffered in the public eye, but not soon nor deep enough. Opinion polls made no difference to the Kaiser. Indeed, writes Tuchman, “Damage to the image of the ruling caste caused its members to swagger more than ever.”


A few years earlier in Britain, academic and journalist Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse, a non-Marxist socialist progressive, and social critic, lecturer and writer John Atkinson Hobson, were publishing books that described how neither man nor his social systems were operating very well. Not headline news, for sure, but their work illustrated underlying pessimism in an otherwise heady time persuaded of forward progress.


Tuchman explains that Hobhouse and Hobson were of a group of sociological examiners who were “concerned with man’s curious refusal to behave rationally in what seemed his own best interest.”


The low level in which the populace reacted politically, the appeal of the sensationalist press and the new phenomenon of mass interest in spectator sports were disturbing. Henri Bergson’s idea of man as moved by a force which he called élan vital had stimulated a new science of social psychology to probe the roles of emotions and instinct as the basis of human conduct.


Hobhouse’s Democracy and Reaction (1904) concluded that the average man “has not the time to think and will not take the trouble to do so if he has the time.” His opinions faithfully reflect “the popular sheet and shouting newsboys…To this new public of the streets and tramcars it is useless to appeal in terms of reason.”


* **********************************************************************************


In the German theater of he 1890s and early 1900s, Death by murder, suicide or some more esoteric form resolved nearly all dramas.


In Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening (revived in New York in the summer of 2006), as Tuchman describes, “the discovery of sex by adolescents conflicting with the prurience of adults produces total catstrophe.” One teenaged character, unable to bear life, commits suicide and in a closing scene reappears in a graveyard with his head under his arm, like that decapitated image of Bijou Phillips used on Duncan’s blog.

[The Chumscrubber, 2005 satire of upper middle class Los Angeles. suburbia features a teen suicide, and a video game hero who “wakes up without his head” in a zombie infested, post-collapse L.A. The self-appointed Chumscrubber carries his head like a totemic device, and in a heroic moment while standing on the hills over the city, holds his head aloft, which then winks at the audience.]


From 1895 on, Wedekind’s plays “plunged into debauch of the vicious and perverse which seemed to have no argument but that humanity was vile.” He introduced the character of Lulu in Earth Spirit (1895) and continued her story in Pandora’s Box (1905). Lulu’s sexuality doesn’t create, but destroys.


A still from the 1928 G.W. Pabst film Pandora’s Box was used in Duncan’s January 12, 2006, entry. This announced the monthly, full-moon meeting of the Los Angeles Lunar Society’s wake for the fake novelist JT Leroy, at which mourning clothes were required. The famous face belongs to actress Louise Brooks, whose own character and Lulu merged. The scene is from a court room appearance in which Lulu is wearing a jet black version of her wedding dress complete with veil, and she’s in the dock to hear the court’s verdict on her role in the death of her newspaper magnate lover.


No one actually loves Lulu, writes Jean-Michel Palmier in Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star, “they buy her, they sell her, they trade her. She’s never anything other than a sales item, and object passed from hand to hand. Those who get near her don’t really love her, they are in love with her image. In other words, they are in love with the reality as they see it…Alienated to her very core, even her identity is stolen from her.”


The connection between this period of history and the decades leading to World War I also provided some inspiration for the most recent novel of Thomas Pynchon, titled Against The Day. It is an example of “historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance.” E.L. Doctorow covered much of this same territory, in a more straight-forward manner, in his Ragtime, in the ancient days of 1975, the year the Vietnam War ended.


Pynchon himself described the massive, sprawling book: “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred."


Duncan mentioned the book's upcoming publication several times in late 2006, and expressed her appreciation for earlier Pynchon works. An essay written in reaction to the novel didn't deal with the text in specifics, but addressed Pynchon's hiding-in-plain-sight invisibility.


She wrote on May 24, 2007, “The United States itself has become a huge haunted Winchester Mansion.” This was an entry pertaining to a 9/11 videographer claiming that he’d been harassed and threatened, apparently due to footage he made on that day. Her Winchester reference is Blake’s three-part film, graphic and painted piece Winchester (2002-2004) about the bizarre gothic mansion built by armaments heiress Sarah Winchester. She designed the place of scores of rooms and weird staircases to appease the ghosts of victims slain by Winchester guns.


“No doubt we shall never understand it completely,” Stillman says, employing a phrase that is repeated now about the circumstance of the deceased writer and artist. “What is absolutely clear about the outbreak of the First World War it that it was catastrophic: the hetacombs of the dead, the appalling material waste, the destruction, and the pain of those four years tell us that. In our hearts we know that since that bootless, reckless, bloody adventure noting has really come right again in the world.”


The fourth and final part of Seven Kinds of Denial Just To Get Out of Bed is titled “I found this out in a roundabout way,” and analyzes how the news of the Duncan-Blake deaths permeated the Internet, and the varying reactions and formations of theories about the event.


"You fucking hopeless parasites. The world is a violent storm of greed, where the victor takes the spoils, and you are just waking up to it now, saying to your sorry selves, "oh no, they could kill me?"
-- omnimental, commenting on the blog, Rigorous Intuition’s July 25, 2005, entry, “Imitation of Life.”