hal tweets ·11:28 AM
Ghostbuster zines from the Canzine Hollywood Piracy Zine Challenge are now online! http://t.co/RoAMEQTU
onlyyy
Fri Mar 21,2008,
16:20 GMT
Peeping Your Death
Posted by Hal
Article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail today on a blogger and BBC columnist who chronicled their own demises from illness. “Blogging the process of dying is becoming a small yet poignant fixture on the Internet landscape.” The piece doesn’t give us any sense of why people might want to blog or otherwise make public their deaths, which is too bad.
But peeping death (our own and others) is an interesting piece in the peep puzzle. If we peep ourselves and others in order to be less alone, then it makes sense: what could be lonelier than death?
Of course peep culture has always had an interest in death: the 1978 Faces of Death cult film/montage of death scenes of humans and animals (some real but most fake) has spawned something like six official spin-offs and any number of unofficial imitators.
On the artistic side, there are documentaries like Silverlake Life: the View from Here a video diary of the death by AIDS of Tom Joslin. Here’s a description of the final moments of Joslin’s life as depicted on the video and described by John McGrath in his book Loving Big Brother: “Massi [Joslin’s partner] focuses the camera on each of Joslin’s eyes in turn. One, the lid covered in lesions, is barely visible; the other is clear: ‘that eye he can see in the camera with’. Massi then asks Joslin how he feels and Joslin mutters in a breathy voice, barely intelligible, with Massi attempting to translate: ‘he feels pretty bad, but wants his friends to feel good.’ The video is showing a frame of Joslin’s face, it cuts suddenly to the face again, a slightly different angle. There is a howl then Massi’s voice: ‘This is the first of July and Tommy’s just died.’ Joslin’s clear eye still stares towards the camera.”
There are -2- Comments: , Add yours…
19:51
I propose not to hold back until you earn big sum of money to order goods! You should just take the loan or just sba loan and feel yourself fine
The Bloggist
Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...
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11:20
hi hal, sounds like an interesting project you got going on here. As you know, i’ve been into blogging projects for a while. Reading about your thoughts on the blogging of death, I thought to draw your attention to a blog written by a friend of mine, Predator, while he was dying of cancer. It is a haunting and beautiful read. There is a description of his deathblog here:
http://www.totalcardboard.com/fiction_htmls/tc8/predtxt.htm
and the blog itself is still online here:
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/blog-index.html
(note how simple the “site” is! he was a zealous anti-complexity campaigner when it came to the web. In fact, Pred taught me my first bits of html)
and you can now download the blog as a book. see the link here:
http://travelsoforion.net/predator
Cheers and best of luck
Lucas