I know this is a serious event for lots of people, but for me it is a death in the midst of thousands of others that are not reported, so don't think of me as callous. I am a realist and goddamn, I am sort of happy the media only reports 'big deaths', because the worst kinds of death happen either
en masse or without reportage.
Elizabeth Taylor died today at the age of 79, after ailing for some time and disappearing from the public eye. I just want to talk about how this affects me, personally, because this is my blog, and I am a heartless, callous, pseudo-realist type of person.
J.G. Ballard's novel
Crash will never be the same after this moment. Vaughn's hoodlum scientist ambition to die in an automobile wreck with Elizabeth Taylor is now completely hopeless. I even doubt it will change any future reading of the book, but you have to admit (if you've read it. And you should.) that is now an even more ghostly tale with serious undertones of having been written almost forty years ago.
I've done my own research on Elizabeth Taylor today. Her last Twitter post (did she write or dictate them?) is dated February 9th, 2011. Let's gloss over it for now and find a memorable, positive, wise statement under
140 characters that we can remember her by:
Not at least until I'm dead, and at the moment I'm having too much fun being alive...and I plan on staying that way. Happiness to all.
Which was in reply to this earlier, equally formidable post:
No one is going to play Elizabeth Taylor, but Elizabeth Taylor herself.
In retrospect: as somber as it is stubborn. She must have drifted into 'out of touch' after years of 'simulated plutocracy'. Lots of explanations and rationalizations and whatnot. It's sad for sad people. I myself felt a lot worse the day Leslie Neilsen died. But since I'm a horrible person I will reveal that these were all dictated, and her final post proves this, because what kind of hyper-rich, aging celebrity is going to plug her interview with a much less important celebrity in some unheard of, insular magazine?
My interview in Bazaar with Kim Kardashian came out!!!
7:48 PM Feb 9th via Twitter for iPad
I guess this doesn't even solve the mystery. I was wrong. It is equally likely that a hip, image-obsessed aide would use an iPad as that an aging, ailing, rich celebrity would bother to try out this new plebeian cyber toy. I guess T.S. Elliot was right, and the final lines of The Wasteland stand like demented statues guarding the advance of the modern world. After only 131 tweets, too.
Sure, Twitter is filled with respectful, cautious asides to the regrettable death of this famous person, but lets not forget that she was the target of a car crash suicide in a very important (and awesome) 70's novel by an established dead writer. Go check Twitter yourself, and you can probably find other people with the same perspective. What's the real tragedy here? Geopolitics? Geological Disasters? Social Media? Celebrity Death? Or that nobody read and remembered Crash, by the inimitable J.G. Ballard?
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