Wit of the Staircase itself is still online, but not all of the archives, at the time of this writing.
Theresa and Jeremy haunt my stats. The visitor frequency exhibits a classic long tail, and this tail developed a new bulge over the past couple of days for some reason. Two days running, it’s the most visited page. Maybe a butterfly flapped its wings, wherever and whenever that sort of carry-on was in season; or maybe periodic flurries of inquiry will become part of the background radiation here and in other places, online and off, which became entangled with the deaths, however tenuously, and their aftermath.
Whatever these tragic events might eventually mean, I cannot really hope to fathom — especially now that I cannot un-read some of the shit that I inevitably did read, as the days passed, and the slow-burn feeding frenzy wound itself up.
What I’ve found most difficult to understand, regarding the occasion of more than one recent demise, is the weird compulsion that surprising numbers of individuals seem to have to bob up in the midst of expressions of genuine grief and tribute, only to report that they, personally, had never heard of the deceased, and that the “fuss” is therefore somehow meaningless, contemptible and ridiculous. Suicides are often tragic, sometimes they give rise to altogether different emotions all round — but meaningless? These people worry me. I worry about their numbers. Fortunately (touch wood) I’ve not been troubled by any of that on my own porch…
Here, by way of a bouquet, is a link to the archived copies of The Wit of the Staircase in the Internet Archive, where we hope it will be safe from the ravages of.
It has already been much pored over, and it will doubtless be studied forever more. Whatever. The novelty machine may have exhausted my appetite for the present, but the mystery may yet enjoy a rich and strange afterlife.
As it happens, I think Wit deserved to be studied anyway; Wit was a class act.
How long before Variety announces prepro on a flick? Directed by Spike Jonze? Michel Gondry? PT Anderson? or (one hopes) Sophia?
I am thinking Guillermo del Toro, or (just maybe) Darren Aronofsky. Sophia would make a lot of (a different kind of) sense, though. PTA would also make sense, except that, being somewhat involved in the story, he might have to be in it (as himself) and that would be wrong for all kinds of reasons, I think…
You’re also a fan of del Toro? He is a tremendous filmmaker. Here’s a really good interview with him –
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7000935
I’m not really sure why you think he fits this story though. I think Coppola would make a very interesting film out of it.
Ooh. It’s very early in the morning for me to be summarising what I think the story’s about, but…
I think the story is a catastrophic legitimation crisis; we’ve got conflicting fantasies/subjectivities, paranoia and menace, seedy nightmarish glamour. A drama that unfolds mostly in TD’s head, against a background which is an unstable and unreliable reference point at best. The movie I have in mind is a beautiful bad trip, after which, ideally, it should be impossible to tell what “really” happened.
Yeah, I think GDT is your man.
Now I get it.
OK I’m warming to this. Cate Blanchett as TD, and Ben bloody Affleck as Jeremy Blake (yes!) and featuring whoever else we can think of with a double consonant in their name…
DJ Oualls as Beck…
I meant Qualls…
“Wit” isn’t preserved too well via the Wayback Machine(links to the archives come up blank..noticed the infamous “Anna Gaskell post” is missing too).
Think google cache may be a better tool.
I’ve just revisited Wit, the Wayback copies, and the relevant pages in Google’s cache. It seems that the famous Anna Gaskell post is not to be found in *any* of them. It would be interesting to know who is cleaning up the blog, and why. I did find an internal link from another Wit post which seems to have been missed. The absence of the archives from Wayback and from the Google cache is also a little troubling.
Gotham City Insider carried what I assume to be the full text of The Trouble With Anna Gaskell in this post.
I’ve seen reports that other items are missing from the Wit archives, but I don’t know what they are.