Doomed and famous : selected obituaries ; chiefly of contemporaries

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Title:

Doomed and famous : selected obituaries ; chiefly of contemporaries

Author:

Dannatt, Adrian author.

ISBN:

9780997567472

Physical Description:

317 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Subject Term:

Obituaries.

Death notices.

Celebrities -- Obituaries.

Added Author:

Guinness, Hugo

Summary:

An obituarist opens his archive to celebrate the obscure and the eccentric. In Doomed and Famous, an obituarist opens his archive in celebration of the most marginal and improbable characters, creating a meta-fiction of extinction and obscurity. For many decades Adrian Dannatt tracked and dredged the dead, with a macabre disregard for the etiquette of mortality. His specialty, much in demand among even the most mainstream publications, was to memorialize those whose eccentricity or criminality made them unlikely candidates for the fleeting immortality of a newspaper necrology. Dannatt maintained a veritable lust, perverse certainly, for capturing and celebrating such wayward existences. This book is a selection of some of the best—meaning most improbable—of these miniature biographies. Here are arranged an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world's rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum, and many others. Dannatt terminates this volume with his own putative extinction, performing the difficult if not dangerous task of penning his personal life history and ultimate end.

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Stillwater Public Library	920 DAN	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

An obituarist opens his archive to celebrate the obscure and the eccentric. In Doomed and Famous , an obituarist opens his archive in celebration of the most marginal and improbable characters, creating a meta-fiction of extinction and obscurity. For many decades Adrian Dannatt tracked and dredged the dead, with a macabre disregard for the etiquette of mortality. His specialty, much in demand among even the most mainstream publications, was to memorialize those whose eccentricity or criminality made them unlikely candidates for the fleeting immortality of a newspaper necrology. Dannatt maintained a veritable lust, perverse certainly, for capturing and celebrating such wayward existences. This book is a selection of some of the best-meaning most improbable-of these miniature biographies.
Here are arranged an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world's rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum, and many others. Dannatt terminates this volume with his own putative extinction, performing the difficult if not dangerous task of penning his personal life history and ultimate end.

Author Notes

Adrian Dannatt is a writer, curator, editor and artist. His fiction and poetry has been published in anthologies including Best British Short Stories and PEN New Poetry and his books include the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum , Wim Delvoye , and most recently Les Lalanne- In the Domain of Dreams .

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this fascinating compilation, journalist Dannatt (Francois-Xavier and Les Lalanne: In the Domain of Dreams) assembles a collection of obituaries of artists, vagrants, and luminaries who lived particularly captivating lives. He writes in the preface that he's drawn to "the truly marginal, utterly obscure, mad, bad, and definitely worrying" and to those who have "failed or succeeded in a way that made such terms intriguing again." These include German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953--1997), who died "after a long, terminal battle with disco dancing, indiscriminate fornication, and, above all, drinking"; Rockets Redglare (1949--2001), a prolific New York character actor who delivered drugs to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen at the Chelsea Hotel the night Spungen died; and Isabelle Collin Dufresne (1935--2014), aka Ultra Violet, who appeared in several Warhol films, had an affair with Salvador Dalí, and "drank his urine to improve her genius level." The book concludes with the author's own (preliminary) obituary, in which he recounts being a child star in the U.K. before going to seminary and eventually becoming an obituarist. The best moments lie in Dannatt's musings on death itself, as, in death, "everything comes together as one giant, cosmic anecdote." Dannatt's collection is easy to dip into and difficult to put down. (Feb.)

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Publisher's Weekly Review

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