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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

20 Comments

  1. Tim B.
    January 11, 2016 @ 10:14 am

    Gutted. First memory of his work for me was seeing the Ashes to Ashes video in1980 as an 8 year old on top of the pops. Don’t really have any great insight into how I felt at the time, just remember it been weird.

    Had booked the day off work to get my alarm repaired, looks like I’ll be listening to BBC 6 Music all day.

    Reply

  2. William Shaw
    January 11, 2016 @ 10:44 am

    I wrote a 900-word thing on my won blog, but I don’t want to spam the comments section here too much, so here’s my favourite part of it:
    – I remember going through a bit of a rough patch last year. I won’t go into details, but it was a period of a few weeks where I was often lonely and frequently miserable. During this period, I listened to ‘Sound and Vision’ a lot. It’s about three minutes long, and captures that sense of isolation more perfectly than any poem or song I have yet come across. It is also the pop music equivalent of that thing you’d do at school where you’d write an essay about how you couldn’t think of anything to write. I listened to it a lot in the groggy early mornings, usually while shaving, clearing away the detritus and getting ready to go out.

    Reply

  3. Goodluck
    January 11, 2016 @ 11:35 am

    I’d love to see an attempt by Phil and/or Jane on analysing some of the symbolism from the “Blackstar” film clip. I think it’s just bursting with occult iconography, not to mention the song itself feels like walking into some strange, ethereal nexus.

    Reply

  4. carey
    January 11, 2016 @ 11:50 am

    I was going to whiteout a huge essay of how my life was changed by David Bowie, got halfway through it and thought, no. All I can say is that the only other celebrity death that has affected me this much was John Peel, and for pretty well the same reason: he was there for me (whether he cared or not) during my developmental years and gave me clues as to how to navigate my way through life. I’ll miss his presence.

    Reply

  5. anther
    January 11, 2016 @ 11:55 am

    Reply

  6. David Faggiani
    January 11, 2016 @ 12:27 pm

    Was enjoying this appropriately gender-swapped Soulwax Bowie mix/film all over again. RIP, David. https://vimeo.com/53207758

    Reply

  7. Tristan Alfaro
    January 11, 2016 @ 12:53 pm

    It’s weird being genuinely heartbroken and upset about the death of someone I never met. But David Bowie’s music, talent, Sound & Vision are so deeply embedded in my soul. He touched us all, falling to earth and then taking off again on a Fantastic Voyage. I’ll miss you, Starman.

    Reply

  8. T. Hartwell
    January 11, 2016 @ 1:51 pm

    Gutted. Bowie was one of the first non-musical theatre artists I really got into, and had a huge impact on my pop tastes and a whole bunch of other stuff. Didn’t think I’d feel as devastated as this, but here we are. R.I.P. 🙁

    Reply

  9. Jez Noir
    January 11, 2016 @ 2:26 pm

    He made an existentialist out of me. And even with the anxieties that brings, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

    Reply

  10. William McCormick
    January 11, 2016 @ 3:52 pm

    Kieron Gillen wrote a beautiful Wic/Div tribute piece to Bowie on his Tumblr.

    http://kierongillen.tumblr.com/post/137082108847/immortality-of-a-kind

    As for myself…Bowie was just kind of always there. My mother was a huge fan so he was part of the soundtrack of my youth. For him to be gone feels kind of hard to process. It’s like waking up and there are no more stars. You might not have thought about stars recently, but you sure as hell feel the absence.

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  11. Chris C
    January 11, 2016 @ 4:06 pm

    “Where the fuck did Monday go?” -lyric from the album

    Reply

  12. Richard Pugree
    January 11, 2016 @ 5:37 pm

    I’ve started to comment several times but haven’t been able to find the right words yet. Other than that I am devastated; more than I would have thought I might be.

    Reply

  13. Chris
    January 11, 2016 @ 6:12 pm

    Early in his career, he took the idea of a stage persona to new levels, blurring the line between fact and fiction. And with the frequent changes to persona, “David Bowie” became more of a concept than a man. David Jones has passed, but the concept he created lives on. It will live on in everybody who is inspired by his work, everyone who experiences it. There will never be a resurgence or rediscovery because he will not fade away. It’s said that everyone dies two deaths: the first is physical and the second is when nobody remembers you. It will take the heat death of the universe to end David Bowie, and even then I’m not too sure.

    Reply

  14. Anton B
    January 11, 2016 @ 8:10 pm

    Would love to write something deep and meaningful and I probably will on my own blog but I just can’t find the words right now. Bowie influenced my every move as a teenager and well into my twenties and thirties. He was responsible for me forming bands, experimenting with music and noise and electronica, discovering the power of image, becoming an actor and creating a theatre company. I saw him live four times, on the Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, Thin White Duke and Serious Moonlight tours. I just wish I could have thanked him personally for everything he gave me.
    His lasting legacy will be not only his own work but also the influence he had on others.

    Reply

    • Anton B
      January 13, 2016 @ 12:23 am

      http://antonbinder.blogspot.co.uk/

      Finally got my response down. So difficult to express everything I wanted to.

      “I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to say. So I just wrote some love today”

      Reply

  15. arcbeatle
    January 11, 2016 @ 8:53 pm

    Reply

  16. John Seavey
    January 12, 2016 @ 9:53 pm

    Weirdly enough, I find myself thinking more and more of Lawrence Miles’ first Faction Paradox novel, ‘This Town Will Never Let Us Go’. One of the characters in there is a big-time celebrity, and she’s in the process of a metamorphosis–she’s transforming into a memetic lifeform, something that only exists in the sphere of ideas, and leaving her physical body behind.

    David Bowie’s last days have the feel of a ritual designed to do exactly that.

    Reply

  17. Harlequin
    January 14, 2016 @ 3:32 am

    I had a couple of friends round. As I had been planning to do for one but had neglected on a previous visit, I read out Dr Sandifer’s piece on ‘Ziggy Stardust’ (from the book, starting with ‘Space Oddity’ and ending with ‘Ashes to Ashes’), punctuating the sections with the actual music. Then two of us consumed some MDMA. Sometime later, we slept.

    That was Sunday night/Monday morning. Around 10am, with ‘Ziggy’ still in my head. I was woken by the distraught and tear-stained face of a friend breaking the news to me.

    Later, we went to Brixton and we were not alone.

    Reply

  18. Daru
    January 15, 2016 @ 8:46 am

    Not had time to comment and spent the week with little sleep due to extreme pain all the way down one arm that was the result of holding onto a tent one-handed in a storm on a mad camping trip in Somerset at the tail end of the New Year. Can type now.

    So sad at this news as Bowie was a huge personal muse for me, not just with his music and songwriting but also his acting and painting. Going to go through the entirety of ‘Pushing Ahead of the Dame’ and revisit all of his work.

    In a way, it is David Robert Jones who is dead and it is David Bowie, as John Seavey suggests above, that will remain alive through the matrix.

    Reply

  19. Doctor Memory
    January 17, 2016 @ 10:30 pm

    And there he goes: the last celebrity whose death I will cry over. It will be cause for reflection when Little Richard, McCartney and Jagger go, and when Stevie Wonder and Prince pass we will have lost the only other musicians of my childhood with a similar breadth and depth of career, but while in many ways the artistic inferior of all of the above, Bowie mattered to me, to my chosen tribe, in a way that they did not.

    If you were one of the weird kids, if gender and sexuality in your youth seemed to be littered with asterisks, footnotes and question marks that were invisible to your peers: inevitably, you found Bowie. (He was there, even in his weird “just kidding” phase in the 80s, where you were pretty sure you could see him winking, or at least you hoped you could.) He wasn’t your friend, you didn’t kid yourself that you would hang out with him, but he was a star in the old sense: something that you navigated by.

    Reply

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