Thomas S. Disch Feb 2, 1940 - July 4, 2008

Suicide says wikipedia.

Copped from boingboing:

The Art of Dying

Mallarmé drowning
Chatterton coughing up his lungs
Auden frozen in a cottage
Byron expiring at Missolonghi
and Hart Crane visiting Missolonghi and dying there too

The little boot of Sylvia Plath wedged in its fatal stirrup
Tasso poisoned
Crabbe poisoned
T.S. Eliot raving for months in a Genoa hospital before he died
Pope disappearing like a barge in a twilight of drugs

The execution of Marianne Moore
Pablo Neruda spattered against the Mississippi
Hofmannsthal's electrocution
The quiet painless death of Robert Lowell
Alvarez bashing his bicycle into an oak

The Brownings lost at sea
The premature burial of Thomas Gray
The baffling murder of Stephen Vincent Benét
Stevenson dying of dysentery
and Catullus of a broken heart

-- Tom Disch

RIP! he was awesome. he was a true multi-genre phenom. those later horror novels - The M.D., The Priest, etc - are INSANE! poetry, awesome sci-fi, and the brave little toaster!!!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5d/TheGenocides.jpg

People regularly disappear.
Some simply return to the burrows
they've lived in and die among friends.
Some take holidays: you may have received
their postcards and seashells. But many more
are murdered. The numbers are astonishing.
Corpses disintegrate in woodland graves
or, submerged, are home
to the seaworm and the ray.
We are entering an era
when men will die like flies,
swept off by floods, shoved
into pits by bulldozers, or starving
en masse as they cling
to the prison bars. Oh, the world
is a terrible, unkind place. But wasn't that
always the case? Let's sing something
together. Maybe that will help.

Why I Must Die: a Film Script

We had had many pre-death services
already with scraps of chewy food
and 5-liter boxes of vin merde
and rations of that scarcest commodity
free speech, precious now almost
as gas, as tears They drill holes
in the storage tanks to get to it
It gushes out like living sperm
a great white awakening Think of the moment
in The Matrix when one realizes we
are the sleeping prisoners
of giant spiders from outer space
whose ships fill our skies like angelic guards
patrolling the border between the horror
of Texas and the horror of Babylon
for not all that much has changed since Then
fire still burns water still drowns
except now it's not just the Euphrates
it's all the rivers that are rising
and the seas Will the soil still be arable
once Carthage is deleted? Will we be able
to eat the tomatoes? But hush!
I see a snitch Follow me into the sewer
We'll be safe underground

Fuck. This is an awful capper to an already not so great day.

Fundamental Disch is one of the greatest short story collections you'll ever read.

RIP.

Some more background...

Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008
Posted by Patrick at 04:37 PM * 27 comments
Ellen Datlow writes:

I’ve just found out that Tom Disch committed suicide in his apartment on July 4th. He was found by a friend who lives a few blocks away.

I’m shocked, saddened, but not very surprised. Tom had been depressed for several years and was especially hit by the death of his longtime partner Charles Naylor. He also was very worried about being evicted from the rent controlled apartment he lived in for decades.

Scott Edelman quotes John Clute’s entry on Disch in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia:

Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distant mannerism of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the fine cruelty of his wit, Thomas M. Disch has been perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers.

I certainly read him; his SF novels of the 1960s and 70s, particularly Camp Concentration and 334, had an enormous impact on me. But “least read” may be true: according to publishing legend, his SF masterpiece On Wings of Song had a 90% return rate in its 1980 Bantam paperback edition. Despite that, he went on to hit bestseller lists with his 1991 horror novel The M.D. Just as unexpectedly, his children’s book The Brave Little Toaster was adapted into a popular Disney cartoon.

He could be hard to take, both in person and in his public interactions with the SF world. He played the game of literary politics hard, and sometimes lost badly. He frequently seemed to have no patience for his allies, much less his enemies. Of his other career, as noted poet Tom Disch, I can’t say much, except that to my mind the poetry was often good. In his later years he wrote a blog; after he began to post frequently on the depravity of Muslims and immigrants, I became unable to keep reading it.

The Disch I prefer to remember was no nicer than that, but much smarter: a brittle and brilliant ironist with a bright wit and no optimism whatsoever. Here are the concluding lines of his 1965 SF novel The Genocides, a book wedged forever up the nose of overweening skiffy can-do-ism:

Nature is prodigal. Of a hundred seedlings only one or two would survive; of a hundred species, only one or two.
Not, however, man.

Damn, a shocker. RIP.

Final blog entry

Until this thread, I'd forgotten just how many of his stories I've read over the years but never quite identified as being his. I guess that's the point made in the copy/paste upthread. I haven't followed any of his recent fiction though admittedly I've responded more to his recent non-fiction than his novels - "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" is one of the best agitprop critiques of SF out there and I'd always be on the lookout for his occasional articles in The Nation.

His short stories are pretty goddamn essential (kinda shocked to learn that he wrote all these when he was in his twenties), but if I had to pick any of the collections it would be "Fun With Your New Head." One of the few folks who took the promise of Classic New Wave SF as a launching pad for greater good. And hey, PKD thought that Disch was a communist agent.

RIP

RIP and i need to read more of his stuff.

"Then, when I was 22, and a junior in college, I had what we then spoke of as a nervous breakdown. I didn't want to take my finals. I hadn't studied for them, and I couldn't ace a calculus test without studying, so I was faced with this crisis. At the same time, I knew, somehow, that if I sat down the weekend that I was having my nervous breakdown and wrote a story, it would be publishable, that I was ready to write a publishable story. So I wrote "The Double-Timer," which was seven and a half thousand words. It was the first story I wrote thinking, "this could be published." And it was. And I never took my make-ups."

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20010730/interview.shtml

I'm kinda shocked and very bummed - Camp Concentration and 354 (or whatever that numbered one is) are really really great.

NYT obit

RIP

LA Times obit.

All the official obits seem to place his middle initial as M. Sorry Tom, don't know where I got that.

Sad. Great writer.

Weird. I just read "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" a few months ago.

RIP.

http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0904_05/onbooks.shtml

It's been a long time since I thought of anything by Spinrad, but that makes up for it all.

just finished Fun With Your New Head collection - Now is Forever! what a great story

“Well, Phil,” I replied in like mode off the top of my head, “personally I can’t stand Orange County. But on the other hand, you can always kill yourself later.”

Although Spinrad finds it ridiculously off-the-wall, I seem to recall something in Dick's bio (I Am Alive And You Are Dead) about Dick thinking he was an FBI informant anyway. No idea if that's credible or not though since that bio is pretty off-the-wall.

So Fun With Your New Head was first published in the UK with the title Under Compulsion? One of the stories, "The City Of Penetrating Light," seems to have been written from the point of view of Tuomas.

Did not know about this: http://www.jamescumminsbookseller.com/news/?p=59

Although Spinrad finds it ridiculously off-the-wall, I seem to recall something in Dick's bio (I Am Alive And You Are Dead) about Dick thinking he was an FBI informant anyway. No idea if that's credible or not though since that bio is pretty off-the-wall.

Actually, I recall from a book of PKD's letters that he tried to inform on Disch to the FBI for supposedly including secret neo-Nazi codes in "Camp Concentration". (Dick claimed he had been approached by the same group and asked to put the codes in his own books.) Funny, that in the book the letter to the FBI is right next to one to Disch telling him what a great book "Camp Concentration" is.

As I reach the end of Fun With Your New Head (and I wish I could get 60s/70s Terry Gilliam to animate that) I realize I need to read everything I can find by Disch. I'm just in awe.

Animate the story "Fun With Your New Head," that is.

Have a library copy of Yes, Let's: New and Selected Poems, by Tom Disch, which I need to read and return. Thing is totally out of print, feel like I should commit it to memory.

Also, what's up with that Lion King treatment?

Also, wonder if this was ever posted here: http://www.danagioia.net/essays/edisch2.htm

On Wings of Song

read it