Mildly red

I'm back from the family visitation in Central Oregon, only mildly sunburned from the high desert sun. I was thrilled to see an unexpected new issue of the_maenad's fanzine Quasiquote in my mail pile upon my return. What else have y'all been up to while I was away?

"Stop laughing at me, Jesus!"

I feel compelled to acknowledge the death of Thomas Disch, although I'm not sure why. I don't usually note the passing of authors. Perhaps it's because it was a suicide, which he committed on the Fourth of July, perhaps in a morbid joke on Independence Day. My subject-line is from one of his stories, I don't remember which. It was about (or at least involved) a wave of fashionable suicides that followed a surge of interest in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. The line I quoted was one of the suicide notes in the story. I remember the first time I read that line and burst out laughing in astonishment at the audacity.

Thinking about it, I also remember the appearance of John Berryman in The Businessman, discovered in the afterlife being punished for his own suicide, still sporting the wounds of it. A fellow Minnesotan, a fellow poet.

When I was in college, Disch was part of a trinity of literary science fiction writers beloved to me, along with Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ. While I liked his novels, it was his short stories that particularly appealed to me. "Getting into Death" (about another suicide?), "The Asian Shore," "Angouleme," "Fun with Your New Head," "The Planet Arcadia," the incredible "Descending". What was the one where the couple get lost in a cemetery and never find their way out? Filled with a strange sense of peace and resignation in the end.

Sharee is fond of recalling that carl and I each gave her a buck-twenty-five at Moscon in 1980 so that she could buy a copy of The Fundamental Disch, which had just come out. A brilliant collection that is well worth hunting down. Come to think of it, the most money I've ever spent on a book was for a first edition (the British hardcover) of his novel, Camp Concentration.

He mocked the vain foolishness of science fiction and science fiction fans, and of humanity in general. His wit was black and acerbic. He was clearly very unhappy in the last years of his life, particularly after the death of his long time partner (and occasional co-author), Charles Naylor. I had to stop reading his LiveJournal because it was full of such bitter, bleak rants. May he rest in peace, and peace be with him. My condolences to his family and friends.