disch too goes dingo, out of the endzone
Thomas Disch was a very fine science fiction writer, born in 1940, with some intermittent commercial success – or what I would call commercial success anyway. He wrote the original book on which Disney based The Brave Little Toaster, as well as such bleak masterpieces as Camp Concentration and White Fang Goes Dingo.
He and his lover Charles lived together in a rent-controlled apartment. Charles became sick, and the medical care consumed all their money. He died, and Thomas became more and more curmudgeonly, unpleasant to read, savage in his attitudes. He has been fighting to stay in his home, and the landlord won an appeal in February on the grounds that the apartment was rented to Charles, not Tom.
That makes me see the Disney still at the top in a whole new way.
His latest book, The Mind of God, is in proof, waiting to be published in September.
On July 2nd, he wrote in his blog, called Endzone, that “Short of succumbing to the madness of anorexia, I doubt I am likely to experience actual starvation before I die. Nor, I’d bet, will most of those who visit this site. But I’d also bet that most of us have felt the pinch of inflation in our daily diet.”
On the third, someone took his photograph at a book event.
On July 4th, he killed himself.
This is one of his poems..
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
(from a comment at Boing Boing).
July 8th, 2008 at 1:19 am
[...] 5: Barista reports that Disch was fighting to stay in his home and that the landlord had won an appeal on the basis that the apartment was rented out to Disch’s [...]
July 17th, 2008 at 3:17 am
Him getting kicked out of that apartment actually makes me sad. If they had been allowed to get married it would have been a different story all together. It’s sad how sometimes people waste away after the loss of a loved one.
The Brave Little Toaster was one of my favorite children’s movies. It’s sad that his life ended this way.