Hypatia and the Burning Library (pt. i)

Are we responsible for Thomas M. Disch’s Suicide? asks “Dr. Blogstein,” of the “Radio Happy Hour,” whose astonishingly rude, stupid and crass interview with Disch came two days before he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

The late Thomas M. Disch; last photo taken in last two weeks

The short answer is: who the hell do they actually think they are? They flatter themselves to even think so, and insult me by suggesting that I make such an accusation. No, Virginia, by themselves, and of their own hyper-inflated sense of their own Place in the Grand Scheme of Things, they are not “responsible” for said suicide, nor, come to think of it, are they responsible for anything at all, since responsibility in the moral sense connotes sentience, and there is nothing in their program to suggest that.

But they still don’t have a clue:

Last night, the Radio Happy Hour asked Dr. Robi Ludwig, a renowned psychotherapist, to review Mr. Disch’s interview from July 1st and look into any possible indication of Mr. Disch’s impending suicide. None were found. (sic)

Frankly, instead of hurling blame at strangers you should ask yourself as Mr. Disch’s colleagues and friends, what you could have seen or done in the months preceding his suicide. However, the smug, elitist undercurrents found in your statements prove that you think you are above possessing the intrapersonal (sic) skills necessary to allow self examination. Proving once again that IQ and EQ rarely are in tandem.

Nope. No sentience here. Just a desperate need to excuse churlishness — a quality embraced in its full flowering by the Jukes and Kallikaks of The Radio Happy Hour.

No: Disch’s suicide seems a reasonable and obvious response to a series of devastating life reversals:

Catastrophes blamed for author’s suicide
Wednesday,  July 9, 2008 3:19 AM
By Douglas Martin
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

NEW YORK — Author, poet and critic Thomas M. Disch — who twisted the inherently twisted genre of science fiction in disturbing directions, including writing his last book in the voice of God — died Friday in his Manhattan apartment. He was 68. His friend Alice K. Turner said Disch shot himself.

She and other friends told how his apartment had been devastated by a fire; then his partner of more than 30 years died; then his home in Barryville, N.Y., was flooded; and, finally, he faced eviction after he returned to the apartment.

“He was simply ground down by the sequence of catastrophes,” said his friend, novelist Norman Rush….

None of the catastrophies mentioned include The Radio Happy Hour, and rightly so. But, while Disch’s friends and admirers will discuss the particulars in far greater detail and with far greater authority than I can, it’s important to finish this up. The self-centered churlishness isn’t confined to “Dr. Blogstein,” BTW. Here’s a commenter on the New York Magazine blog, whose self-centeredness shines brilliant and adamantine, like a lit fart in a dark cesspool:

think they should have left off the rent controlled apt stuff… as a 9 to 5 ghost, i really have no empathy for people who lived in rent comp apts. but… sad to see a sci fi writer bite the dust.

By veritas723 on 07/07/2008 at 1:27pm

I chose the title of yesterday’s blog for a simple reason: ‘a failure of decency’ seems to have been, collectively, the identity of all the straws that broke the camel’s back. The Radio Happy Hour was merely one of the last. The “ghost” that calls itself “truth” is another: I don’t care about anybody who has something that I don’t. I can dismiss another writer’s life with a bit of nauseating, dismissive slang: “sad to see a sci fi writer bite the dust.”

Yeah. Sad ’bout them niggers what got lynched, too. Right, veritas?

He/she/it doesn’t have any more of a clue than The Radio Happy Hour did. From the New York Magazine piece that dumbass, er, veritas commented on:

… Aside from his speculative fiction credentials (he appeared three times on David Pringle’s authoritative list), Disch was perhaps best known to the public for his children’s book, The Brave Little Toaster, and for his evocative descriptions of Manhattan in the 1986 text-based computer game, Amnesia. But he really wanted to be known as a poet, as he told us in an interview just ten days ago: “I write poetry because I think it is the hardest thing I can do very well. And so I simply enjoy the doing of it, as an equestrian enjoys spending time on a good horse. Poetry is my good horse.” Disch, however, had stopped submitting his poems to literary journals, opting to self-publish them on his LiveJournal, where he knew he had an audience.

In his final book, The Word of God, Disch declared himself a deity and used this running commentary as a device to publish many of his poems and stories….

To have it right there in front of you, and STILL toss the insult (because you feel YOU’VE got it harder than anybody with ‘rent control’) is symptomatic of a cloddish and brain-dead zeitgeist. (There is, BTW, a reasonably complete listing of Disch articles and tributes on his publisher’s blog, at Tachyon Press).

And that, if you’ve been waiting for a ‘thesis statement” is what I’m focusing on herein. In an age that really doesn’t have much use for poetry, Disch was a poet. In an age in which Science Fiction has resoundingly triumphed — it seems incredible now to realize that in the 1950s, SF writers were referred to as “lunatics” and openly mocked for their silly ideas that anyone could go into space, or — folly of follies! — go to the MOON — SF is marginalized, a caboose on the train that is marked “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” and represents, fundamentally, concepts in Science Fiction that were outmoded by the 1930s.

It was the zeitgeist, finally, that did Disch in.

[* Zeitgeist

SYLLABICATION:    Zeit-geist
NOUN:    The spirit of the time; the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation: “It's easy to see how a student . . . in the 1940's could imbibe such notions. The Zeitgeist encouraged Philosopher-Kings” (James Atlas).
ETYMOLOGY:    German : Zeit, time (from Middle High German zt, from Old High German; see d- in Appendix I) + Geist, spirit; see poltergeist.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.  2000.]

When he started as a writer, you KNEW your publishers. Donald A. Wollheim over at ACE books eventually spun off a monogram brand called DAW Books. Ian Ballantine literally invented the modern paperback. Lester Del Rey (later with an imprint of his own, DelRey Books), etc. When Hemingway and Fitzgerald dealt with Max Perkins at Charles Scribners, and later Charles Scribners Sons, they were literally dealing with Charles Scribner and his progeny. Penguin books was originally run by ACTUAL penguins. (Not a lot of people know this.)

Those of you who’ve seen the Charles Bukowski documentary will recall Bukowski’s publisher, who went into his own pocket to make sure the poet had money to pay rent, buy cigarettes and alcohol and WRITE. That same ethos is seen in Disch’s latest publisher (pun intended) Tachyon Press, whose publisher, Jacob Weisman said this in his blog posting, yesterday:

… I’ll miss our time together. I stopped by his apartment each time I went to New York and we’d make a day of it. Tom was mostly housebound. He’d make me lunch, usually a Western Omelet, and I’d buy takeout Chinese for dinner, unless he was feeling up to going out. We’d sit and talk in Tom’s padded chairs, move to the dining room table for lunch, and then back to the chairs. He’d tell me about his travels around Europe with John Sladek, and about his encounters with Avram Davidson, Terry Carr, and Philip K. Dick. These reminiscences were usually at my request; Tom lived his life in the present. Just before his death he was writing poetry at a prodigious rate, somewhere around five hundred poems in a two year span, and posting them on his LiveJournal* blog…. [* Note: Endzone, HERE. -- HW]

Think about it, the publisher actually SPENT TIME with the writer. It’s almost as though … writing MEANT something. As if the words of a gifted poet and writer were WORTH something, had VALUE, and were worthy of cultivation. If that sounds normal to you, you are sadly off the beaten track. You see, in the 1970s and 1980s, all those book companies were bought up by conglomerates, usually with a movie studio and a record company attached, BOTH of which made so much more money than the publishing arm, that landing as the corporate manager of the poor print arm of Engulf & Devour, Inc. was the corporate equivalent of being sent to an Alaskan Arctic Radar station, or in the old USSR, being sent to Siberia.

And, understandably, those sub-managers, often with very little experience in books, spent their days in corporate exile plotting their return, ultimately contemptuous of their low station, and the denizens thereof.

Nobody who followed it won’t tell you that American publishing, once robust and the envy of the world, is but a sad shell of its former self. Over 60% of bookstore-type publishing is now owned by overseas overseers: Bertelsmann of Germany, and The Penguin Group of the UK are the largest publishers in the world. And Penguin owns the old ACE books (and a zillion other imprints). Bertelsmann, well, here’s Wikipedia, and it’s a good example of what happened to publishing during the salad days of Thomas M. Disch’s career:

Bertelsmann consists of six corporate divisions:

• RTL Group, Europe’s biggest broadcaster
• Gruner + Jahr (a magazine publisher, the biggest in Europe)
• Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), which mainly consists of 50 percent interest in Sony BMG^{[citation needed]}
• Random House, the world’s largest trade book publisher (popular literature)
• Direct Group, the world’s largest book and music club group
• Arvato AG, an international media and communications service provider

In August 2004, BMG and Sony entered a 50-50 joint venture, reducing the Big Five of music companies to the Big Four. BMG Music Publishing, the world’s third largest music publisher, stayed wholly owned by Bertelsmann and became the world’s largest independent music publisher. As of 2005, Sony BMG’s share of the music market stands at 21.5%. … Since the 1980s, Bertelsmann has expanded internationally: in 1979 it bought the American Arista label, in 1980 Bantam Books, in 1986 the label RCA Victor and the publishing house Doubleday. It has distributed Windham Hill Records since 1989. In 1992 it acquired 50% of Windham Hill Records and in 1996 it took full control. During this period the activities in the music market were bundled into the label BMG.

Yep: Bantam Books, the very symbol of the paperback trade — and Science Fiction was always paperback stuff, at least until the late 1970s. I remember SF writers in LA just gaping in astonishment, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had a NYTimes BESTSELLER! Fred Pohl had a NYT BESTSELLER! Arthur C. Clarke had a BESTSELLER! Robert Silverberg had a BESTSELLER! This was unheard of  and undreamt of in science fiction circles. When Theodore Sturgeon was a boy, growing up in Philadelphia, his stepfather told him that science fiction was PORNOGRAPHY and ripped young Ted’s collection into “postage-stamp sized” pieces.

In the late 1970s, when Thomas Disch’s On Wings of Song was published, it was published in HARDCOVER, which was a very new thing for SF. But the corporations took over, and the money never came. In his Hugo-winning nonfiction The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, the subtitle says it all, almost:

How Science Fiction Conquered the World

Which begins chapter one, “The Right to Lie”:

America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe….

We pretend that we’re going to write the Great American Novel, and that we will become rich and famous. (Most readers believe that if you’ve gotten a book in print you MUST be rich.) Sadly, while that happens just often enough to fuel the literary lottery — e.g. J.K. Rowling, broke, writing the Harry Potter books in coffee shops — it doesn’t actually happen very often. The weight of Letters falls on the impoverished shoulders of writers scratching out a meager living in the great barnyard and hoo-haw of publishing.

As Ambrose Bierce quoted the old saw: “The publisher drinks wine from the author’s skull.”

Worse, since Hollywood was set up by the great Eastern theater families, the Schuberts, the Laemmles, et al, the motion picture production model was consciously designed to castrate writers, to remove them from the creative process and financial rewards. Undoubtedly, the prima donna egos of many a Broadway playwright contributed to the desire to make screenwriters powerless and ineffectual, but it doesn’t excuse the reductio ad absurdam of screen writers.

Quick: name me three screen writers.

Get the point?

And, as the despised “crop” of the despised arm of the mega-conglomerate, the writer has been reduced to a cheap vaudeville act, driving his beat-up tin lizzy from city to city, “performing” on the radio, at book store “signings” and “readings,” occasionally picking up honoraria for speaking to a college or university, none of which is either facilitated nor promoted by the publisher.

The author is now responsible for his own bookings, he is his own theatrical agent, and often — as I watched ACLU President Nadine Strossen at the World Pornography Conference at the Universal Sheraton in Hollywood in 1999 — with an icy and desultury ennui, opposed by their very publisher! The publisher was to have shipped a box of books for Strossen to sign/sell, and either forgot or shipped on a slow boat to China, as the books never appeared throughout the Conference.

Given that her peers in the area of First Amendment law were all present, her publisher didn’t merely inconvenience the author, but actively FUCKED her –  metaphorically, of course.

And if the President of the ACLU is treated thus by publishers, what chances have you, newbie authors? It is an obscenity that has robbed our society of thought, and our civilization of its very civility. The contempt of the subliterate for our literacy has actively promoted subliteracy — TV and movies by writers who aren’t really writers, who haven’t really, actually read.

Of all the horrors of media concentration, this is the subtlest, but the one with the most far-reaching consequences.

But who could hope to compete with Bertelsmann? It is hard, if not to say, impossible, to imagine THAT publisher visiting aging, ailing shut-in Tom Disch in his New York apartment. Just as it is impossible to imagine the nurturing, the necessary human interaction of a generation of publishers that was denied as Disch’s generation came to maturity. For the first time since ancient Greece, writing was not particularly valued as a necessary adjunct to civilization, and civilization suffered for it.

But authors suffered more. Gone were the magazines and editors who would put together (as did one of mine) $1000 in payments owed, and pieces I’d write in the future, so that I could put a down-payment down on a car when my motorcycle was stolen in 1980. Gone was that publisher who would wire a writer stranded in Europe — following a vicious mugging — enough money to fly home. Gone was the human touch of understanding that, finally, writing is about paying one’s rent.

Rather than waste time on the publishing divisions, the conglomerates needed to make money. Cold hard, theoretical cash (since most of it was never actually represented by any coins or bills, but as electronic tallies running through the international banking system).

Rather than promote authors (whose profits are not instantaneous, nor whose impact is immediate, but whose visions ultimate move the world far further and faster than the latest pop sensation), book publishers became, in addition to corporate Siberia, the place to do “tie-ins” to get that much-touted “synergetic” effect of having the network promoting the movie, selling the soundtrack (and promoting the career of the company’s contract music star), and selling the novelization, and the coloring books. That last is probably the most interesting product to the Greater Beast from the point of view of their publishing arm’s profitability.

William Kotzwinkle, that gifted author of Dr. Rat and other amazing novels, became best-known for having done the novelization of the movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which is the sort of hack work that keeps the rent paid and the typewriter greased and in dark ribbons. That is not to say that one must DO crappy work, having accepted it: Thomas M. Disch wrote a novelization of the British television series (in ‘colour’) The Prisoner, and was, by all accounts, proud of his work.

The Prisoner Novels

The three authorized Ace novels of The Prisoner are of special interest beyond adding stories to the short canon of Prisoner adventures. They are noteworthy as each appeared several years after the series demise and were not part of any attempt to promote a show no longer on the air. In addition, they demonstrated a variety of interpretations about the meaning of the show.

Distinguished SF author Thomas Disch wrote the first enigmatic paperback sequel simply titled The Prisoner (1969). In this novel, Number Six learned he’s been brainwashed to forget much of his past in an attempt to make him the new, hopefully more reliable Number Two. When the story ends, Six finds Number One was a female robot who loses her hand….

Disch wrote his best stuff, as much as he could. This is a strange, incomprehensible profession, and you will get as many interpretations as to what writing is, as you will find writers.*

[* More, in fact, since many writers are active schizophrenics, and/or Librans.]

Disch GAVE us the gift of his last poetry on his blog site Endzone.

Probably because it would actually be READ, and not, as short writing and poetry has become, an endless line of submissions to magazines that will never pay their promised peanuts and may never actually see the light of day. American publishing became too anemic in the 1970s to support much more than itself, and with the advent of the internet, and the phenomenon of blogging, American writers have responded with the savage tradeoff, ‘I can’t get paid, but at LEAST I can get read.’ And Tom Disch gave us his concentrated poetic output of 2007-2008 — which was prodigious.

And, it’s good stuff. Brilliant stuff, and I’d strongly suggest that you get over there and read what the late poet gave you for free. Odds are that the executor of the estate will realize the cash value of those poems, and remove them from the web, ¡muy pronto! (Tonto.) Entirely too much psychobabble nonsense was written into interpreting Disch’s last blog posting by the Telegraph (UK), but the posting itself is illuminating, nonetheless:

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

10:16 am

Inflation/ Starvation/ Fun 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. I remember the rapid evolution of low-cost middle-class A & P into up-scale, twice-the-price Food Emporium with no practical difference except the prices and the phasing out of cooking staples, a process still barely begun in most supermarkets. The eventual goal is shelves stocked only with bachelor commodities–breadfast (sic) cereal, frozen entrees for dieters, and bellywash in small bottles. Cooking gas will be rationed in winter as people try to heat their urban apartments with their ovens. Etc. I’m curious as to where we are on that scale now. How has your own diet been affected? I had sticker shock this week when I found that a “low-cost” lunch has climbed from $5 to $10/15 in just the last couple years. The Tv advertises a $5 slice of pizza as a bargain. I don’t see how teens can get by unless they are dealing drugs or balling for dollars. But that’s just me. Maybe there have been no changes in your part of Omaha at all. Just curious.

What’s important here is watching yourself as an old man, about to be kicked out of your apartment that you’ve lived in for decades — a place where you’re a shut in, and are now looking at the collapse of the dollar and, thus, your pantry. It is remarkably good-humored for someone about to be interviewed by Jukes and Kallikaks. There is no hint of doom in it. But try this:

Saturday, June 21st, 2008
9:23 am
In Memoriam

to D-Con, with thanks

He went down the chute just now,
a paper towel for his shroud
and a big Premium cracker box
for a coffin. He had taken care
to come out from behind the oven
and die in plain sight. But
(a good feminist may ask) why
do I suppose he was a boy-mouse?
Might not the corpse as likely have been
a girl’s? Well, I checked his genetalia
and he had the cutest little pecker
that ever incited a mouse to acts of love.

3:03 am
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

This isn’t a suicide note. It’s art. And there’s something that strikes me, before we turn, at last, to The Radio Happy Hour’s savage interview. It’s called post partum depression.

part two follows immediately.

Courage.

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