Maybe everyone here already knows this, but: Thomas M. Disch died two
days ago in New York, reportedly suicide.

Along with Delany, Vonnegut, and a handful of others, he wrote things
that seem to me like some of the greatest treasures of human culture
in the last hundred years... except I can't really tell, because to me
they're just like vital organs of my own mind and heart now.

I knew people who knew him, but I never met him -- and, to be honest,
I would've been a little afraid to meet him given the opportunity,
because the bitterness of his public persona had reached Kingsley Amis
proportions. Reading his online journal was often like looking into an
open wound, which once in a while would divulge a pearl of humor or a
ridiculously good poem. Being a selfish reader, among all the pain on
display what bothered me most was that he had never reconciled with
Chip (over something that, from the little I know about it, was too
stupid to repeat). Well, either we're all reconciled in the end, or it
won't matter.

I was going to write something about having just seen The Polymath,
but I'm too damn sad now.

Eli