Thomas M. Disch

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Thomas Michael Disch (February 2, 1940-2007), an American science fiction author and poet, was born in Dublin, the United States.

In 1999, he received the Hugo Award for Best Related Book, originally called "Best Non-Fiction Book," and he had two other Hugo nominations and nine Nebula Award nominations, as well as two other Seiun Awards. His work first appeared in science-fiction magazines in the 1960s.

The Genocides, Camp Concentration, and 334 are three of his critically acclaimed science fiction books, which are among the New Wave science fiction series.

In 1996, Disch's book The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1999, he received the Nonfiction Hugo for Our Stuff Is Made Of, a reflection on science fiction's impact on our culture, as well as the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse.

He wrote theatre and opera reviews for The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals as part of his nonfictional writing.

As Tom Disch, he published several volumes of poetry. Following a long period of depression following Charles Naylor's death in 2005, Disch stopped writing entirely, except for poetry and blog entries, although he did produce two novellas.

Disch killed himself by gunshot in his apartment in Manhattan, New York City, on July 4, 2008.

Naylor and Disch are buried at Saint Johns Episcopal Church Columbarium, Dubuque, Iowa, alongside each other.

His last book, The Word of God, was written only days before Naylor's death and was published just a few days before Disch's death.

Early life

On February 2, 1940, Disch was born in Des Moines, Iowa. Helen, his mother, home-schooled him for a year due to the polio epidemic in 1946. As a result, he went from kindergarten to second grade. Disch's first formal education was at Catholic colleges, as can be seen in some of his books that contain scathing critiques of the Catholic Church. The family moved from St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, reunited both parents and grandparents, where Disch attended both public and Catholic schools. Disch discovered his long-term passions for science fiction, drama, and poetry in Saint Paul public schools. Poetry, he says, is his stepping-stone to the literary world. Jeannette Cochran, a teacher at St. Paul Central, was given 100 lines of poetry to memorize; Disch ended up memorizing ten times as much. His early fascination with poetry and criticism influenced his later work.

After graduating from high school in 1957, he worked as a summer draftsman, just one of the many jobs on his path to becoming a writer. He discovered a Manhattan apartment and began to channel his energies in many directions at the age of 17. He appeared as an extra at the Metropolitan Opera House in productions of Spartacus for the Bolshoi Ballet, Swan Lake for the Royal Ballet, and Don Giovanni, Tosca and others for the Met. He began working at a bookstore and then at a newspaper. A penniless, friendless adolescent who attempted suicide by gas oven at the age of 18, but he was unable to pay the gas bill because he didn't have enough funds to pay the bill. He enlisted in the army later this year. Disch's incompatibility with the military forces resulted in a nearly three-month commitment to a mental hospital.

After being discharged, Disch returned to New York and continued to study the arts in a more personal way. He worked in bookstores and as a copywriter. Later in life, some of these careers paid off; working as a cloak room attendant in New York theater culture allowed him to explore his lifelong passion of drama and led to his career as a staged drama reviewer. He went back to school and got another job with an insurance company. After a brief flirtation with architecture, he decided to apply to Cooper Union, where he was told he received the highest score on their entrance exam ever, but he dropped out after a few weeks. He then enrolled in night school at New York University (NYU), where lectures on novella writing and utopian fiction piqued his interest for some of the common science fiction genres and topics. In May 1962, he decided to write a short story rather than sitting for his midterm exams. To the magazine Fantastic, he sold the story "The Double Timer" for $112.50. He did not return to NYU in a literary career, but rather a string of odd jobs like bankteller, mortuary assistant, and copy editor – all of which fuelled what he described as his nighttime "writing habit." He wrote more science fiction stories in the next few years, but he also went back to poetry; his first published poem, "Echo and Narcissus," appeared in the Minnesota Review's Summer 1964 issue.

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Career

Disch's younger adventure tales of its older style were being challenged in a more mature, darker style. Disch did not want to compete with mainstream writers on the New York literary scene, but instead of aiming for mainstream writers, she began to publish in science fiction and literary magazines and began to speak out with a new voice. In a long review of SF Impulse, Brian W. Aldiss singled it out for praise in 1965. In English author Michael Moorcock's New Wave magazine, he had published a large part of his early science fiction, including his sixth book Camp Concentration in two installments.

Disch travelled extensively and lived in England, Spain, Rome, and Mexico. Despite this, he was a New Yorker for the past 20 years of his life, owning a long-time New York home overlooking Union Square. "A city like New York, to my knowledge, is the world's largest city."

Writing had dominated his life. Disch referred to his personal change from dilettante to "someone who knows what he wants to do and is so occupied doing it that he doesn't have much time for anything else." He wrote Camp Concentration and 334 after The Genocides. More books have been published, including science fiction and stories, gothic works, analysis, plays, a libretto for an opera of Frankenstein, prose and verse children's books, as well as ten poetry collections. With a quartet set in Minneapolis, he went from science fiction to horror in the 1980s: The Businessman, The Priest, and The Submarine.

His writing includes extensive periodical scholarship, including regular book and theater reviews for The Nation, Harper's, The Washington Times, Harper's, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and Entertainment Weekly. At the College of William & Mary, recognition for his award-winning books culminated in a year as "artist-in-residence." Disch found his way into new genres and genres throughout his long and varied career. Disch, both a fiction writer and a poet, was cast in a science fiction story. "I have a class theory of literature." I came from the wrong neighborhood to sell to The New Yorker. No matter how talented I am as an artist, they can always remember where I come from."

Though Disch was a fan of and acquaintance with author Philip K. Dick, Dick's book Camp Concentration revealed that he wrote a notorious obnoxious letter to the FBI in October 1972 that denied Disch and suggested that coded messages were triggered by a clandestine group. Disch was unaware that he would continue to champion the Philip K. Dick Award. However, Disch's In his last book, Dick has retaliated against Dick, writing a tale in which Dick is dead and living in Hell, but he was unable to write due to writer's block. He makes a deal to go back in time and kill Disch's father in order that Disch will never be born, and also ensure that Hitler wins World War II. In a blog post, Disch also mentioned Dick, "May he rot in hell, and may his royalties corrupt his heirs to the seventh generation."

With his partner, poet and fiction writer Charles Naylor, he shared his Manhattan apartment and a house in Barryville, New York. Despite being out as a gay man after 1968, and this portion of his life was not foregrounded in his writing: "I'm gay myself, but I don't write 'gay' literature." In interviews, he rarely discussed his sexuality, though he was interviewed by The Body Politic in 1981, a Canadian gay periodical. After Naylor's death in 2005, Disch had to leave the house, as well as fight attempts to depose him from his rent-controlled apartment, and he became steadily more distraught. He wrote about a LiveJournal account from April 2006 to his death (he shot himself by gunshot), in which he published poetry and journal entries. Peter Swirski, a literary critic who died in September and October 2007, conducted an email interview with Disch about his book The M.D. A Horror Story and 334. Excerpts from these conversations were published in Swirski's 2010 book Literature, Analytically Speaking – Chapter 7 is mainly about The M.D. With Disch responding to questions with humor and irony, Disch is addressing the questions with humour and humour.

Disch was both a vocal atheist and a satirist, and Tachyon Publications' Word of God was his first book. The Wall of America, Disch's last published work, features speculative fiction from the first half of his career. The bulk of his literary short fiction was not published after 1976 (although a tale from The Hudson Review was published in 2008). He had a devoted blog right up to the end of his life.

Disch created the interactive fiction text adventure Amnesia in 1986, which may be played on the Commodore 64, IBM PC, or Apple II computers. The title, which is based on Cognetics' Charles Kreitzberg's technology, was developed by Don Daglow and programmed by Kevin Bentley. It displayed Disch's vibrant writing, a sharp contrast to other game-programmer-written text adventures of the time, as well as his love for the city of New York's high energy. Although the text adventure style was dying by the time Amnesia was released and it had limited success, the game pioneered concepts that would later become popular in game design by allowing the player to explore every street corner in the city's quest to advance the story. Despite the fact that only floppy disk storage capacity of the 1980s computers reduced much of Disch's original text about the city, many Manhattan addresses and people were referred to with a special loving distortion through the Disch lens. In his essay "You Are What You Read," David Lehman singled out "Amnesia" for praise in Newsweek (January 12, 1987). In an interview with Lehman, he asked Disch about the source of "Amnesia." "I forget" is the word that comes to mind," Lehman said. "It's true," Disch said. "I forget my own life all the time," amnesia was a natural topic for me."

Disch was also known for his theater work, from 1987 to 1993, as the nation's resident, his meta-historical stage adaptation of Ben-Hur, and his controversies regarding verse monologue/poem, The Cardinal Detoxes. Both plays were produced and presented by Jeff Cohen and the RAPP Arts Center in Alphabet City, New York. Ben-Hur not only told the tale of the famous Biblical book, but also delves into the life and times of its author, Lew Wallace, a proto-American general. Disch dismisses the belief that Wallace penned Ben-Hur, in part, to deny his guilt over Mary Surratt's execution. Time magazine selected Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore in 1989 as a Critics' Choice.

The Cardinal Detoxes had a simple belief: a Catholic Bishop was guilty of vehicular assault while driving inebriated and is incarcerated in a monastic "drying tank" where he is sure he is being bugged by the higher-ups. He's trying to get his freedom by blackmailing the Church with all of its dirty information, both large and small. The play was produced at RAPP, which is located in the former Most Holy Redeemer School, and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York gave it a cease and desist order. Mervyn Rothstein's article was picked up around the world on the AP wire, and the game became one of the most notable censorship scandals of the 1990s. After the American Civil Liberties Union refused to bring the lawsuit, Disch and RAPP were represented by William Kunstler and Ron Kuby, and the Archdiocese lost in court. The theater company's answer was to lock the theater out of their building and have the Director jailed. Fortunately, The Cardinal Detoxes became as popular for its literary merits as well as its controversy. In Best of American Poetry 1994 and later in Best of The Best American Poetry 1988--1997, it was selected.

Robin Willoughby of Buffalo, New York, translated his short story "The Squirrel Cage" in 1985, which was included in his book Fun With Your New Head. Tim Kloth's composition was inspired by him. Any phanage has taken a single individual captive by some unknown entity.

Law enforcement?

Foreign country?

Aliens?

Is he there for punishment, examination, or entertainment? An unheard and unheard group of musicians who perform in reaction to his musings surrounds the performer on stage.

Disch's first published poems, though not published until 1972, were published with the stories and novels that made his name in the 1960s. Although he targeted his poetry at a new audience than his fiction, he ended up simplifying his by-line from Thomas M. Disch to Tom Disch – both genres emerged from the same rising consciousness and evolving times. His poetry includes experiments within conventional frameworks, such as a collaborative sonnet cycle with Marilyn Hacker and Charles Platt and Haikus of an AmPart, though others such as The Dark Old House Mix are more confined and freeform. He often uses humour and irony in his poems, as well as other writers.

Disch's reputation as a poet was solidified by a 1989 mid-career retrospective collection titled Yes, Let's. In 1991, Dark Verses & Light, a book of new poetry, was published. Disch produced two collections of poetry criticism between 1995 and 2002. He continued to publish poetry in magazines and journals like Poetry, Light, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and even Theology Today, which was perhaps an odd choice for a long-serving Catholic). In four editions of The Best American Poetry, Disch's poems were anthologized, including those edited by John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, A. R. Ammons, and John Hollander. The Castle of Indolence: Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters, as well as Poetasters and Poetasters. The Castle of Perseverance: Contemporary Poetry's Two Collections. His poetry explores what makes poetry work, what makes it famous, and how poetry can reclaim a place in modern popular culture.

He stopped writing poetry to literary journals until the journals asked for his contributions near the end of his life. He preferred to post his poems on his LiveJournal page. "I write poetry because I think it is the hardest thing I can do well," Disch said in a ten-day interview. And so, as an equestrian who likes spending time on a good horse, I simply love doing it. Poetry is my favorite horse.

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