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RIP Mark Sandman, died 3 July 1999 July 3, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in R.I.P., music.
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Updike at rest January 30, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in R.I.P., authors, death.
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I was sad to read in the paper yesterday that John Updike died on Tuesday. Just a few weeks ago I was thinking how he was immortal, publishing yet another book, a sequel to the Witches of Eastwick. I thought he had another ten or twenty years with many more novels to come; I didn’t know he was battling for his life.

He was my second favourite writer for a time. I came to grow a little disenchanted with him, but still rated him very highly. I have the illusion of being friends with him, or at least him being a kindly risque uncle I’ve had long conversations with.

I’ve been thinking of his line, ‘After all, you survive every moment except your last,’ as a comfort for my fear of death. But that was when he had survived it all too.

Now there’s no chance of a sixth Rabbit book. It would have been set in 2009, if he had continued the trend. I know it seemed unlikely, given he killed off Rabbit two books ago, but I always thought my hopes would come true and I would have another slice of the Angstrom world.

I will have to write a longer piece about his work and my interactions with it, but I’m at an internet cafe in Richmond and I’ve got to go.

Strange memories of death : an update on the comments on Tom Disch’s blog after his suicide August 13, 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in R.I.P..
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Some more moving and strange and banal comments have appeared on Tom Disch’s blog, now six weeks since he killed himself. Including one comment urging people to tell someone who’s not yet killed themselves how great they are. And this one, bringing Phil Dick into the picture:

Well, you depressing bastard, as if writing The Genocides (and boy did that book get under my skin, buddy! What a masterpiece; first time out the gate and a tour-de-force! Makes me jealous as hell) wasn’t enough, you had to go and do this.

I’ve got to admit I’m a little pissed off at you about it. But God knows (and that’s you, right? So YOU know) I understand where you were coming from, so I’ll cut you some slack. Listen: granted, there’s no afterlife, and you and me and Sam Clemens all know it, but let’s just pretend there is for one second so I can ask you this one favor in return: cut Phil some slack too when you run into him him, would you? He was just another poor slob who made some stupid mistakes, like we all did, (okay so some of his were worse, but its not like the FBI actually read any of that crazy bastard’s letters, right?) so I’ll forgive you if you forgive him, okay?

And this beautiful paragraph from Jerry:

And finally, after running this and letting it run, for days, through my mind and heart and spirit, and with my younger son telling me he wants to remember you from the often happy times of the ’60s and ’70s and that he has been sharing some of his memories of you from then with some of his friends, and my older boy mailing me links to he few photographs he has up a on private site of you (and Charlie too) visiting us, as you often did, on West 87th Street when we were all young, still under 30, I can stop by here and say something.

R.I.P. Thomas Disch 1940-2008 July 11, 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in R.I.P., authors.
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Last Friday I felt compelled to look up Thomas Disch, my third favourite science fiction writer. I found a link to his livejournal account. He’d written on it just two days earlier, 2 July 2008. I thought up what I could say to him about how great his work is. I couldn’t think of what to write; he’s a bitter, cynical man and I didn’t want to be cut down for liking him.

Then yesterday he shows up on the Wikipedia’s recent deaths list. He’d killed himself that same day I found his blog. I feel pretty sad about that. The worst way to die.

There’s now 111 comments on his last entry, with people telling him how good he was, or how they miss him. But of course he’s not there to read it. I thought of adding to it, but instead I’ve written this. I can’t claim to be as much as a fan of some of them, but I really liked his work.

People seem immortal when they have a blog. They can’t be blogging, and so immediately visible, and then die. It just can’t happen.

334 is the best novel of his I’ve read. I can’t remember too much, but for the bleak wittiness of it, and the droll way he wrote horrific things. I liked the interconnections between the novellas that make it up too. And I liked the irony of the spaceship on the front, when none of it’s set in space. Poor pulp writers.

I read Camp Concentration and The Genocides earlier this decade and liked them as well. It’s only the Puppies of Terra I didn’t like.

His more recent horror books are the best horror books I’ve ever read (I haven’t read many, I must say) – The M.D. and the Businessman.