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The Dead Thread

 

  • The Dead Thread

    Too morbid?

    John Updike
    March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

    I still haven't got around to reading him....


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  • I'm personally just relieved that this thread isn't about the Grateful Dead...

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  • I read an article about him a couple of weeks ago, but nothing he's actually written. Still, sad :(

    That was then, this is dumb.
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  • kcarpenter_ said:
    I'm personally just relieved that this thread isn't about the Grateful Dead...



    I know exactly what you mean, man. I was only 7 when he died, but it still hurts.

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  • I know Updike had written the Witches of Easwick , which was turned into a movie with Jack Nicholson, Cher, and Michele Phifer.
    I was supposed to have read a short story by him, "A & P," Freshman year, but never got around to it.

    Editado por StDionysus em Jan 28 2009, 3h21
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  • "A&P" is a pretty good read.

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  • Might give it a try. I was mistaken as it turned out, having rooted around a bit - I read one of his short stories at the beginning of last year, from 'Museums & Women, & Other Stories' - I found his prose kind of dense and clunky. Not much of a eulogy, but there we go.

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  • I started Rabbit, Run and liked it, but had to put it aside to read the stuff I was forced to for school. I need to pick that up again.

    oh word
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  • Charles Cooper (of Telefon Tel Aviv)
    April 12, 1977 - January 22, 2009

    I chose to write an essay about suicide in gifted people for my suicide block today, so it's weird that this topic popped up. Thinking of people I could focus on... Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Mark Rothko, van Gogh, and Ernest Hemingway come to mind, anyone know of any "interesting" cases?

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  • Jazz trombonists Frank Rosolino and J. J. Johnson both committed suicide, for different reasons.

    Rosolino's suicide is quite complicated. I dunno if it is worth writing about, but for a man who played with a great sense of humor he sure left this world in a terrible fashion.

    Albert Ayler also apparently committed suicide, by jumping off the Liberty Island ferry.

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  • The Beat writer Richard Brautigan offed himself as well.

    oh word
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  • N3croyeti said:
    Charles Cooper (of Telefon Tel Aviv)
    April 12, 1977 - January 22, 2009

    I chose to write an essay about suicide in gifted people for my suicide block today, so it's weird that this topic popped up. Thinking of people I could focus on... Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Mark Rothko, van Gogh, and Ernest Hemingway come to mind, anyone know of any "interesting" cases?

    Jeff Buckley, wandering into the Mississippi...Darby Crash of the Germs o.d.ing on purpose, only to be upstaged by John Lennon's death the next day - Nick Drake and Danny Whitten of Crazy Horse went the same way. Contentious suicides: one way or another Michael Hutchence wins the prize for worst rock n' roll death ever, and Elliott Smith stabbing himself (?) with a kitchen knife.

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  • Virginia Woolf, putting stones in her pockets and walking into the River Ouse.

    oh word
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    • rm508 disse...
    • Usuário
    • Jan 28 2009, 18h30
    Writers.

    New York poet Hart Crane (you really must read The Bridge) threw himself off a ferry in the Gulf of Mexico.

    Virginia Woolf: stones in her coat, jumped in a river.

    Sylvia Plath: stuck her head in an oven. Somewhat fetishised ever since. Gives her name to the Sylvia Plath effect.

    Ernest Hemingway: shot himself.

    Russian poet Vlad Mayakovsky: also shot himself.

    90s playwright Sarah Kane: wrote precociously well crafted, graphically violent and entirely depressing plays. Did herself in at a young age in one way or another. Also somewhat fetishised ever since.

    But before we get too depressed, remember surprisingly few major figures of literature actually did themselves in. Two of the century's greatest practioners of depressing fiction, Beckett and Kafka, died of natural causes. Nietzsche survived; Poe and Zola and Dostoyevsky survived; Rilke survived; Conrad, Lewis and Faulkner survived; Ionesco and Pinter survived. Camus knew the world to be absurd but railed against suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus. But then, you know, died in a car crash. Always wear seatbelts people.

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  • and a few more suicides :

    David Foster Wallace recently killed himslef, and few years ago Hunter S. Thompson did so as well.

    Yukio Mishima (score to movie by Philip Glass) let his friend behead him.

    Pan-disiplinary philosopher Gilles Delueze jumped out of a window.

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  • StDionysus said:
    Yukio Mishima (score to movie by Philip Glass) let his friend behead him.


    Isn't that murder, though? I know this is a bit of a moral question, but if you ask me, a suicide isn't a suicide unless the person him- or herself does the killing. I guess Kevorkian-esque "assisted suicides" don't count if they're legal and it's the person and not the doctor who does the injection, but I know a lot of people would disagree...

    Also, Robbie, I'd sort of put Poe in a gray area. He drank himself to death! In a way, you could just call that prolonged suicide...

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  • StDionysus said:
    I know Updike had written the Witches of Easwick , which was turned into a movie with Jack Nicholson, Cher, and Michele Phifer.
    I was supposed to have read a short story by him, "A & P," Freshman year, but never got around to it.


    i looooove that movie. i remember when i was younger watching the epic ending over and over and over again. sarandon, cher and pfieffer (sp?) using a voodoo doll on nicholson is amazing.


    as a side note, my friends started a grim reaper prediction fbook group. everyone had to choose someone they think will die this year. selections include: bob barker, mickey rourke, bea arthur, nancy reagan and i selected kirk douglas. you get a morbid sense of winning if your person dies.

    we'll see what happens!!!

    love, music, wine and revolution
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  • My money's on Gore Vidal - he's started sounding really peculiar.

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  • inyourpanorama said:
    StDionysus said:
    Yukio Mishima (score to movie by Philip Glass) let his friend behead him.


    Isn't that murder, though? I know this is a bit of a moral question, but if you ask me, a suicide isn't a suicide unless the person him- or herself does the killing. I guess Kevorkian-esque "assisted suicides" don't count if they're legal and it's the person and not the doctor who does the injection, but I know a lot of people would disagree...

    Also, Robbie, I'd sort of put Poe in a gray area. He drank himself to death! In a way, you could just call that prolonged suicide...

    He made a conscious decision to have his life taken.
    The culpibility of a third party or how he did it is irrelevant.
    Would you consider "cop assisted suicides" murder or suicide, or both?

    If you want go all trite semantics on me, then lets just say it was "ritual suicide," like it appeared on the wiki!

    It must be fun to share a class with you.

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    • rm508 disse...
    • Usuário
    • Jan 28 2009, 21h00
    generalmalaise said:
    My money's on Gore Vidal - he's started sounding really peculiar.
    You mean this?

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  • StDionysus said:
    inyourpanorama said:
    StDionysus said:
    Yukio Mishima (score to movie by Philip Glass) let his friend behead him.


    Isn't that murder, though? I know this is a bit of a moral question, but if you ask me, a suicide isn't a suicide unless the person him- or herself does the killing. I guess Kevorkian-esque "assisted suicides" don't count if they're legal and it's the person and not the doctor who does the injection, but I know a lot of people would disagree...

    He made a conscious decision to have his life taken.
    The culpibility of a third party or how he did it is irrelevant.
    Would you consider "cop assisted suicides" murder or suicide, or both?

    If you want go all trite semantics on me, then lets just say it was "ritual suicide," like it appeared on the wiki!

    It must be fun to share a class with you.

    Actually, Mishima commited Hara-kiri, which is ritual suicide, but as the ritual goes, after the person plunges the sword into his abdomen and slices up his insides, a trusted friend then beheads him. Well, the one friend tried two or three times to go all the way through Mishima's neck and failed, so someone else had to finish the job. I'd still call it a suicide though, since Mishima was already dying as a result of his own action before he was beheaded.

    And to add to the grim reaper prediction thing, there's a whole section of rotten.com devoted to that. Rotten Dead Pool

    oh word
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  • It seriously weirds me out when I realize that someone whom I just assumed was dead is still alive. Before he actually died, I'd assumed that Solzhenitsyn had been dead for a long time...

    As for sharing a class with me, Julian, you don't know the half of it. I've got a nagging suspicion that I am, in fact, THAT student who always comes up with nitpicky questions to ask in every class. I don't do it to show off, though, it's genuinely in my nature.

    And if I were to contribute to this morbid grim reaper thing, I'd wager that Dick Clark doesn't have much left in him.

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    • rm508 disse...
    • Usuário
    • Jan 28 2009, 21h15
    inyourpanorama said:
    Also, Robbie, I'd sort of put Poe in a gray area. He drank himself to death! In a way, you could just call that prolonged suicide...
    Gray, but still not suicide. What of the writers that die of lung cancer, or a broken heart? I wouldn't call smoking or the fruitless pursuit of an impossible lover a form of prologned suicide.

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  • rm508 said:
    generalmalaise said:
    My money's on Gore Vidal - he's started sounding really peculiar.
    You mean this?


    That was my first clue. I posted that up sometime in November - Vidal is either senile or pilled-up here, I'm not sure which. A lot of the commentary I read at the time had it that he'd 'pwned' David Dimbleby, which is just perverse.

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    • rm508 disse...
    • Usuário
    • Jan 28 2009, 21h40
    generalmalaise said:
    That was my first clue. I posted that up sometime in November - Vidal is either senile or pilled-up here, I'm not sure which. A lot of the commentary I read at the time had it that he'd 'pwned' David Dimbleby, which is just perverse.
    Like Palin pwned Couric. Dimbleby was having a horrible night, and the BBC coverage was hopeless, but Dimbleby acquitted himself well when faced with this very confused old man.

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