I recently discovered Descending, which opens like this:
“Catsup, mustard, pickle, relish, mayonnaise, two kinds of salad dressing, bacon grease, and a lemon. Oh yes, two trays of ice cubes. In the cupboard it wasn’t much better: jars and boxes of spices, flour, sugar, salt – and a box of raisins!
An empty box of raisins.”
It continues with the story of a man on an escalator who, while reading, doesn’t notice that there is no longer a way to get back up until it is too late, and who then continues downwards until his inevitable end.
I will never read on an escalator in the same way again.
What startled me most about is that just after reading it, I found out that Disch committed suicide exactly a week ago (July 4). His blog is still online, with his last post dated July 2. People are still commenting on it – everything from NYC rent discussion to Camp Concentration analysis to final, anonymous goodbyes. Some are directed at ‘you,’ some at the general population, but either way this seems like the place to point out that they have wills for what happens to your creative property when you die, and I’m with Neil Gaiman on this one – writer-types should have them.
ETA: After disappearing from the Internet for a while, the full text of Disch’s Descending is available here via the Internet web archive.