Thomas M. Disch is dead. The author of Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song and, yes, The Brave Little Toaster committed suicide at the age of 68 after life dealt him a few too many blows:
...his apartment had been devastated by a fire; then his partner of more than 30 years died; then his home in Barryville, N.Y., was flooded; and finally, he faced eviction after he returned to the apartment. He also suffered from diabetes and sciatica.
“He was simply ground down by the sequence of catastrophes,” his friend Norman Rush, the novelist, said Monday.
Go read his books if you haven't already -- he sits comfortably on the shelf next to Phil Dick, and was probably that much more accessible as well.
There are 21 books by him in the Buffalo and Erie County Library system. All but 3 are in the closed stacks, which means you have to reserve them through the computer or the librarian. Also, another 4 are unable to be reserved, which could mean that they're in no condition to leave the library or those books were designated lost/stolen.
I think the only thing I've read of Disch was "On Wings of Song". I have seen "The Brave Little Toaster", and "The Prisoner", but have not read Disch's narratives. Still, this is sad: I suspect that I, like Spenser, feel that despair is one of the world's fundamentals evils.