Post by yosoy on Jun 23, 2021 9:51:27 GMT -5
I thought I would post about this obscure work on this board since there is bound to be some person here who find it interesting. I am speaking of Mitchell Heisman’s “Suicide Note”. It is a massive work (about 900 pages) of history and philosophy. The author worked on it for years without really speaking about it to those who knew him and upon completion, he went out to Harvard yard with a gun and killed himself in public. His suicide is described in the work as an “experiment in nihilism”. His work deals with dialectical materialism and biopolitics and covers the norman conquest of england and how that continued to play out in modernity, among other things, incredibly in depth. It is erudite, deep, fascinating, dark and also, surprising to the few people who take the time to actually read it, quite funny often. Heisman had a rich, absurd sense of humor, which you can get a good feel for even just from looking at his table of contents.
Given the macabre circumstances surrounding the work, the intense feat of investigative abilities on display, the ponderous nature of the core questions and the absurd humor sprinkled throughout, I thought it would be a good recommendation for Snicket fans who want some heavier reading. There is also the fact that during his life, Heisman worked at a used book store in Boston called “the Raven”, so there is a slight Poe connection to add to this Snicket pattern. There is no physical copy yet published of this work but you can download an ebook for free easily in a number of places by googling it or looking on libgen. It is very obscure and the small amount of press and internet commentary it has received are just from people discussing it biographically, as a news event- very few people have read it (as Heisman predicted would be the case). So if you look it up, you won’t find much more about it here than I’ve described for you. But it is a very fascinating and powerful work.
Given the macabre circumstances surrounding the work, the intense feat of investigative abilities on display, the ponderous nature of the core questions and the absurd humor sprinkled throughout, I thought it would be a good recommendation for Snicket fans who want some heavier reading. There is also the fact that during his life, Heisman worked at a used book store in Boston called “the Raven”, so there is a slight Poe connection to add to this Snicket pattern. There is no physical copy yet published of this work but you can download an ebook for free easily in a number of places by googling it or looking on libgen. It is very obscure and the small amount of press and internet commentary it has received are just from people discussing it biographically, as a news event- very few people have read it (as Heisman predicted would be the case). So if you look it up, you won’t find much more about it here than I’ve described for you. But it is a very fascinating and powerful work.