In Portland, Oregon. On art, expressionism, and suicide.

Suicide is the 20th century self-legitimizing defense mechanism for accused-to-be-sensationalist artists. For all the fuss about higher-based intellectually stimulated reasons for suicide, alas, most fall upon the fuss about a girl.

In 1907, Arnold Schoenberg discovered that his wife Mathilde (the sister of Zemlinsky) was having an affair with Expressionist painter Richard Gerstl; and promptly confronted the two. Gerstl, upon realizing the futility of continuing the affair, burned his paintings and hanged himself naked in front of a full-length mirror. Schoenberg spent the next few months contemplating suicide himself, but as Alex Ross puts it, "suicide just wasn't Schoenberg's style."

Expressionist philosopher Otto Weininger shot himself in the room Beethoven died in Vienna; some say, it was about a girl (despite his raucously misogynistic magnum opus). Alban Berg, at the age of 16, impregnated and fathered the child of a house-servant, and soon later began drafting suicide letters.

Mark Rothko slit both his wrists in his studio in his 60's, Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the mouth. Stefan Zweig, the Jewish writer and Strauss' librettist for "The Silent Woman" self-exiled both himself and his wife and the two took their lives in South America during World War II.

Beethoven contemplated suicide in his Heiligenstadt testament (directly after an unrequited love affair with the purportedly beautiful Guilietta Guicciardi), but decided to forge ahead into a life of misery. Schumann jumped into the Rhine.

Virginia Woolf drowned herself poetically, silently walking into a lake, her clothing laden with heavy stones. Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven. Diane Arbus, the demented photographer, slashed herself with a razor.


After possibly the roughest summer I've ever gone through, it's time to go back to work. Forging ahead, I have seven different jobs this year, on top of being a full-time student. In Seattle on Sunday, and back to New York late Monday night.

Breathe.