So he's gone

Date: April 12, 2007
Time: 21:36
Place: In the chronosynclastic infindibulum

Kurt Vonnegut claimed he was going to sue the tobacco companies. He said they'd been promising to kill him for the last 40 years and hadn't delivered their end of the bargain. He died yesterday from irreversible head wounds suffered in a reent fall. So it goes.

I started reading all his stuff back when I was in about 6th grade. Breakfast of Champions was just out that year and somewhat scandalized the world with his crudely drawn sketch of a vagina. Even 12 year old me was able to understand from the text that what was being parodied was the trumped up, idiotic, and pointlessly infantile sexual fixation predominant in society at large.

I can get several of these 10 minute blogs out of Kurt, and I know he would have approved. He was a big advocate for writing whenever and wherever you could, and he claimed the anyone who managed to get paid for writing was among the most fabulously lucky people on earth.

Kurt was one of those shameless hack authors who made no bones about the commercial aspect of his trade. That puts him in esteemed company of P.G.Wodehouse, whose books I saw in a segregated "literature" section which would have no doubt amused Mr. Wodehouse greatly. As an Irish American who drank a lot of Guiness at a bar called Bloom's in Sunnyside, Queens, I felt compelled to read Ulysses. One of the great literary features associated with that highly regarded novel is Joyce's use of different techniques, hence the term "technical novel". Vonnegut managed to blend narration styles, prose styles ("Cat's Cradle" written in the "rat-a-tat staccato rhythms of journalism") and work in an otherwise deprecated science fiction framework. Kurt, of course, had plots and points to make which also distinguished his work from Ulysses.

I never was able to enjoy sci-fi to which my otherwise nerdy tendencies would dispose me, but I would be expecting "Sirens of Titan" and be confronted in a book with a guy milking the bitchy robot joke long past death.

Tom Carson, the literary critic of the New Yorker, once wrote that there are two types of people who consider Vonnegut a great literary author, those who don't read much literature and those who read a lot of literature.