Kurt Vonnegut
So, geez. Vonnegut is dead. It's not a surprise -- the guy has not been young in a very long time -- but it is still something of a shock. This is not an Anna Nicole Smith death, media candy about someone who was never worth a moment of our national time. Vonnegut is one of the very, very few celebrities that I felt a profound sense of loss when I heard the news.
It's not adequate to say Vonnegut's writing was important, or to talk about just what his genius was: if you haven't read anything by him, go out and read something now. Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House, Cat's Cradle... read everything. And honestly I don't want to talk about what made his books so important. It wouldn't do them justice, and I think it would miss the point. His stories were, figuratively speaking, the guy across the bus you make eye contact with and know, by the worried little grin he makes, that you're both thinking "who the frig is driving this thing?"
The first Vonnegut I read was his short story "Harrison Bergeron". It was one of about a dozen short stories we read in one big clump in 7th-grade, and at that point, "literature" was just fifth-generation photocopies a teacher handed out; it didn't occur to me that any of those stories were things I might be interested in if I came across in the library. So I didn't pay much attention. But in 10th-grade English (well, okay summer school 10th-grade English...), my friend lent me his battered copy of Welcome to the Monkey House, a collection of the short stories Vonnegut wrote to pay the bills before his novels caught on. "Harrison Bergeron" is one of those stories. And I loved it. I still do; it's one of my favorite books.
Later that summer (or maybe the next), my family was vacationing up at Lake George, and the house we rented had a large collection of his novels: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Slapstick, and maybe Hocus Pocus. I read, or devoured actually, all of them in that week. All of it said "It is what it is. A lot of it makes no sense, and you do what you can, but it is what it is no matter what you think about it." If I had to describe my own personal philosophy today, that's exactly how I'd put it, actually, and certainly his books have affected that over the years; but I do think the transformative effect they've had on me came out of how much of myself I recognized in them.
A lot of my friends found a powerful connection to Salinger's or Austin's writing, or other authors. For me, Vonnegut will always be the man. Go find something he wrote that you haven't read, and read it. Even if it's crap, it's worth your time.
It's not adequate to say Vonnegut's writing was important, or to talk about just what his genius was: if you haven't read anything by him, go out and read something now. Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House, Cat's Cradle... read everything. And honestly I don't want to talk about what made his books so important. It wouldn't do them justice, and I think it would miss the point. His stories were, figuratively speaking, the guy across the bus you make eye contact with and know, by the worried little grin he makes, that you're both thinking "who the frig is driving this thing?"
The first Vonnegut I read was his short story "Harrison Bergeron". It was one of about a dozen short stories we read in one big clump in 7th-grade, and at that point, "literature" was just fifth-generation photocopies a teacher handed out; it didn't occur to me that any of those stories were things I might be interested in if I came across in the library. So I didn't pay much attention. But in 10th-grade English (well, okay summer school 10th-grade English...), my friend lent me his battered copy of Welcome to the Monkey House, a collection of the short stories Vonnegut wrote to pay the bills before his novels caught on. "Harrison Bergeron" is one of those stories. And I loved it. I still do; it's one of my favorite books.
Later that summer (or maybe the next), my family was vacationing up at Lake George, and the house we rented had a large collection of his novels: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Slapstick, and maybe Hocus Pocus. I read, or devoured actually, all of them in that week. All of it said "It is what it is. A lot of it makes no sense, and you do what you can, but it is what it is no matter what you think about it." If I had to describe my own personal philosophy today, that's exactly how I'd put it, actually, and certainly his books have affected that over the years; but I do think the transformative effect they've had on me came out of how much of myself I recognized in them.
A lot of my friends found a powerful connection to Salinger's or Austin's writing, or other authors. For me, Vonnegut will always be the man. Go find something he wrote that you haven't read, and read it. Even if it's crap, it's worth your time.
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