RIP Kurt Vonnegut

Boy, he will be missed. What a writer and what a guy.

 

One of my true heroes. His books were not only entertaining as hell, but they helped change the way I thought about and viewed the world.

 

I got addicted to Vonnegut in the Navy. His short chapters were great to pick up and read in the five-minute gaps between drills, training or having to move on to somewhere else to be bored to death. Helped pass a lot of time on deployments.

 

Martone had a great description for what makes Indiana Indiana, and it applies to Vonnegut very well: "Nice weirdness."

By the way, I would recommend Martone to anybody. Start with his "Blue Guide to Indiana."

 

Who's going to do my homework?

 

Of course you did. Perfect timing.

 

Appropriately enough, the Chicago Tribune reposts Mary Schmich's column about her "wear sunscreen" column getting sucked into urban mythdom when it got attached to an alleged graduation speech by Vonnegut.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-070412schmich-vonnegut,1,5553649.column?coll=chi-news-hed

Remember the musical version?

 

suck. just giant suck

*

 

Every time I see a wide open beaver - I think of Vonnegut.

 

(talking about when he tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals.

 

An e-mail from a friend... I figured it was worth posting.

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. With the end of the experiment certain truths become self evident. Chain smoking does not kill everybody. Not every suicide attempt leads to others. Iconoclasts are not replaceable.

Made in the same era as Hunter Thompson, certainly with an overlapping cult following, Kurt was part of the 60s and 70s social fabric. From our first days in the book business his brightly colored paperbacks were continuous best sellers. Sales slowed in the 80s. Most of the buyers were youthful. Most had longish hair. A well served literary dinner during our Vietnam revolution would have included Ginsberg as the first course, Thompson as the entree, and Kurt as dessert.

I knew Vonnegut beyond the writings and media interviews. No, never met him - wish that had been possible. Rather, during the halcyon days of Liberties, Jill Krementz (noted photographer and Kurt's wife) became a good friend. Vonnegut often invaded conversations. He was really "a man in whole." The writer and husband didn't stray far from each other.

The following 1995 quote is Vonnegut at his finest with lament, philosophy, and admiration wrapped in few words.
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon."

Swiftly, icons of the 60s are going underground for the last time. In years to come, as with all that is in the past, this era will be recolored by misinterpretation.

"Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times" - Gustave Flaubert