Thursday, April 12, 2007
News / Chicagoland R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut
Posted by Whet Moser on 04.12.07 at 08:44 AM
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the impressively ripe age of 84, sadly claimed by brain injuries from a fall.
Aside from being a famous author, he led one of the ridiculously varied and full lives that people used to lead in the previous century--one of seven POWs to survive the Dresden firebombing (in a meatpacking freezer, thus the title Slaughterhouse Five), a grad student in anthropology whose thesis was rejected by the University of Chicago (they later accepted Cat's Cradle as a replacement), a crime reporter for the late, great City News Bureau, a PR man for General Electric, an instructor of creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a dealer of Saab cars.
I will not pretend to be especially familiar with his work or a fan of his writing, though I recall finding Slaughterhouse Five moving when I read it many years ago. But I will say that I find his life story as moving and hopeful as any fiction I have read, and a full accounting of his life and times makes for outstanding reading. The New York Times, long the finest obit paper in the country, already has a substantial piece. I suspect the local political magazine In These Times, for whom Vonnegut wrote frequently in his later years, will have something good up soon, although nothing as of this writing. Keep an eye out.
Miscellanea:
Bands influenced by Kurt Vonnegut
"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable."
Avatar John Hockenberry interviews avatar Kurt Vonnegut in the online virtual community Second Life, from which the above picture is drawn. Wagner James Au explains.
A PBS interview with Vonnegut
Comments (3)
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What sad news--there will never be another Vonnegut, though God knows there have been enough aspirants. Strangely, the one Vonnegut quote I've never forgotten is this: when asked the secret to his success as a writer, he replied, "I never use semicolons." That's not as flippant as it may sound, because the semicolon is most often used to imply a relationship between ideas that isn't really there. It's a mark of equivocation, and Vonnegut, in life and in literature, was a period man. God rest his soul.
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I read too many of his books at once, and I'm stuck with the impression that Vonnegut's only real talent was making eschatology boring. His affected world-weariness, at least, taught us what a sham our own affected world-weariness is, but to keep hearing it was grating to anyone who got out of their teenage Vonnegut-reading years without killing themselves. He had a great cameo in Back to School, though.
jrj: That's a fantastic quote. I read somewhere that he attributes his style to his time as a beat reporter for the City News Bureau. From what little I know about it, it doesn't sound like the sort of place that tolerates semicolons. Hoping to find some old Vonnegut reporting in the local newspaper archives, though I don't know if CNB reporters got bylines.
