Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007
"So it goes."
I read Slaughterhouse-Five when I was 12. I distinctly remember thinking two things right after I had finished it: What the fuck was that? and, I didn't know you could write books in that way. How amazing.
Moment of silence for Kurt Vonnegut, an early influence and a great loss to the writing world.
For further reading: The New York Times also published this interesting and lengthy article about him.
6 Comments:
Kurt is up in heaven now.
When I was a marketing intern at Steppenwolf (which seems like ancient history now), they were mounting a mediocre stage adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five.
The afternoon of opening night, I was standing out front smoking a cigarette wearing this alarmingly bright green blazer that I found at a thrift store a few years prior. Two drags into my cigarette, out walks Kurt Vonnegut. He's standing three feet away from me. He removes his pack of unfiltered Pall Malls from his inside pocket and brings one to his mouth. I whip out my Zippo and light it for him.
"Did you win the Masters?"
It takes me a second, but I realize he's asking me about my blazer. I reply, "No, but this is an original Arnold Palmer." I open the blazer to reveal Arnold Palmer's embroidered signature on the inside pocket. Kurt Vonnegut snickered.
For the next five minutes, he and I made smalltalk about golf. He seemed to enjoy watching golf but not necessarily playing it. I talked about the lessons I took when I was in junior high school and how bad I was.
The conversation was abruptly interrupted when Martha Lavey, the Artistic Director of Steppenwolf, came out of the theater with some of Vonnegut's handlers. One handler said, "Okay, we're going to dinner now," in an effort to hurry him away from the oddly dressed intern. So we thanked each other for the time and said our goodbyes.
I learned the next day that Vonnegut was sheepish all day. He avoided conversations with anyone wanting to blow smoke up his ass. He sat in corners. I also learned that he really only seemed interested in two random conversations that day: the conversation with me and a conversation with a janitor about the Bears.
The greatest celebrity encounter of my life was meeting Arlo Guthrie. Obviously. Making Kurt Vonnegut laugh is a very close second.
NOW
Can you handle mainstay opinion from the conservative blogosphere? Here's what PowerLine had to say on the occasion of Mr. Vonnegut's death:
"From an adult perspective, one can see that the novels are full of cheap irony, insufferable sentimentality, paper thin characters, and forgettable plots. If Vonnegut's novels have made it into the high school curriculum, as Dinitia Smith states in today's New York Times obituary, pity the poor high school student who thinks that this is what literature is all about."
Want more? Here's a comment in response to that post:
"Kurt Vonnegut was an arrogant, nihilistic, anti-social, leftist, atheist bigot. May he remain dead without regard to how peaceful it may or may not be."
Picked up on Buzzfeed. Cool!
Wow. Calling Kurt those names is like kicking your grandfather to the curb, spitting on him, shitting on him and then shooting him in the head. What is fucking wrong with this fucktards?
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