Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is dead. Aged 84. The semi colon has been replaced by a period. Full stop. So it goes.
Here's the thing - I never took Lit. in college. I never learned how to read the classics or anything that would qualify as 'Literature'.
Consequently, most of 'Literature' scares me. And what doesn't, it bores me.
What is the underlying motivation of the protagonist, what are the central themes, the symbolism - why is the moon like a siren's gaping maw and what does that have to do with the asscrack of eternity?
Fuck that shit, I don't know.
Kudos to my mongrel education, I barely learned to spell.
So, I stayed well away from the 'Important' writers. Writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway and Mailer and Vonnegut etc. They seemed too clever for me, too abstruse. (To my credit, I dreamed that word up...plucked it out of the ether. Thank god it actually exists and means exactly what I need it to mean.)
Funnily enough, I was right. They were clever. Sneaky, even. Because, somehow (I don't know if it was the smell and feel of ancient books bought on sun-warmed pavements or the fact that secondhand was all I could afford to buy at the time) I got hoodwinked into reading the things I had initially dismissed as 'The Classics'.
And I was surprised when in a lot of the writing I found echoes of my own thoughts. Notions that had vaguely occurred to me, only set down with such clarity and economy and wit as to give me pause and make me wonder if, perhaps, I hadn't thought those thoughts independently, but had stolen them from the author by some form of pre-osmosis.
Vonnegut was one of those. At the first reading, it was like expecting to find a dour college professor or sanctimonious, old-fart, elderly relative and instead finding an ageing beatnik who maybe listened to Greenday and had a weakness for fart jokes. I mean, the guy said Fuck...A LOT! How scary could he be?
Surely, this couldn't be 'Literature'! It didn't seem painful enough. The writing wasn't flowery or long-winded. There weren't even any 'thees and thous and thys.' And wait: he was actually funny, and irreverent, and poignant, and absurd, and ironic and gentle. And hip! And he MADE UP WORDS!!!
The first one I read was 'Cat's cradle.'
It was unexpected. It was funny and weird and profound and it took me a while to wrap my head around it.
So now the thing is, I never know if I ought to recommend Vonnegut to just anyone. Because if you come into one of his books with a defined notion of what a novel is supposed to be, then you're going to wonder about my taste and maybe even my sanity. So, the best I can do is tell you that he's weird, but in the best possible way.
Look, this guy says things like "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." and "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." and "I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool"
His characters travel back and forth in time...and no they don't save the world (though they try.) And maybe their only super power may be a slightly heightened ability to see their own specific strand in the cosmic cobweb of reality. His Heroes aren't tights and cape wearing Pin-up idols for the gay community, just worn and wearied versions of himself and his villains are time and tide and the dogma of mercenary modernism. But he manages to amass so many potent features of life and living and pack them all so diabolically into a device as simple as a few hundred ink-stained pages, bound together by string and glue.
So wait, to simplify - here's what I think his books have been about: truth and simplicity, and absurdity and seriousness and frivolity and gentleness and dystopia and hope and the past and futures and nihilism and idealism and science fiction and family and war and politics and ethics and tequila and peace and forgiveness...in short, EVERYTHING.
Go read one now.
Gratuitous yet occasion-appropriate Vonnegut quote:
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist." - Slaughterhouse Five.
Here's the thing - I never took Lit. in college. I never learned how to read the classics or anything that would qualify as 'Literature'.
Consequently, most of 'Literature' scares me. And what doesn't, it bores me.
What is the underlying motivation of the protagonist, what are the central themes, the symbolism - why is the moon like a siren's gaping maw and what does that have to do with the asscrack of eternity?
Fuck that shit, I don't know.
Kudos to my mongrel education, I barely learned to spell.
So, I stayed well away from the 'Important' writers. Writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway and Mailer and Vonnegut etc. They seemed too clever for me, too abstruse. (To my credit, I dreamed that word up...plucked it out of the ether. Thank god it actually exists and means exactly what I need it to mean.)
Funnily enough, I was right. They were clever. Sneaky, even. Because, somehow (I don't know if it was the smell and feel of ancient books bought on sun-warmed pavements or the fact that secondhand was all I could afford to buy at the time) I got hoodwinked into reading the things I had initially dismissed as 'The Classics'.
And I was surprised when in a lot of the writing I found echoes of my own thoughts. Notions that had vaguely occurred to me, only set down with such clarity and economy and wit as to give me pause and make me wonder if, perhaps, I hadn't thought those thoughts independently, but had stolen them from the author by some form of pre-osmosis.
Vonnegut was one of those. At the first reading, it was like expecting to find a dour college professor or sanctimonious, old-fart, elderly relative and instead finding an ageing beatnik who maybe listened to Greenday and had a weakness for fart jokes. I mean, the guy said Fuck...A LOT! How scary could he be?
Surely, this couldn't be 'Literature'! It didn't seem painful enough. The writing wasn't flowery or long-winded. There weren't even any 'thees and thous and thys.' And wait: he was actually funny, and irreverent, and poignant, and absurd, and ironic and gentle. And hip! And he MADE UP WORDS!!!
The first one I read was 'Cat's cradle.'
It was unexpected. It was funny and weird and profound and it took me a while to wrap my head around it.
So now the thing is, I never know if I ought to recommend Vonnegut to just anyone. Because if you come into one of his books with a defined notion of what a novel is supposed to be, then you're going to wonder about my taste and maybe even my sanity. So, the best I can do is tell you that he's weird, but in the best possible way.
Look, this guy says things like "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." and "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." and "I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool"
His characters travel back and forth in time...and no they don't save the world (though they try.) And maybe their only super power may be a slightly heightened ability to see their own specific strand in the cosmic cobweb of reality. His Heroes aren't tights and cape wearing Pin-up idols for the gay community, just worn and wearied versions of himself and his villains are time and tide and the dogma of mercenary modernism. But he manages to amass so many potent features of life and living and pack them all so diabolically into a device as simple as a few hundred ink-stained pages, bound together by string and glue.
So wait, to simplify - here's what I think his books have been about: truth and simplicity, and absurdity and seriousness and frivolity and gentleness and dystopia and hope and the past and futures and nihilism and idealism and science fiction and family and war and politics and ethics and tequila and peace and forgiveness...in short, EVERYTHING.
Go read one now.
Gratuitous yet occasion-appropriate Vonnegut quote:
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist." - Slaughterhouse Five.
