Goodbye Blue Monday

Hey All,

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died yesterday. He evidently bumped his head very badly, and died from subsequent complications. If you've read much of his work, or simply flipped through copy of Breakfast of Champions you'll get the above reference, why it is significant, and why I used to doodle the phrase on notebook covers, journal leaves, scrawl it in wet sand, and on the occasional men's room stall.

If you don't get it, I want you to go get a library card.

I think I have read every piece of Mr. Vonnegut's fiction, save his most famous, Slaughterhouse 5. Why? Because I saw the movie too damn many times, and wanted to wait until those images in the film--someone else's interpretation of Mr. Vonnegut's imagination--were plowed under by time. I wanted my reading of the book to be as fresh as possible.

I started reading Kurt Vonnegut at the behest of Rob Harriman when I was about 20 years old. I am now 41. I still have never read Slaughterhouse 5. But. I haven't seen the film version for almost 20 years as well, so, the imagery (the brief and teasing glances of Valerie Perrine's boobage) is finally beginning to fade. I'll try to get around to reading it before the curtain gets drawn.

I hope.

Many people banned Mr. Vonnegut's books. Sometimes they were banned because of the sex, but mostly because of the Humanist stuff; the skepticism. Mr. Vonnegut frequently questioned the purpose and/or existence of a supreme being. That propensity for such great questioning can happen to you when you are huddled with fellow prisoners of war in a makeshift prison called Slaughterhouse 5 as bombs fall overhead. Bombs dropped by your own countrymen. That sort of experience will fill you with a certain taste for cosmic irony, if you survive. It'll also get your books banned and burned.

But Mr. Vonnegut stated in one of his last biographical works, Fates Worse Than Death (1991), "The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am." Be that as it may, it clearly informed his worldview, his vision of reality. And, besides, now that he is dead, along with his literary, "Author's Voice," I can speculate as to the nature of his writing until all of them lonely monkeys in a room full of typewriters hack out the complete works of Stephen King.

I loved Kurt Vonnegut's books. I frequently gave them to people who were not "readers," because they were insidious and deceitful works. His were always rather short books and appeared to be an "easy read," and frequently less than 200 pages with larger size type. But if the recipient of my gift had one iota of intellect, they realized they had been asked to think about a great, great many challenging things before they were through.

heh.

Mr. Vonnegut also liked to doodle, and in one of his many doodles he advised his readers to learn to distinguish an asterisk (*) from a certain delicate bodily orifice of one's "lower 48."

Translation: Know the difference between an asterisk and your asshole.

In an interview this morning, Gore Vidal made comments as to how Mr. Vonnegut more times than not hid his social commentary behind the veil of Science Fiction. A tactic, he stated, found more frequently in writers from the Post WWII era as it made their satirical efforts more accessible or palatable to the general public, teaching through deception, which is always the benefit of a good satire, correct?

I don't think I've ever read anything by Vidal of any length, I don't think I share enough with him. He turned me off with his comment. He knew Mr. Vonngegut, and knew his work for a long time. Mr. Vonnegut never wrote a dram of SF, he wrote Speculative Fiction. Speculative Fiction (a term I am quite certain Harlan Ellison coined to describe his own work) is something far more dangerous, far more insidious, and far closer to the bone. Science Fiction can look at a great many things, but there are always rules to the stories woven, many of them technological. Speculative Fiction has fewer rules, and deals more with the knotty alchemy of human nature, the chemistry of the soul.

I was surprised to hear that Mr. Vonnegut attempted suicide at just the about the time I was introduced to his work. His attempt failed. He later stated, "My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."

I'm glad he didn't succeed. His work brought me a great deal of insight and, frankly, joy, thereafter. As he and I both matured, his writing became...softer...not dull, per se, but definitely not so sharp. Sure, there was still a bitter taste to the steely jabs, but the bite was not so deep. I made this realization when I correctly guessed the identity of the narrator of one of his later novels, Galapagos. Perhaps it was easy to guess the narrator's identity because I had been so deeply mired in Mr. Vonnegut's work for so very long and was well entrenched in what passed for a "shared universe," within his works. Perhaps for that reason putting the pieces together wasn't so difficult. The narrator closes his story with a backhanded sense of optimism. The human race has finally destroyed itself, but they left behind the seeds of a simpler, gentler race of beings, and that was just fine with him. He felt he'd never done much with the life given him anyway, but now he could watch the progress of this new race of beings, better than Homo sapiens, he opined, and do something genuinely productive, for all eternity.

If you haven't read Galapagos, you should, it was one of Mr. Vonnegut's better final works. You should especially read it if you aren't a "reader," per se. It's a very short book; it won't take much of your time...

I'll talk about music next time.

God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.

And So It Goes,
Coletrane