So It Goes

[copied from dland]

I'm not sure how I let this slip by for the last couple of days, but I suppose it's not really important if time is moving haphazardly, back and forth, or in a linear fashion. It all comes out the same in the end.

Billy Pilgrim has become stuck in time. Or, to be more precise, Kurt Vonnegut has died.

My high school boyfriend, Bob, had a way of imposing his will on me people. This was not always to my detriment (although my parents weren't too sure.) He practically forced me to read his all time favorite book, Catch-22, which I've never regretted. And he was pretty adamant about Cat's Cradle, too. And I was hooked.

Have you ever seen Field of Dreams, how Ray (the builder of the baseball diamond) seeks out the novelist Terry Mann because he was the influential philosopher of his youth? I never stalked Vonnegut, but there was certainly a time when I knew where he lived (Martha's Vineyard) and the names of his children (I've forgotten that.) Kurt Vonnegut spoke to me in a way that I think no other writer ever has, even -- yes, I dare to speak this aloud -- Shakespeare. What Vonnegut wrote reached into every little corner of me; what I have become is in many ways shaped by the words Kurt Vonnegut wrote that I read in my late teens and early twenties. And if you read the article I linked to above, you'll see that I was far from the only one. Aw, you're probably one of us, too. A generation whose ideals were not shaped so much by Dr. Benjamin Spock, as the media once accused, but by Kurt Vonnegut.

He was quirky: no one else got away with writing like that, real novels masquerading as science fiction. (Or maybe they really were science fiction.) He took topics that were nothing more than ethical questions to us and embroidered them into their weirdest possible outcomes, as in the excellent short stories "Harrison Bergeron" and "Welcome to the Monkey House." He took the most ordinary people or experiences and shared them with us, as in the stories "Who Am I This Time?" or "The Long Walk to Forever." Hell, the preface of each of books was pure gold.

I read all his early works, although not all of the recent stuff. I did read and listen to his last book, A Man Without a Country. I remember being totally blown away by Breakfast of Champions; it has in it one of my truly favorite scenes in all fiction: one of the characters has already told us that he calls mirrors "leaks" because he thinks they are portals to other dimensions, a leaking-through of one dimension to another. And then there is a scene in a bar where a great many of the characters from many of Vonnegut's novels are gathered. (I loved the way his characters kept turning up in more than one book.) And then we learn that the man sitting in the corner, watching the scene through mirrored sunglasses, is the well-known writer Kurt Vonnegut, who happens to be passing through town that day.

Blew me away. Still does.

Anyway, I've mentioned before that I have one bookshelf here, a little to my left, on which I have copies of the books that changed my life, or, at the very least, had major influence on my life. Occasionally, I'll refer to a title or two. Only one author is represented more than twice, and he's there four -- really, five -- times.



He's flanked by Catch-22 on the left and Inherit the Wind on the right. I have new copies of four of his titles: Slaughterhouse-Five, Welcome to the Monkey House, The Sirens of Titan, and Cat's Cradle. Lying across the top of them is my original copy of The Sirens of Titan, a mess, but R wouldn't let me throw it out. I bought the new copies and re-read all of them four years ago, right after I turned 50. It seemed like the thing to do. The re-discovery was a wonderful process.

So, I just thought I'd say something. And there it was.

"Poo-tee-weet?"

watching Will & Grace :: entry #1430