Today I was building a bookshelf, and I found out Kurt Vonnegut died.
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about me
- geoffreycrayon
- I'm too educated for the kind of repetitious, souless dedication to meaningless tasks required for remunerative success in America. Now I write books and don't make any money. Crap.
4 comments:
An appropriate action for a somber moment.
If he were a character in The Road:
Papa, the boy said, Was he one of the good guys?
Yes. He was one of the good guys, And always will be.
Like us.
Yes. Like us.
I have to say that, when I hear "Vonnegut," I think of his "Here is my picture of an asshole" from Breakfast of Champions. I have read little of him, so this is what sticks: the the shaky asterix of an asshole, a blot on the page.
Still, I was sad. The middlemen, as I have always thought of them (the Bellowing Bellows and other manly writers who were writing angry novels in the 60s) are dying out. And Vonnegut had a nice edge to him (it seemed) that the others didn't.
I enjoyed Breakfast of Champions very much--he wrote it, I recently learned, after he reneged on an announced retirement from novel-writing. On the back of my old paperback, the NY Times reviewer writes, "He draws pictures, for God's sake...."
I guess Betsy's middlemen would include Mailer and Updike--Vonnegut is better by a mile because he is more human. He isn't mannered, falling into the shadow of Hemingway like those others.
Vonnegut's anger was the sad, funny anger of a loving person in a country and time not worthy of that love.
My fellow-outcast Mike Rodman and I started reading him in middle school, which is part of what has me feeling so sentimental about him.
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