Goodbye Blue Monday
Apr 11th, 2007 by Matt
One of my favorite authors died tonight. Kurt Vonnegut was 84.
Loving his goofy, bleakly humored novels seems like some guilty pleasure to me. I remember once when I went back to visit my favorite English professor at the University of Iowa years after graduation, he asked me what I was reading. Already embarrassed that I hadn’t been reading much at all, I told him the only thing that was true. “Some Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions.”
I get the feeling he bit his tongue to keep from revealing some displeasure. “Oh that,” I could almost hear him say, like I was reading stuff that’s too damn easy! Maybe I was wrong. Hell, at least he got me to read some Jonathan Lethem. Good ol’ Brooks.
It’s just whenever someone asks me my favorite authors, I keep thinking saying Vonnegut is like saying “Well, I read this book in high school and it was funny and good the end.” I’m supposed to say clever bullshit like “So-and-so has such incredible structure!”
Breakfast of Champions is probably my favorite novel. I mean, the guy draws a picture of his asshole for crissakes, which makes me laugh. Yet, every time I read it — it’s among the very few books I’ll read over and over again – I just about die inside for ol’ Kilgore Trout. Poor bastard. Today, I think I know how he feels.
Make me young. Make me young. Make me young.
Nothing?
So it goes.
Cat’s Cradle remains one of the freakiest novels I have ever read.
We will honor Kurt next weekend, every time our characters shoot someone in the face in the name of love.
From http://www.slate.com/id/2164174/
In New York, many years later, I came to understand that a number of intellectuals thought Vonnegut was for students—for the kind of immature, emotional readers who get caught up in Dune or The Fountainhead: a “phase” author. But it’s never struck me that there is a mature, dispassionate stance on death, greed, cruelty, and human weakness that sober-minded adults ought to graduate to, after reaching some arbitrary educational high-water mark, that would elevate them beyond Vonnegut’s whimsically bleak philosophy.
Breakfast of Champions never struck me, but Harrison Bergeron did. I still remember my outrage at the tale’s end.