Thursday, April 12, 2007

So It Goes

Kurt Vonnegut picked my birthday yesterday to die.
What a pisser.
He was a literary giant; moreso, he was a literary giant who wrote science fiction.
Most famous for Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, my first Vonnegut was Breakfast of Champions, a funny and sad novel that many of Vonnegut's regular cast of characters wandered through, including Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who toils away at his craft making no money and gaining no fame. But it is through Trout that Vonnegut answered that age old question.
It is Trout, while sitting in a men's room stall, who sees the question scrawled on the stall wall:
"Why are we here?"
Trout doesn't hesitate for a moment. He whips out a pen and replies:
"To be the eyes and the ears of the conscience of the universe."
And it is in Slaughterhouse-Five that Vonnegut becomes our conscience, bemoaning the madness of war and lives that spin out of control.
Another moment lost, another giant falls.
So it goes.
Hi ho.


The Works of Kurt Vonnegut
A recent Vonnegut Interview in Rolling Stone
An excerpt from his last book, A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush's America

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On an unseasonably, uncomfortably, unnaturally warm day in mid-October I sit here trying not to think about global warming. But it's difficult. Is this fear going to pass away like the other fears I remember - nuclear war, overpopulation leading to mass starvation, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain? Well, those problems haven't gone away exactly. The new one just seems bigger than all the rest.

Philip Pullman