An old hero of mine has passed on:

Counterculture idol Kurt Vonnegut has died at his home in Manhattan, aged 84.

Vonnegut, who often marvelled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks ago, his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, said.

Vonnegut was a novelist known for his dark humour and metaphysical and science fiction content.

He wrote 14 novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions and Timequake during a career that began in 1950 with the publication of a short story in the magazine Colliers.

His books were described as dark, comic narratives that blended science fiction, metaphysics, and humanism.

When I was in tenth grade, and interested in reading nothing other than Stephen King, I received a Lit Class assignment that I didn't much want to do. I had to pick one book from the current "Greatest American Novels of All Time" list, read it and write a report on it. The only one I could imagine me even trying to read was Slaughterhouse Five, a sci fi book about war and time travel by some guy named Kurt Vonnegut.

As it turned out, our school library only had one copy of Slaughterhouse Five, and it was out... so my teacher, enthusiastic about getting me to read something other than Stephen King, told me I could read any Vonnegut book I might find in the library. I chose Slapstick.

My teacher's plan kinda backfired on her. I read Slapstick voraciously, loving it's warped blend of humor, science fiction, politics and commentary. My teacher was in the habit of giving students in the class free time to read if we were reading something for a report, and the problem was that Slapstick was so damned funny that, while reading it, I'd typically laugh so frequently and so loudly and continuously that she finally forbid me to read it in class. No worries. A new, rabid Vonnegut fan had been born.

I suppose I read all of Vonnegut's books over the next twenty years, and although I grew to find myself at odds with what I saw as a far-left agenda in his work, I never stopped loving it. And I have to say that his humanism, his dark humor, and his kind-hearted pessimism have effected me profoundly throughout my life. Part of who I am, for good or ill, is owed to Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut's relationship with the internet was always a touchy subject. He's had a legion of net fans and there were lots of fan websites and newsgroups. Nonetheless, he famously despised the net, and worried that people were turning into "ghosts," simply reading other peoples words on sterile screens instead of really interacting with each other. I'd like to say that it was simply to prove him wrong that I eventually married a woman I met in the Vonnegut usenet newsgroup. That wouldn't be entirely true, but it is true that it was our mutual love of Vonnegut's work that first brought Wendy and I together back in the newsgroup days. Yet another way my tenth grade Lit teacher ultimately changed my life.

It's unfortunate that most of today's young people only know Kurt Vonnegut through the famous Sunscreen Scam and the resulting pop song. It's sad because Vonnegut never delivered the sunscreen speech, wouldn't likely have ever crafted such a maudlin lecture, and his real work is so much more worth exploring. If you've never read Slaughterhouse Five or Cat's Cradle or Sirens of Titan or etc, etc, etc ... I promise you, they're worth your time.

It distressed me to see him become cantankerous, paranoid and hateful in his old age ... but it distresses me more to hear that he's died. When I was a young man trying to figure out what I believed, he served as a template. Even now, even while I hold opinions that are so counter to his own, he remains a touchstone.

Rest in peace, old man.

Etc.

Here's an old TV clip from YouTube featuring readings from Vonnegut titles like Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five, and others ... and some explanatory comments from KV himself. Typical Vonnegut; funny, odd, kind-hearted stuff.

Labels: News, Personal, You Tube