when I started this blog five years ago, I was a pet sitter and the name animal-crackers made sense. now I'm a stay-at-home-dad and freelance writer, but rather than confuse everyone by getting a different blog, it's just easier to keep posting things here.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
So it goes
I rarely mourn the deaths of people I don't know. But today I do.
Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday. He was 84.
Unfortunately I wasn't introduced to his writing until after college. However, I was immediately hooked when I read The Sirens of Titan. It's a story about the richest man on Earth who follows a bizarre quest to Mars and back and then to Titan. There, he discovers that the sole purpose of human existence was for him to take a spare part to a broken alien robot who was stranded there eons ago.
It blew me away. Nearly all science fiction writers dwell on intricately developed theories about how future technology works. Vonnegut eschewed that as nonsense and wrote about Martian invaders and aliens who manipulated human history.
These same aliens from Tralfamadore make another appearance in the next book I read, Slaughterhouse-Five. Like many of Vonnegut's other books, this is a semi-autobiographical story about a soldier who becomes a prisoner of war in WWII and witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. It's a unapologetic anti-war novel published in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War.
This became my favorite book ever, partly because I come from a family that seems to favor war. One of my grandfathers served in the Pacific, the other was an infantryman poised to invade Japan when Hiroshima and Nagasaki melted. My father served stateside as Vietnam was just starting, but two of my uncles were there. Most recently, my brother and his wife were in Iraq, having previously served time in North Korea and Bosnia.
Most of my family still thinks we could have won in Vietnam, if it hadn't been for those damn hippies and John Kerry.
So Slaughterhouse-Five solidified me as the only anti-war sissy in my family.
Next came Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle. I have never read a book as focused as Breakfast of Champions. Every aspect of the book supports its theme that we are what we eat. Dwayne Hoover goes crazy on a diet of bad chemicals and bad ideas. America's breakfast of slavery, violence and exploitation has sustained it for 200 years. And the title comes from a waitress--every time she serves a customer a martini she calls it the "Breakfast of Champions."
The next two books I read were Hocus Pocus and Timequake. Although imaginative and insightful these didn't measure up to Vonnegut's other works. What's important though, is that that even Vonnegut's worst novels are better than most.
Just a few months ago I finished Mother Night -- the story about Howard Campbell, an American spy in Nazi Germany who secreted messages out of the country through his weekly radio addresses. However, these speeches were virulently anti-Semitic and inspired great loyalty from the Nazis. The book's message: you are who you pretend to be.
And now I'm half-way through Galapagos. After that, only seven more Vonnegut novels to go.
I've started almost a dozen novels, and only once written more than 7,000 words. My latest project was going to be called Vacation at Kurt Vonnegut. This was going to be my foreword:
So it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday. He was 84.
Unfortunately I wasn't introduced to his writing until after college. However, I was immediately hooked when I read The Sirens of Titan. It's a story about the richest man on Earth who follows a bizarre quest to Mars and back and then to Titan. There, he discovers that the sole purpose of human existence was for him to take a spare part to a broken alien robot who was stranded there eons ago.
It blew me away. Nearly all science fiction writers dwell on intricately developed theories about how future technology works. Vonnegut eschewed that as nonsense and wrote about Martian invaders and aliens who manipulated human history.
These same aliens from Tralfamadore make another appearance in the next book I read, Slaughterhouse-Five. Like many of Vonnegut's other books, this is a semi-autobiographical story about a soldier who becomes a prisoner of war in WWII and witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. It's a unapologetic anti-war novel published in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War.
This became my favorite book ever, partly because I come from a family that seems to favor war. One of my grandfathers served in the Pacific, the other was an infantryman poised to invade Japan when Hiroshima and Nagasaki melted. My father served stateside as Vietnam was just starting, but two of my uncles were there. Most recently, my brother and his wife were in Iraq, having previously served time in North Korea and Bosnia.
Most of my family still thinks we could have won in Vietnam, if it hadn't been for those damn hippies and John Kerry.
So Slaughterhouse-Five solidified me as the only anti-war sissy in my family.
Next came Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle. I have never read a book as focused as Breakfast of Champions. Every aspect of the book supports its theme that we are what we eat. Dwayne Hoover goes crazy on a diet of bad chemicals and bad ideas. America's breakfast of slavery, violence and exploitation has sustained it for 200 years. And the title comes from a waitress--every time she serves a customer a martini she calls it the "Breakfast of Champions."
The next two books I read were Hocus Pocus and Timequake. Although imaginative and insightful these didn't measure up to Vonnegut's other works. What's important though, is that that even Vonnegut's worst novels are better than most.
Just a few months ago I finished Mother Night -- the story about Howard Campbell, an American spy in Nazi Germany who secreted messages out of the country through his weekly radio addresses. However, these speeches were virulently anti-Semitic and inspired great loyalty from the Nazis. The book's message: you are who you pretend to be.
And now I'm half-way through Galapagos. After that, only seven more Vonnegut novels to go.
I've started almost a dozen novels, and only once written more than 7,000 words. My latest project was going to be called Vacation at Kurt Vonnegut. This was going to be my foreword:
The title of this book is an unabashedly transparent attempt to meet the author Kurt Vonnegut, who is not the namesake for the Village of Kurt Vonnegut. That Kurt Vonnegut gathered a large pile of stuff through murder and robbery and then forced the local people to eternally adopt the name of their exploiter. He was a big fish in a small outhouse. The author Kurt Vonnegut showed me the futility and beauty of living and letting others live too. He is a catch-and-release fisherman in an ocean.OK, perhaps it needs some work still. Not that it matters. I'm too late. It'll probably be a long time until I have the chance to meet him.
So it goes.
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