Kurt Vonnegut RIP

Damn it. I never got to have a cup of coffee and a couple of Pall Malls with one of my favorite authors. Mr. Vonnegut was on the Daily Show not too long ago (no YouTube because Viacom sucks), and he did look pretty ancient.

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84 - New York Times
Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island. His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

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Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.

His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).

Knew his death was imminent, but still am saddened. Remember writing my 11th grade honors English thesis on Vonnegut, even though my teacher (Mrs. Elaine Hettenhausen aka Ms. Hett) claimed she had never heard of him. Of course, that meant I was able to take creative liberties while writing Vonnegut's bio - I used several 'facts' which were only true in Vonnegut's novels.

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