Friday, April 27
One more Kurt link
"They're all really good," says co-worker Brian, pointing us towards "15 things Kurt Vonnegut said better than anyone else" on AV Club.
Saturday, April 21
Go ahead
Friday, April 20
The commencement speech
It's nearly that time of year, so this next link will take you to what purports to be a commencement address to Kenyon graduates by the novelest/braniac David Foster Wallace. I like it -- a lot -- and perhaps wish I'd heard it at one of my graduations.
Of course, we've been fooled before...
Of course, we've been fooled before...
The copy artist
"I idealize the transmission of intellectual property materials," Jonathan Lethem says.
Friday, April 13
Vonnegut and Me
Entertainment Weekly checks in with the Twain comparison. I first came across Vonnegut late, I suppose (compared to every obit which seems to mention his popularity among high school students), in a college English class, "Twain and Vonnegut," at Sonoma State University in my brief three-semester attempt at graduate school while I worked nights as a sports writer. The class was taught by the same guy who taught the Shakespeare class I took that semester.
I enjoyed Twain, but I fell in love with the three or four Vonnegut books we had to read, and as soon as school ended I read the rest of 'em. I thought they were all so funny and honest and weird and strange and true and funny. Turns out I shared his humanist tendencies, but I'd never seen that philosophy in print or knew it existed. It was the truth I think, or my perception of the truth, the tell-it-like-it is feeling that captured me. The short sentences. The weirdness. I liked it. A lot. And again, the humor of course. Also, I never had to overcome the opinion that Vonnegut was slumming in sci-fi. From the start, it was great literature for me. I was a true believer. Plus, more important: his books made me feel like writing was something I could do.
And so that summer I started writing my first novel, only to realize within weeks that I was way too young to have done anything or to know anything worth writing about in long fiction. And that I wasn't very good. But still. My need to write novels really started then, that summer of '86. And it's never let up. And so I soon quit school ("Vonnegut didn't learn to write novels in a college writing program!") and moved to San Diego and started writing another novel. And later, when I learned Vonnegut had been a news writer (in Chicago) and did PR for a big corporation (GE), both things I'd done (or still do) and I had three bad novels in a drawer, he was living, visible proof that maybe, someday, with continued hard work and the right breaks, maybe I could climb out of the cubicles of corporate America. So I keep trying, and he's still an inspiration. Maybe someday, I'll get out. Maybe this current novel (my 7th) will be the one I'm happy enough with to chase down an agent and a publishers. Maybe. So it goes. Thanks Mr. Vonnegut.
Below, I share an e-mail from the one time I saw Vonnegut.
I enjoyed Twain, but I fell in love with the three or four Vonnegut books we had to read, and as soon as school ended I read the rest of 'em. I thought they were all so funny and honest and weird and strange and true and funny. Turns out I shared his humanist tendencies, but I'd never seen that philosophy in print or knew it existed. It was the truth I think, or my perception of the truth, the tell-it-like-it is feeling that captured me. The short sentences. The weirdness. I liked it. A lot. And again, the humor of course. Also, I never had to overcome the opinion that Vonnegut was slumming in sci-fi. From the start, it was great literature for me. I was a true believer. Plus, more important: his books made me feel like writing was something I could do.
And so that summer I started writing my first novel, only to realize within weeks that I was way too young to have done anything or to know anything worth writing about in long fiction. And that I wasn't very good. But still. My need to write novels really started then, that summer of '86. And it's never let up. And so I soon quit school ("Vonnegut didn't learn to write novels in a college writing program!") and moved to San Diego and started writing another novel. And later, when I learned Vonnegut had been a news writer (in Chicago) and did PR for a big corporation (GE), both things I'd done (or still do) and I had three bad novels in a drawer, he was living, visible proof that maybe, someday, with continued hard work and the right breaks, maybe I could climb out of the cubicles of corporate America. So I keep trying, and he's still an inspiration. Maybe someday, I'll get out. Maybe this current novel (my 7th) will be the one I'm happy enough with to chase down an agent and a publishers. Maybe. So it goes. Thanks Mr. Vonnegut.
Below, I share an e-mail from the one time I saw Vonnegut.
Thursday, April 12
When I saw Vonnegut in Denver
In 1997, Kurt Vonnegut came to Denver. My friend Krell and I made the drive down from the edge of nowhere to the Tattered Cover in Lower Downtown to see him. The next morning, I sent the following e-mail to my friend Hagerty.
Date: Wednesday, 8 October 1997 8:28 am MT
To: Tom.Hagerty
From: eba
Subject: Vonnegut
We waited about two hours, first for a ticket to one of the 300 seats, then for the thing to begin. All seats filled; standing crowd pushed total to maybe 350 or 400. He had a “professional interview” with a friend of his, the 40ish man who owns Wynkoop Brewery in LoDo, whose dad was a college frat buddy of Vonnegut’s at Cornell in the early ‘40s. [Note: Interviewer was John Hickenlooper, who’s now mayor of Denver.] As an interviewer, he was weak, but he was perfect to do it because they had some sort of relationship.
Vonnegut looked like the old man he is; a tousle of not-really-gray hair and lots of it, which he scratched frequently. He wore a blue suit and a thick tie that looked like it was made in the ‘80s; a big knot. He slumped back in the chair mostly, rolling his head from side to side, gesturing with one big hand. With his bush gray mustache, he looked not unlike Mark Twain, to whom he’s frequently compared of course.
He talked about lots of stuff: a bit about the new book; a lot about pursuing art in your life; he ripped Microsoft for doing everything it can to enslave people by making microchips replace much of the economic functions of human beings; he talked about religion and his atheism; he talked about social justice and living wages; and he talked about his silk screens. He had a lot of one-liners which the overly reverential crowd laughed loudly and applauded loudly and frequently.
He opened by asking if there were any members of the Turtle Club present. The appropriate answer is, “You bet your sweet ass I am.” Maybe a third of the crowd knew the answer and shouted it with glee, which is also appropriate.
I went, of course, with my own personal agenda: to learn from the closest thing I have to a mentor (in abstention), and to see if my literary hero could offer any advice that I could use. That’s asking a lot from a complete stranger, and usually in those situations, the anticipation, the waiting, the going is usually more important than the reality or the results. I’m a firm believer in ‘getting there is all the fun,’ that the journey is much better than the destination. And even with all of this personal baggage, I was still not disappointed by Vonnegut. He didn’t say anything new, but hearing it from him reinforced what we already know. And for some reason, I’m going to let him live as a hero, and try to do what he said.
Which was:
+ Be a decent human being. The world is a cruel place, and by trying, striving to be decent, to be a saint, at least there’s hope that the new babies born today will one day run into you and learn something about being decent. He also said his often-reported quote that he and a friend decided that about 17 percent of the people live these sorts of lives. (Drew a huge laugh).
+ Do art. Feed your soul. Don’t just watch it or read it or see it, but do it. Yourself. He even gave us homework: Go home, write a four line poem, and write the best four-line poem you can. Don’t read it to anyone. Just write it. Then wad it up and throw it away. Turn on the radio and dance. Don’t let anyone see you, just close the curtains and dance to a song. Sing a song. Learn all the words and sing the song to yourself. Draw. Paint. The art is in the doing, not in the selling or showing or reading or publishing. Do it for yourself. Get off the couch. (And as he talked, he got up out of his chair, and walked slowly around the riser/stage, dancing in slow motion the act of getting a book off a shelf and reading. In his old body, it was simply beautiful to see his fingers flipping pages.)
+ Enjoy the nice things. This was something his uncle told him. When you see a nice thing, pause and enjoy it. If it’s a pitcher of lemonade in the shade on the Fourth of July, pause and enjoy the moment. Say, “This is nice.”
+ Fart around. He lambasted the internet indirectly, reminiscing about the decentralized libraries at the U of Chicago. “I had to walk across the quadrangle and bump into people and see people and talk to strangers and go into the religion library or the English department library. How inconvenient!” he said, mockingly. “What a waste of time!” Then he paused and looked at the crowd. “But so what? What are humans here for? To waste time. Fart around.”
I’m glad I went. He lived up to my expectations, which is a rare thing indeed.
Date: Wednesday, 8 October 1997 8:28 am MT
To: Tom.Hagerty
From: eba
Subject: Vonnegut
We waited about two hours, first for a ticket to one of the 300 seats, then for the thing to begin. All seats filled; standing crowd pushed total to maybe 350 or 400. He had a “professional interview” with a friend of his, the 40ish man who owns Wynkoop Brewery in LoDo, whose dad was a college frat buddy of Vonnegut’s at Cornell in the early ‘40s. [Note: Interviewer was John Hickenlooper, who’s now mayor of Denver.] As an interviewer, he was weak, but he was perfect to do it because they had some sort of relationship.
Vonnegut looked like the old man he is; a tousle of not-really-gray hair and lots of it, which he scratched frequently. He wore a blue suit and a thick tie that looked like it was made in the ‘80s; a big knot. He slumped back in the chair mostly, rolling his head from side to side, gesturing with one big hand. With his bush gray mustache, he looked not unlike Mark Twain, to whom he’s frequently compared of course.
He talked about lots of stuff: a bit about the new book; a lot about pursuing art in your life; he ripped Microsoft for doing everything it can to enslave people by making microchips replace much of the economic functions of human beings; he talked about religion and his atheism; he talked about social justice and living wages; and he talked about his silk screens. He had a lot of one-liners which the overly reverential crowd laughed loudly and applauded loudly and frequently.
He opened by asking if there were any members of the Turtle Club present. The appropriate answer is, “You bet your sweet ass I am.” Maybe a third of the crowd knew the answer and shouted it with glee, which is also appropriate.
I went, of course, with my own personal agenda: to learn from the closest thing I have to a mentor (in abstention), and to see if my literary hero could offer any advice that I could use. That’s asking a lot from a complete stranger, and usually in those situations, the anticipation, the waiting, the going is usually more important than the reality or the results. I’m a firm believer in ‘getting there is all the fun,’ that the journey is much better than the destination. And even with all of this personal baggage, I was still not disappointed by Vonnegut. He didn’t say anything new, but hearing it from him reinforced what we already know. And for some reason, I’m going to let him live as a hero, and try to do what he said.
Which was:
+ Be a decent human being. The world is a cruel place, and by trying, striving to be decent, to be a saint, at least there’s hope that the new babies born today will one day run into you and learn something about being decent. He also said his often-reported quote that he and a friend decided that about 17 percent of the people live these sorts of lives. (Drew a huge laugh).
+ Do art. Feed your soul. Don’t just watch it or read it or see it, but do it. Yourself. He even gave us homework: Go home, write a four line poem, and write the best four-line poem you can. Don’t read it to anyone. Just write it. Then wad it up and throw it away. Turn on the radio and dance. Don’t let anyone see you, just close the curtains and dance to a song. Sing a song. Learn all the words and sing the song to yourself. Draw. Paint. The art is in the doing, not in the selling or showing or reading or publishing. Do it for yourself. Get off the couch. (And as he talked, he got up out of his chair, and walked slowly around the riser/stage, dancing in slow motion the act of getting a book off a shelf and reading. In his old body, it was simply beautiful to see his fingers flipping pages.)
+ Enjoy the nice things. This was something his uncle told him. When you see a nice thing, pause and enjoy it. If it’s a pitcher of lemonade in the shade on the Fourth of July, pause and enjoy the moment. Say, “This is nice.”
+ Fart around. He lambasted the internet indirectly, reminiscing about the decentralized libraries at the U of Chicago. “I had to walk across the quadrangle and bump into people and see people and talk to strangers and go into the religion library or the English department library. How inconvenient!” he said, mockingly. “What a waste of time!” Then he paused and looked at the crowd. “But so what? What are humans here for? To waste time. Fart around.”
I’m glad I went. He lived up to my expectations, which is a rare thing indeed.
NYT's reviews
Seattle P-I on Kurt
I like this appreciation from the Seattle P-I quite a bit, particularly the comments from other writers who say what I would say about him.
On the beach
Of all the photos I've seen of Kurt Vonnegut today, this one from the New York Times is my favorite.
Good-bye, Kurt
Kurt Vonnegut, my all-time favorite author and one of America's greatest humans, has died. More later.
Tuesday, April 10
Listen to Ezra
Thursday, April 5
Reading list
"Beauty from ashes." So says Kirkus about Don DeLillo's newest, Falling Man. Count me in.
Right now I've finally (temporarily?) put down the presidential biographies I've been reading for the past three months to pick up Heyday, Kurt Andersen's latest ("brilliantly imagined, wildly entertaining" according to the, uhm, publisher). I also have Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land still sitting bedside.
Right now I've finally (temporarily?) put down the presidential biographies I've been reading for the past three months to pick up Heyday, Kurt Andersen's latest ("brilliantly imagined, wildly entertaining" according to the, uhm, publisher). I also have Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land still sitting bedside.
Tuesday, April 3
Play ball
