Epitaphs, pt. III
April 16, 2007
Here’s my KV piece. David Hoppe has a better one on Nuvo’s website.
Epitaphs, pt. II
April 15, 2007
I was struck by the similarities between Liesly Schillinger’s Vonnegut memorial and my own (forthcoming, maybe, in this week’s Nuvo. And Molly will have something in the Indy). It’s tough to write about Vonnegut without reinforcing the biggest charge against him, which Schillinger summarizes:
In New York, many years later, I came to understand that a number of intellectuals thought Vonnegut was for students—for the kind of immature, emotional readers who get caught up in Dune or The Fountainhead: a “phase” author. But it’s never struck me that there is a mature, dispassionate stance on death, greed, cruelty, and human weakness that sober-minded adults ought to graduate to, after reaching some arbitrary educational high-water mark, that would elevate them beyond Vonnegut’s whimsically bleak philosophy.
Schillinger ends her piece with “So it goes. Respect from the granfalloon,” which I will not do, but which seems to acknowledge in its simplicity that there’s no real getting around that intellectual indictment of Vonnegut’s works. I won’t try. It would be an empty exercise anyway: it’s too easy to prove that anybody is insufficiently intellectual by pointing to the internal contradictions that inevitably build up in their work over long years or by decrying their obscurantism (we all get a little mystical sometimes).
People (like Schillinger) keep mentioning encounters with the man himself. We all wanted to know him in the flesh: see the pleasant-enough “Everyone Knows Kurt Vonnegut but Me.” This is why he keeps getting compared to Mark Twain. Unlike most writers, he could hold his own in person. Throw down, even. “Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@” is worth your time.
What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?
Assholes.
Keep it in mind.
