Kurt Vonnegut 1922 - 2007
Stealing a moment from Glendale/Burbank news to remember one of my literary idols. I first met Kurt Vonnegut's words in 1992 as a high school junior in Milpitas, California. It was Mr. Davis' Honors English class -- to get our minds used to performing close textual readings, he had us consider a passage from Breakfast of Champions. It was a something spoken by Kilgore Trout, one of the author's early alter-egos.
I've forgotten what it was exactly -- likely something observant and cynical, yet comforting in its truth. There were three grades you can get -- you were either on the level, close to it, or way off base. I ended up in the middle.
The author was out of my mind until a year later, when I picked up Breakfast of Champions, intrigued by Vonnegut's crude drawings of human anatomy and ironic toilet humor, then absorbed by his particular brand of humanism, of laughter against human cruelty.
The rest followed -- from Cat's Cradle to Slaughterhouse Five to his collection of short stories and essays (which kept me company the first weeks of college) to Timequake.
And so it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Born: Nov. 11, 1922
Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
Died: April 11, 2007
New York, New York, USA
Updated 12:30 a.m. -- The Daily News' Mayor of Television has this remembrance.
Updated 3:05 p.m. -- There IS an Armenian connection (just to tie this back to the blog)! The protagonist in one of his later novels -- Bluebeard -- is none other than Rabo Karabekian, a fictional, one-eye abstract expressionist painter and son of genocide survivors whose works fell apart because he used cheap paint. Thanks, Raffi K.!