Thursday, April 12, 2007

He's just unstuck in time


My favorite author (not that I read much), Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at age 84. Well, they say he died, he's actually probably somewhere in a zoo on Tralfamadore with a porn star. More after the jump.

I was first introduced to Kurt Vonnegut in high school in my freshman honors English class (someone obviously mixed up my transcript with some other kid). I had one of those "cool" teachers. You know, he wore sportscoats with no tie, had crazy hair, and let us call him Chuck. One of our first readings was Slaughterhouse-Five, a scary title for a 13-year-old, and pretty shocking for an all-boys Catholic high school (that probably explains a lot about me). But after being introduced to Billy Pilgrim and his travels through time and space I was hooked.

I'm not a big fan of science-fiction, I still haven't seen Star Wars for god's sake, but I just couldn't get enough of Vonnegut's writing. It's probably a little blasphemous to even talk about Vonnegut and Sci-Fi in the same sentence, but what else to you call novels about time travel, space ships and ice that melts at 114.4 degreed Fahrenheit?

I have to say Vonnegut and his novels helped shaped me and my opinions. Some would say I shouldn't have read them. I would say I always read them.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, I hope his complex fifth dimensional waveform found its way to a suitable psichronosynclastic infundibulum of some other medium suitable to a human of his immense talent and depth of human understanding... IOW, he has found some other plane on which to fart around.