The greatest compliment that anyone has ever given me in my entire life was telling me that my writing reminded them of Kurt Vonnegut. I have never come close to his brilliance but just knowing that for a moment I had someone comparing me to my literary idol had me floating on air for a week.
(My second greatest compliment was Gabriel grabbing me and going, “Chris, you are my idol” and my response of “Dude, you are so wrong” but that is a story for another day.)
It was tough waking up this morning and finding out that Kurt had died. Not that it was a surprise as he had reached the age where those things occur. He had written about it for years, basically viewing his last few essays as a coda on his writing life. Even his last novel Timequake is filled with self-reference in which he states that he is too old to still be writing novels. As he states at one point, “When Hemmingway and Fitzgerald were my age they were already dead. Why am I still writing novels?” But for me, it is really a loss of one of my literary heroes.
Growing up there were two writers that I admired and whose styles I tried to copy. One was the late Douglas Adams, who wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide books and showed me that you could be funny and philosophical and fantastical all at the same time. The other was Kurt, who showed me that books didn’t have to all be the same. That the distance between the author and the story can be negligible. And that you don’t need to write massive tomes to get your point across. Slaughterhouse-Five is a tiny little book. It doesn’t feel like it when you read it. I can still remember the image of Billy Pilgrim standing in the corner of the rail car, with his arms outstretched and head down, even though it has been more than fifteen years since I first read that story. You don’t need a thousand pages to prove your point. Sometimes you only need three words.
(The only F I have ever received was on a paper I wrote on Slaughterhouse-Five. Technically, I received an A and an F on the same paper. From an analysis standpoint I was given an A based on my interpretation of the symbolism in the novel. The F was on my grammar as writing about a book that has no consistent timeline resulted in my paper using past, present and future verb tense, often in the same sentence. In retrospect, I should have claimed that it was a tribute to a master.)
Maybe it was because he eschewed artifice. Maybe it was because he saw as a young man how inhumane people can be and how random life really is. Or maybe it was just because he understood too well what it meant to be a human being. Where you decide to pinpoint his insight is insignificant, the importance is the mirror he put up to the world. Almost alien at times, his detachment to the world around him and his ability to point out the frivolity of life while maintaining those moments of brilliance that keep us going is what made him special. He made a kid lying on a couch in his basement fall to the ground in laughter and then wonder if one day he could write something that would stay with someone for a lifetime.
The last great American author died this morning. So it goes.
(My second greatest compliment was Gabriel grabbing me and going, “Chris, you are my idol” and my response of “Dude, you are so wrong” but that is a story for another day.)
It was tough waking up this morning and finding out that Kurt had died. Not that it was a surprise as he had reached the age where those things occur. He had written about it for years, basically viewing his last few essays as a coda on his writing life. Even his last novel Timequake is filled with self-reference in which he states that he is too old to still be writing novels. As he states at one point, “When Hemmingway and Fitzgerald were my age they were already dead. Why am I still writing novels?” But for me, it is really a loss of one of my literary heroes.
Growing up there were two writers that I admired and whose styles I tried to copy. One was the late Douglas Adams, who wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide books and showed me that you could be funny and philosophical and fantastical all at the same time. The other was Kurt, who showed me that books didn’t have to all be the same. That the distance between the author and the story can be negligible. And that you don’t need to write massive tomes to get your point across. Slaughterhouse-Five is a tiny little book. It doesn’t feel like it when you read it. I can still remember the image of Billy Pilgrim standing in the corner of the rail car, with his arms outstretched and head down, even though it has been more than fifteen years since I first read that story. You don’t need a thousand pages to prove your point. Sometimes you only need three words.
(The only F I have ever received was on a paper I wrote on Slaughterhouse-Five. Technically, I received an A and an F on the same paper. From an analysis standpoint I was given an A based on my interpretation of the symbolism in the novel. The F was on my grammar as writing about a book that has no consistent timeline resulted in my paper using past, present and future verb tense, often in the same sentence. In retrospect, I should have claimed that it was a tribute to a master.)
Maybe it was because he eschewed artifice. Maybe it was because he saw as a young man how inhumane people can be and how random life really is. Or maybe it was just because he understood too well what it meant to be a human being. Where you decide to pinpoint his insight is insignificant, the importance is the mirror he put up to the world. Almost alien at times, his detachment to the world around him and his ability to point out the frivolity of life while maintaining those moments of brilliance that keep us going is what made him special. He made a kid lying on a couch in his basement fall to the ground in laughter and then wonder if one day he could write something that would stay with someone for a lifetime.
The last great American author died this morning. So it goes.
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