Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

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Recently read Armageddon In Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut.

What could the final book Vonnegut ever publishes is a mixed bag of newer and some of Vonnegut’s oldest, previously unpublished, material. The newer work, including a hilarious speech, has the same Vonnegut style and charm as his excellent Timequake and A Man Without A Country. The older works, mostly fictional and non-fictional recollections of his time in World War II are a mixed bag. They are all good, no doubt, and very sadly intense in their nature, but a lot of it is very raw and not quite the Vonnegut we would come to know later. This isn’t to say Armageddon In Retrospect isn’t worth checking out, just that some of it is sub par for my very high expectations.

I read this via the audio book. Rip Torn does a wonderful reading of the book. This is a good example of an audio reading really emphasizing the better qualities of the writing.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84.

I don’t really know what to say. The first time I read Vonnegut was when I was fourteen. A friend told me about Breakfast Of Champions so I went to the local library and borrowed it.

Reading that book broke my brain I think.

So much of what I was thinking, and still am thinking, Vonnegut wrote on those pages. It is hard to put into words how great reading Vonnegut felt. A few of my friends were also very interested in him and, despite our later differences, we could always talk about Vonnegut or reference Kilgore Trout together.

As I have said before, it is a pretty troubling thought that someone sixty years my senior is one of the people whom I relate to the most. Into his eighties Vonnegut’s writing about contemporary issues was frighteningly right on. When I was reading A Man Without A Country last year it was somewhat comforting, as the world spirals into the void around us, that someone else understood.

Take care, old friend.

Read in 2005: A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut.