Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/04120
By Ron Jacobs
We Join Kilgore Trout In Mourning: Kurt Vonnegut Moves On
Remembering Kurt Vonnegut
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne
The Aggie Librarian read Slaughterhouse 5 while studying abroad and finished it sitting in an outdoor cafe in Dresden, Germany, appropriately enough. While employed at TAMUG, he read the unabridged audiotape edition of Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye, Blue Monday, and loved it. Through the years Aggie Librarian has read Vonnegut's assorted interviews and articles, too, and all that was enough to appreciate the magic and genius of this man. He is truly the 20th Century's Mark Twain reborn, or perhaps its Ambrose Bierce.
Reading Slaughterhouse 5 was a moving experience for me, and from it, I moved on to Joseph Heller's Catch 22; the irreverence of both of these books, their exposure of the insanity in the heart of so-called civilization, helped restore me to some measure of sanity, and to lift up my spirit and keep me going...helped me shake off a long funk of dark depression and loneliness I was experiencing while living abroad in Germany, and made me feel ok about being an American again. Vonnegut's writing was so...out there, but so damn good. Funny, insane, wild-eyed...yet wracked by self-doubt and self-deprecation, as reflected in Vonnegut's doppelgänger, Kilgore Trout, the washed up science fiction writer. This was Vonnegut's real image of himself, I think--a talentless hack and a failure. It is a tragically sad flaw of so many great men, that they view themselves essentially as failures. Vonnegut was anything but, but no one of this earth could probably have convinced him otherwise.
I have a collection of Vonnegut novels which I've yet to wade through, but I treasure them all the more today. He was a great ally in the cause of human dignity, and human community against the forces of Imperialism, crony Capitalism, technological de-humanization, War, stupidity, and the Powers that Be. He will be sorely missed.
May Libraries across the land institute a READ VONNEGUT month in his Honor!
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