Vonnegut, remembered

Something close to my heart is taking place this Friday.\nWell, two things, actually – I really can’t wait to see Yung Joc in concert at Sigma Alpha Mu.\nBut the other semi-momentous occasion going on in the world is the one-year anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut’s death.\nThe thing that was strange to me upon hearing the news a year ago – what set this incident apart from being simply “my favorite author died” – was that sort of inexplicable role he filled for so many people, transcending “writer” and instead becoming, in a way, like somebody you knew your whole life. My best guess as to why is because the tone of his writing was so cynical, so hilariously bittersweet, that the things he touched on were always themes that went against the mainstream. Thus, if you really felt what he was saying, the nature of the sentiment immediately placed you and Vonnegut outside looking in.\nAnd at the same time, his writing could morph into a head-spinning stream of consciousness, mentally purging anything and everything onto whatever he could find, be it scraps of paper, backs of receipts, or any other haphazard surface. Many passages evoke random bursts of laughter because they’re so downright random, or the non-sequiturs are so out of left field – grin-worthy hints that some of these were almost surely a product of hitting the bottle.\nBut then, you never can tell. Even Vonnegut’s sobriety was everyone else’s furthest point from the norm. So much of his writing was autobiographical, be it through recurring character Kilgore Trout or some other unorthodox means. But his plotlines, far more than with more conventional fiction, were always second-fiddle to their most important function: serving as springboards for him to, well, be Kurt Vonnegut. \nThe plotlines themselves are endearing, but Vonnegut is at his best with his wacky asides, shelling his darkly humorous social commentary on everything from technology to sex, from wealth disparity to Vietnam. Everything was fair game, and all unapologetically so. \nAnd the quips didn’t stop with his writing: His personality showed through perhaps best in off-the-cuff interviews and remarks, such as when he referred to his affinity for smoking filterless Pall Malls as “a classy way to commit suicide,” and subsequently expressed his annoyance that they hadn’t done the job yet.\nIt was this abysmally bleak, only-half-kidding outlook that served, I think, as the nuts and bolts of his sardonic machinery: Suicide is a staple theme of his writing, and his own suicide attempt in 1984 is referenced several times in later books and interviews with remarkable candidness. \nBut there he always was, a pillar of eye-rolling for an entire generation. It’s nice to have an authority on being an ass – someone who unleashes cutting insights on social phenomena, then turns right around and observes that “Evolution is so creative. That’s how come we got giraffes and the clap.”\nI’ll tip my glass to that. Kurt Vonnegut, you are missed.