On Vonnegut

 

In the UMass Campus Bookstore today I came across this little shrine erected to the dearly departed Kurt Vonnegut, consisting of this sign and a pile of his books for sale. 

I was surprised that with all that was written about Vonnegut's ties to the region in the wake of his death, no one mentioned how disgusted he was by the political correctness he found entrenched in Northampton's. Smith College when he taught there briefly in the year 2000. Vonnegut said he was amazed to discover how rigid the academic environment was in enforcing leftist orthodoxy. Although a proud liberal himself, Vonnegut had no use for the modern repressive intellectual environment and said so publicly. Somehow the local writers forgot to mention that in their reviews of Vonnegut's Pioneer Valley ties.

The absurd tragedy of Vonnegut's own life was that he became increasingly disillusioned and even embittered as he got older, shocking his fans by actually attempting suicide in 1984. His depression betrayed not just his fans but his best self when he let his outlook turn so dreary, and the quality of his work plummeted as his vision darkened. His obituary writers are too kind to say so, but the truth is at the time of his death Vonnegut hadn't written anything of importance since the 1970's.

That's okay, as Ken Kesey used to say, "Cream rises and shit sinks." Vonnegut's best early work, with its wildly creative science fiction scenarios, his trademark catchphrases which recurred again and again with different meanings in different contexts, his wonderfully sympathetic view of human foibles and admiration for human courage, all that will endure to entertain, enlighten and console readers for generations to come, while the rantings of the bitter, angry old curmudgeon he became will fade away.

Vonnegut was often compared to Mark Twain, who in his later years he even physically resembled. However, the truth is that for all his talent, Vonnegut was never in the same league as Twain. Vonnegut's prose never came near Twain's sophistication and in fact, Vonnegut's entire collection of novels does not add up to even one chapter of Huckleberry Finn.

But in the context of his own time, if you define that time as stretching from the 1950's through the 1970's, then he was indeed a writer of considerable importance, and a genuine hero to the youth of that era who had too few real heroes to look up to. But Ayn Rand said that the definition of success in life is to arrive at the end of it with the best vision of yourself, even if unrealized, at least still intact. By that standard Vonnegut was a failure, but I'm not sure to what extent the realization of that would have bothered him.

As he might have said - so it goes.

I was down at The Fort restaurant in Springfield recently. Of course the place itself is like dining in a museum, with artifacts and images from Springfield's past on display everywhere, such as this colored glass image of The Puritan statue.

Meanwhile the weather continues to really suck around here, despite it being weeks since the official start of Spring. When will it actually feel like Spring? Mother Nature, if you read this blog, please note the picture below, taken of me last July.

 



This is how I want the weather to be. This is what I want to do. So stop being such a mean Mother and make it happen! Thank you very much. 

Finally, here's a video of the local avant-garde spacerock band ZEBU performing recently at The Red Barn in Amherst.