So it goes*
Kurt Vonnegut Jr, one of only two authors I listed as my personal favorites, died yesterday. He was 84.
Reputedly, at the time of his death, he had caused six billion laughs from all over the world.
Seriously, he died after banging his head after a fall in his Manhattan apartment a few weeks back. He at last succeeded in killing himself after a failed suicide in 1984. A true master of irony and satire him.
Who was he again?
An intelligent read. America’s 20th and 21st Centuries’ Mark Twain who wrote and looked like him. Mark Twain was anti-imperialist. Vonnegut was ACLU, humanist, anti-Vietnam and Iraq wars all the way. (Some even described him as socialist, pero Trotskyite.) Both have cult followings, especially politicized campus denizens.
Vonnegut has been credited as the father of literary counterculture in the US. True to character, he refused to be so labeled nor he ever did postulate on what the heck counterculture is.
In his only book Pom and I own, Bagombo Snuff Box, he wrote the following advice to aspiring short story writers:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
"I’ve had a hell of a good time," Vonnegut once wrote. "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different."
Last year, he came out of semi-retirement to write a new book - A Man Without a Country - because of his "contempt" for current US President George W Bush. “Bush is so ignorant,” he was quoted to have said.
Did I say he was also a master of understaments?
After finishing the book, he was again quoted in August 2006 to have said: ‘Please, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?’ That’s what I feel right now. I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?"
Sure, Mr Vonnegut. As if you need permission from anyone.
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* Vonnegut’s favorite and most popular parting shot.
