If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don't have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts.

Thus spake Kurt Vonnegut, as of today, dead . . . this latter concept captured brilliantly by a Vonnegut drawing on today's front page of vonnegut.com:

Flown the cage, eh?

My drawing for my event would add a hand reaching into the cage and daintily pulling out, by one claw, an inverted bird.

It's not only my parents who probably are glad I didn't go into the visual arts.

But back to Vonnegut's advice. The greatest sorrow for parents, is when one of their children dies. The real sorrow, for the child, is when parents die.

Readers? Their sorrow at the passing of an author is not usually so great. Being at several removes of distance, we can take to heart the usual advice at death: As long as we remember him [or her], there's still life.

Still life.

Amazing, after all these years. Life still goes on, going it just so. That Vonnegut himself died of irreparable trauma to the head, that seems, oddly, fitting. He saw so much in civilization that he took at repeated blows to the head, to the sensibility of the humane man. Humans are such frail creatures. And yet, we endure. Vonnegut himself endured for quite a long time, no matter how many cigarettes he smoked, no matter how many pills he took. He even tried to kill himself once.

He found reason to laugh at in his survival. Even as we are saddened, can we find reason to laugh at his death? That, I bet, would be carrying laughter too far.

And yet we'll laugh again. Perhaps at a Vonnegut quip. His words will be remembered for a long time.

Vonnegut's novels, in my order of preference:

1. Mother Night




2. Slaughterhouse Five




3. Sirens of Titan




4. Bluebeard

The latter is, I believe, one of his books that most people never read. It is not sf. It is not considered major. But I'm very fond of it. It is Vonnegut's satire on modern art (abstract expressionism in particular) and on art-as-investment, and a whole lot more. And once again he brings up the matter of genocide.

Vonnegut was obviously obsessed with the subject. It was his touchstone concept. Man's inhumanity to man? Genocide is the ultimate form of this inhumanity.

The thing about Galapagos, the book of his that disappointed so many readers (including Jesse Walker), the chilling thing about it? In that book Vonnegut contemplates post-human evolution, and in a sense seems to be wishing for genocide. It has the same problem that Vidal's Kalki had: is this satire or is this wish fulfillment?

It's easy to be "against genocide." Vonnegut explored the idea, and tried to make some sense out of human senseless slaughter.

A human death, on the other hand, is just one natural death among so many . . . there's no use trying to make too much sense of that. Death is just the final burst of the glorious bubble of an individual life, and, though one hates to burst a bubble, every bubble will indeed burst. That Vonnegut's bubble lasted as long as it did is amazing in its way. And, iridescent as the bubble was, its longevity was something for which we could be grateful.

George Meredith is undoubtedly the most unjustly under-appreciated 19th century British novelist. His repuation has fallen not for want of high praise, but for want of readers. He was and remains a highbrow author, a writer whose comedy was not too sophisticated for the average reader, but whose prose sometimes (too often?) was. Chaos and lightning! That's how Oscar Wilde characterized his work, and I agree.

I'm by no means an expert in his work, having only taken on a novel or two. But I aim to take on them all. For one thing, Meredith does one of the things I wish all novelists would do: contrive a brilliant opening. A great first sentence, or paragraph, or scene. I want to be drawn in from the first words. And Meredith usually does this. No boring opening lines for him.

Take The Amazing Marriage, one of his lesser works, by most critics' accounting. Take the first sentence:

Everybody has heard of the beautiful Countess of Cressett, who was one of the lights of this country at the time when crowned heads were running over Europe, crying out for charity's sake to be amused after their tiresome work of slaughter; and you know what a dread they have of moping.

Yes, it's a longish sentence. True, it will vex the Hemingway slaves. And perhaps that clash of imagery, with crowned heads said to be running, will make some wince. But I suspect that was part of Meredith's aim. He aimed to amuse, and even the conflict of imagery amuses. The whole thing admirably starts the novel in question.

I want to read more, anyway.

On the phone, not long ago, I mentioned my love for Lucian. My friend on the other end heard Lacanian and gasped.

No, Lucian of Samosata, I said.

Very different. I prefer wriers who prick the balloons of pretension to those who fill up multiple ballons, ceaselessly.

But that doesn't mean I can't read writing that others find difficult, whether it comes from the allegedly long-winded Herbert Spencer or the obviously scholastic prose of C. S. Peirce.

Still, Lucian is a good palliative, if not cure, for excessive pomposity in speech and writing.

It turns out that Neil Gaiman is a Cabell fan. From his site:

Cabell's far and away my favourite forgotten American writer — he wrote about 25 books, most of them very different from each other. The only ones to have remained more or less in print over the last forty years are the fantasies Figures of Earth, Jurgen and the Silver Stallion. I think my favourites of his books are probably the short story collections Gallantry (I decided upon reading it, aged 20, that one I day I would one day, when I was a writer, steal the structure of Gallantry; then I read it again some years on and realised that the structure I'd imagined I'd perceived might have been to some degree accidental, but I was still going to steal it one day, even if it had been only in my imagination. One day...) and The Certain Hour — if ever I were to edit a book of favourite horror tales, or favourite tales of faerie, I'd put the short story from Certain Hour about Herrick in it.

As I never tire of saying, my favorite short fiction by Cabell is The Music From Behind the Moon, which I believe Cabell himself referred to as an epitome.

I will now turn away from the computer and haul out my volume of The Certain Hour.

Gore Vidal is of no close relation to Al Gore. And his Christian name is not, of course, Gore.

Somehow, his given name escaped me, even though I've read Palimpsests.

Gore Vidal remains my favorite living American author.