And So It Goes

I don't usually write on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but today is a special occasion. One of my heroes died yesterday.

I've found that, sometimes, knowing the right artist can unlock doors. Years ago, I was travelling to a wedding with a couple of gay gentlemen, Ken and Darius. They were nice enough, but had some of the standard defensive nervousness around straight men, and the ride started off a little uncomfortably. We tried to find a conversational topic to which we could all contribute, but we were very different people; I was a graduate student in English, Ken worked for Bell Atlantic, and Darius...well, Darius JUST LOVED TO DANCE. However, I had recently spent a semester researching John Waters, and knew quite a bit about the self-described "Pope of Trash." When I mentioned the magic name, the discomfort evaporated and we spent the rest of the trip merrily discussing the wonders of Waters and the joys of queer literature. By the end of the road, they were talking about making me an honorary member of the rainbow mafia. I still see them from time to time.

Kurt Vonnegut had a similar effect on engineers. As "a teacher at a major mid-Atlantic technological university," to use the parlance of Penthouse Forum, I often find myself trying to communicate with science-related professionals. While some of these people are just like you and me, many of them exist in a semi-autistic world of code, jargon, and self-imposed isolation. I've discovered, however, that a surprisingly large number of engineers and scientists have read, and loved, Vonnegut. In some ways, he is the Rosetta stone, the universal translator, that makes communication possible between the world of scientists and the world of writers.

This isn't too surprising; Vonnegut majored in Biochemistry at Cornell University, and his writing often reflects the straighforward, definitional world of science. His characters are minimalistic, and his scene setting is usually rendered in broad strokes, but the ideas that he explores are wide-ranging, intensely topical, and amazingly deep. Like Orwell, he often adopts a journalistic tone, but modifies it with a truly bent sense of humor that forefronts the absurdity of society. If you haven't read him, you should definitely check out Welcome to the Monkey House, Breakfast of Champions, and Sirens of Titan. While you're at it, you might want to take a peek at Slaughterhouse Five, his most famous work.

I met him when I was still in college. A committee that I chaired brought him to speak. I was the only person in the group who actually knew who Vonnegut was, so we spent most of the evening chatting about his books and Jazz. He was surprised that I'd read Philip Jose Farmer's hoax Venus on the Half Shell. In one of Vonnegut's novels, his recurring character Kilgore Trout authored a book with that title. As a joke, Farmer followed Vonnegut's skeletal plotline and wrote the novel, publishing it under Trout's name. Vonnegut loved the story, although he was angry when people accused him of writing the book.

In the course of dinner, I watched as Vonnegut smoked seven unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes while eating a corned beef sandwich. I was surprised that he'd survived into his late sixties, and my amazement deepened as I watched him put away the better part of a pack over the next couple of hours. In all, I calculated that he was smoking between three and four packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and was putting away enough nicotine to fell a bull elephant. I thanked God that I'd gotten to meet him, as his smoking and cholesterol consumption clearly made him into a ticking time bomb.

I have to laugh. This was in 1990, when he was 67. He lived for another seventeen years, and was finally killed by brain damage that he sustained in a household fall.

He had a good run. All day, I've been getting e-mails from former students who read his books in my classes. I'm sad that he has died, but he's practically the definition of a life well lived.

And, as my students can attest, it would be foolish to say that he's gone.