Ask me who my favorite author is, and I will not blink, pause, or ponder. Vonnegut. Loud, proud, and the same every time. I'll gobble up every word he puts to paper, and I'll do it over and over.
I wasn't expecting Mr. Vonnegut to be the sort of person who would ever die. He'd just live somewhere out there, forever, sketching little odd things and occasionally publishing a small tome to tide us all over and motivate us to read his books, all of them, over again.
This was a shocking morning for me - I even cried a bit. Sadly, it seems like everyone keeps mentioning the movie versions of his books, so I've had a couple of people ask me if I'd heard about that guy who died and what other movies did he do? Sigh.
Thanks for the words, sir. I'm very grateful to you for leaving so many of them behind.
*End weepy tribute*
In related news: CNN gets its priorities straight while still somehow managing to minimize the man's impact on American literature:
Nothing like the faint memory of a former Patridge Family train wreck to jar you out of mourning. Update: By 3:00 p.m., all reference to Vonnegut had been removed from both the Headlines and Entertainment sections of the CNN homepage, replaced by a link to an interview with the Ugly Betty actress. And yet for the past two days, I've been forced to endure Larry Birkhead and Howard K. Stern ad nauseum. And sure, I'm biased because I'm so admiring of him...but ya know, I tolerated everyone else's fascination with a crazy astronaut going all Cannonball Run in a diaper. So not to get all uppity - but seriously? Seriously.
Since we're on the subject of the printed word - no one has mentioned being bothered by what I wrote about The Secret, but I do feel compelled to mention that if you read the book and it helped you, or feel you would like to read the book and it could help you, I'm all for that - I think that the underlying point of the book is an outstanding one. I was just surprised to learn that it wasn't so intuitive a point as to cause the book to be a tremendous and grand flop.)
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