no comment (and so it goes)

Commenting seems to be broken here on the blog. I suspect it has to be re-installed (the blog, I mean). It was not installed very carefully the first time, mostly because I wasn’t actually planning to have a blog. I was just trying to see how easy or difficult it would be to install one, so I could advise a friend, and it was so easy that I suddenly had a blog. So, like the woman in “You Can’t Take it With You” (who received a typewriter by mistake, so she decided to become a writer), I became a blogger.

So, commenting will be fixed at some point.

(Later: Turns out it’s the theme I was using. If I switch themes, commenting works just fine. The course of least resistance would seem to be to find a new theme. I’ll try to do that this week. Until then, it’s back to the old one.)

I read all of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels as they came out, until Breakfast of Champions. That killed my interest, because it was so silly (drawings of underpants, for goodness sake) and seemingly arbitrary. Then, years later, I read an article which said that a lot of people stopped reading Vonnegut with Breakfast of Champions, because it was so silly (with the drawings of underpants and so on).

It annoyed me to be part of a group like that when I had thought I was having an independent opinion, so I went back and read all the novels I’d missed, In order, one after the other: Slapstick, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galápagos, Bluebeard, Hocus Pocus, and Timequake. This didn’t seem odd to me at the time, it was entertaining and educational, but, thinking back, I can’t immediately think of another novelist whose work I would want to read that intensely. Seven novels in a row, and if there had been any more, I would have read them, too. And now there won’t be any more, but there’s a bunch of them, and they’re mostly really good.

A few somewhat random thoughts about Kurt Vonnegut:

1. To the extent that people are still aware of the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, it’s probably mostly because of him.
2. He made a wonderful defense of the (often criticized) tendency of science fiction to have two-dimensional characters. His defense was that this was deliberate, since science fiction was a literature of ideas, not a literature of characters. Which reminds me of my idea of “puzzle films” which I talk about here (scroll down to #5).
3. He didn’t care one bit if ideas were popular or not. If he thought they were true, he’d promote them. If he thought they were wrong, he’d mock them with rare skill.
4. Mother Night still remains my favorite of his novels. And it was made into a very good movie. Some of his novels were made into movies which weren’t so good, but it didn’t bother him. “It doesn’t hurt the books,” he said, pointing at his shelf. “There they are. They’re fine.”
5. He was not a huge influence on what I do (not much influence at all, I think), except in one way. In Breakfast of Champions, the main character goes crazy, not because he has some sort of traumatic experience, but because the chemicals in his body make him go crazy. Which is also true of starling, who was not abused or “driven crazy,” except by the chemicals in her body. Not a romantic view, but probably a realistic one, in many cases.