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.

One day I googled "daphne the dog," and I found out two interesting things.

One is that apparently Daphne is a fairly popular name for dogs. The other is that apparently (according to this website) Jean Shepherd had a dog named Daphne.

Since Shep was a huge influence on me when I was growing up, I wonder if this is a coincidence. Most nights, after my bedtime, I would huddle with my ear next to the white plastic clock radio, lights out, volume nearly inaudible, listening to the stories about Flick and Schwartz and his old man, about the army, about the woman who started doing a striptease on the Madison Avenue bus at 3:00am on New Year's morning, about how great it would be, when you were arguing with your friend Ockie over the kitchen table late at night, if you could reach under the table and switch on an echo chamber as you were making your crushing rebuttal to Ockie's idiotic opinion about the chances of the White Sox doing anything this year, about the Phantom D train, and so on.

Did Shep mention Daphne the dog at some point, and is that where it popped from when I needed a name for Carl's dog? Coincidence? Either is possible. As Nero Wolfe said, "In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but each one of them must always be mistrusted."

In other news, the Q&A on the Chicago Manual of Style website just referred to one of my favorite grammar rules:

Q. I'm teaching a class at the university after a long break and have discovered that most of my students are putting commas or other punctuation outside quotes rather than inside. Is either correct?

A. Tsk – the things kids get up to these days! You have to watch them every minute. Unless you're teaching in the U.K., the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. (But see CMOS 6.9 for exceptions.)

This is one of my favorite rules because it's so simple, and when people get it wrong, sometimes it's because of overthinking. Some people like to make rules more complex than they need to be (or more absolute).

(Or more logical, since I've just heard that there's some thinking that the United States should adopt the British method, where the punctuation is only inside the parentheses if it is part of the material being quoted. This would be more logical, of course, but things have seldom caught on in this country just on the basis of being logical. Otherwise we'd be measuring things with the metric system, and recording them with the phonetic alphabet on Dvorak keyboards.)

On the other hand, I've had to mediate some disagreements at work about whether or not the second element of a hyphenated word gets capitalized in title case, and that rule is so complex that CMOS has offered a simpler rule as a substitute (though they indicate that they prefer the more complex rule, of course). Given that the complex rule is confusing even to me, and I'm sure it would be completely baffling to those who are not native English speakers, I've decided to go with the simpler rule: "Capitalize only the first element unless any subsequent element is a proper noun or adjective."

The more complex rule is:

(1) Always capitalize the first element. (2) Capitalize any subsequent elements unless they are articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, or, nor) or such modifiers as flat or sharp following musical key symbols. (3) If the first element is merely a prefix or combining form that could not stand by itself as a word (anti, pre, etc.), do not capitalize the second element unless it is a proper noun or proper adjective. (4) Do not capitalize the second element in a hyphenated spelled-out number (twenty-one, etc.). (5) Break a rule when it doesn't work.

If I ever go crazy, I expect I will end up on a street corner, CMOS in hand, accosting passersby to get them to heed the Word and read the Book. (CMOS allows capitalization of terms like this in a religious context, even though they generally favor a "down" style.)