Thursday, April 12, 2007

Alas... the Cat's no longer in the Cradle...

… the Champions are finished with breakfast, and Tralfamadore’s closed for business.

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“NEW YORK - Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.”

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I am, perhaps, not Vonnegut’s greatest fan, but I’m a fan. I read Cat’s Cradle in high school in the infant ‘70’s, in an English literature class that shaped my whole future. I thought it tremendously weird, but was fascinated with the concept of “Ice-9,” that version of ice that forms at room temperature, originally created for the Marines to be able to cross swamps in times of war. It was a natural progression of events due to the fallibility of man that the end of the world was not far off from that discovery.

I saw Slaughterhouse Five on the big screen when it came out in 1972. Again, I was an impressionable high school student. What a fantastic movie! ‘Fantastic’ in its truest sense. Billy Pilgrim, bouncing around time and place like channels changing on a TV. And what teenage boy could forget Montana Wildhack? Oh, to be trapped forever in a luxurious glass-domed condo on Tralfamadore with her.

And all his other fantastic works… what can one say about such a sharp, prescient social commentator who could also write good? Other than observing that there is yet another gaping hole in our collective social conscience.

ahhh Kurt… we’ll miss ye… please greet Doug Adams for us as you stick your thumb out on the entrance ramp to that Intergalactic Highway to Heaven…

-Ed

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