So it goes...

Alas, Kurt Vonnegut has passed.

He was born on Lācplēša day in 1922, and departed from the mortal coil in New York City, on April 11th 2007. He died at Mount Sinai Hospital at 9:45 p.m.

Not wishing to dwell on his foibles and “clunkers,” he shall remain in my memory as the kindly, frumpy, off-kilter author who wrote many works that helped shape (or warp) my character. In the times that I met him he was a personable fellow.

In high school, he was one of the writers that got shoved down your throat. “Slaughterhouse-5” was a required read, and it would not have been so bad had an uppity teacher not tried to micro-analyze it. That experience almost put me off of Vonnegut for good. Luckily, at University I started reading a copy of “The Sirens of Titan” that one of my dormitory mates had unwisely left laying about. Rather than dismissing his work, I became addicted to it. To be fair, some works were more painful than others, “Slapstick” and “Wampeters, Foma, and Granfaloons,” for example. Others were riotous romps—“Breakfast of Champions,” and “Deadeye Dick” stand out among his finest. His work could be quite captivating. I first read “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” in one all-day marathon session, thoroughly enjoying the ride, but feeling like I had cheated myself by not parsing it out. A treasured memory came a summer I lived in Bavaria, and finding “Bluebeard” and “Cat’s Cradle” in English at a small bookshop on Leopoldstraße, part of the University neighborhood in the Munich city district of Schwabing. Meting them out in timed doses was like having the company of a good friend while traveling the S-bahn or just sitting out in the summer sun in the Englischer Garden.

In the 1990s, Kurt stopped writing his great works of fiction and witty and black comedy, and dropped the dark humor, and just got dark. “Fates worse than Death” was his MisranthOpus. At the end he became suicidal and was hospitalized with a brain injury, suffered as the result of a fall in his Manhattan residence. I would rather remember him as frumpy “Uncle Kurt,” who shared tales about working as a cub reporter at the Chicago City News bureau, and also as the tour guide of surreal journeys through his many a good book.