Laughter in the face of disaster

• Benjamin Kunkel (Indecision) takes another look at Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle in The Guardian.

Cat's Cradle is a black cartoon, a grubby fantasia on the end of the world. Notice I have avoided the word "novel", which applies here only in the sense of a work of fictional prose longer than 120 pages. Vonnegut's invention of "ice-nine", a substance capable of freezing all the world's water in rapid contagion, makes the book in some sense a piece of science fiction; and like most sci-fi, it will disappoint any reader who insists on the evolving, three-dimensional characters of the realist novel. But unlike most sci-fi novels, it doesn't concern itself with the creation of a coherent world corroborated in all its details. This is an album of sketches, not of blueprints or portraits, and Vonnegut's poor, sad, banana-less republic of San Lorenzo, where much of the action is set, is every bit as much a caricature as his poor, sad, human beings.

So he goes

• Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007.

Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

Here we go again

Sort of old news, but worth rehashing for the sake of completeness:

• Broadminded school council members are still trying to ban books.
  

As we all know, books that dare to discuss sex will send their readers straight to hell for all eternity. The current crop of "pornographic" offenders:

The titles on [board member Laura] Pinney's list are "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin, "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World" by Michael Pollan, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, "Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers and "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez.

Thankfully, since this story broke, Pinney has gone away, having been exposed as the moron she is. The fact that she hadn't actually read the books probably didn't help her cause much, which is about as bad as Bob Doyle trying to ban Natural Born Killers without having seen it.

Sigh...