Vonnegut in Retrospect

over the weekend i finished Kurt Vonnegut's posthumously(he's up in heaven now.) issued "Armageddon in Retrospect." and as you might expect from any of his works, there are a number of good laughs woven into the rather gloomy but hopeful tales. its a collection of 12 unpublished works, including his last speech, which is great.

i can see why these stories may not have been published while he was alive. they are a bit rough and under-developed, but nonetheless, great. rather than a novel on a subject, with a short story, you get right to the point. thats something that Kurt had no problem doing. he has a way of depressing you with humanity, making you laugh, and giving you a little hope all at the same time. he is definitely one of my favorite writers.

id recommend this to anyone who has a couple of his better known novels under their belts. i dont think it is a good starting point. but what do i know. ive broken his cardinal rule of writing a number of times by using that hermaphrodite transvestite of punctuation called a semicolon. and i did go to college.

also, i have been know to have random writing burst out of me, but nothing of great enough weight or depth to create a real story as i have long wanted to do. i dont think i ever wondered where to get material. its a matter of putting enough related and coherent stuff together. i think its all in time, as they say. and as i was thinking about this i finished the book, which culminates with this quote that i love:“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany likfe everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”