Deborah Lipp

Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84, and I suspect there will be many obituaries with the same title as mine. (There’s a wonderful and thorough biography in The Guardian.)

I also considered the titles “Hi Ho” and “Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time.”

As a teenager I read every novel and short story Vonnegut had written up to that time (and have continued to read his work, albeit less voraciously). I had an amusing exchange with a high school English teacher in a class on the American novel. He handed me Slaughterhouse Five, and when I said I’d already read it, he handed me Cat’s Cradle, and when he went back to the cabinet for a third time, I said “I’ve read that one too” without even looking, so he went back the fourth time and came out with Ethan Frome. Which I hadn’t read.

As a writer, what I’ve learned from Vonnegut is that it’s okay to be simple, and in fact, simplicity is a virtue. And that rhythm matters. Vonnegut wrote in beats. He was a bit of a Luddite, and probably knew nothing of the Internets, but I think he’d have liked the way that blogs play with language. The. Punctuation. Experiments. Changes to rhythm and form. Grammatical anarchy in the cause of a conversational tone of voice. Vonnegut cared about ideas, thoughts, tones, beats, and letting the audience listen. He didn’t tell you what to think; but in a gentle voice, he showed you what he saw, inviting you to see it his way. I don’t recall words like “evil” or “angry” in his work. You just read the events, and met the people, and saw the irony, and made your own decision. Yet for all that, his work was full of morality and caring:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

(From God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.)

Mr. Vonnegut, you were kind.

Over the weekend, cartoonist Johnny Hart died. He was the creator of both B.C. and the Wizard of Id, and continued with B.C. until his death.

In later life, Hart published cartoons that were anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, and racist. Making him a funny subject for me to eulogize. But here I go.

My father buys lots and lots of cartoon collections. Peanuts, Tumbleweeds, Pogo, Krazy Kat, Doonesbury, Zits, you name it. And we kids would read them all. You have a dull afternoon, a pile of cartoon books, you’re set. I think I absorbed those cartoons through my skin.

And one of the bits I remember best, one of the truly funniest things that stands out among all the funny things, was from B.C. I mean, I don’t think I could quote from many of the hundreds and hundreds of cartoons I read, but I can tell you all about one thing:

Clams got legs.

I can only find one real example online (below the fold).
» Read more..

So, I dreamed I was taking a cruise, by myself. I planned it carefully, it wasn’t one of those dreams where you show up somewhere and you realize you forgot to pack or by a plane ticket or something (I have those all the time).

I walk down the long cruise ship corridors looking for my room and I see the rooms are labeled “Single Gentlemen” (or something like that) and I think “Huh,” and I also think, “Well, I know this isn’t my corridor; got to find the women’s section.” Which I do, and go into my room, and there’s someone else’s stuff in it and the bed’s unmade and slept-in. Then a man shows up and says it’s his room. We both have room keys, so obviously it’s a screw-up on the ship. We go out in the corridor until we find a steward or something and she says she’ll get it straightened out, and they move him out.

So that’s weird. What does that mean?

Then I’m settling in my room and someone I know in real life, nice guy, married, one kid one on the way, very good-looking, comes up to me and kisses me very very hard. Like grabs my face and holds it so he can get the kiss in before I can protest. Which totally weirded me out, like, woke me up because damn, that’s weird. I hate that about dreams, that you can get all horny over someone you’d never consider in real life. Totally throws your day off.