Goodbye Kurt Vonnegut. His gentle, amiable writing style stunned me at age 12 and I continued to read everything he wrote up through Bluebeard, I think. He was the soul of humanism and devoted a whole chapter to people he had known in Palm Sunday, cherishing those linkages to the humble and great as justifying his own life. And in Bluebeard, again, the final painting of the protagonist is a visual record of everyone he had in his life, because it is our part in other lives that makes a story.
I thought back a bit having heard of his passing this morning and realized that my first great memory from Vonnegut is from Breakfast of Champions and is suitably juvenile: a crude drawing of an anus as an asterisk (accompanying image stolen). I have no idea what the context was but remember laughing about it for days, secretly snickering at the implausibility of that little drawing appearing in the middle of a "serious" work of fiction. He was laughing, too, when he drew it.
My second memory is a quote that goes something like: I will not participate in massacres, nor will I let my children participate in massacres. It's a good start to a humanist manifesto.
Goodbye, Kurt.
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