Heard that Kurt Vonnegut died… so it goes. You were the first person I thought of. Any thoughts? -Javi

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. – Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was my second religion. The first, ostensibly, is Catholicism. I like to think of it this way: I can spell “Kurt Vonnegut” without pausing, but I always have to stop and think for a second when I spell “Catholicism.” In fact, I just stopped and looked it up on Google, to make sure I was spelling it correctly. What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that I became a Missionary in the Church of Interestingness. All my friends, Javi included, knew that I was a wee bit obsessed with Vonnegut in junior high and high school. What it comes down to, I guess, is that I got a lot of email yesterday.

I like to think that my Vonnegut experience is in a way universal, catholic if you will (please note the lowercase “c”). In Mrs. Cramer’s Gifted and Talented Seventh Grade English, we read “Harrison Bergeron” (another one I didn’t have to think to spell). I understood, in seventh grade, what it was to live with limitations. The totalitarian regime reminded me of my parents, my own overdeveloped body seemed in need of weights and covers to make me conform and other comfortable, I felt in a lot of ways as though I wore a mask and all I wanted was to break free. I was a maudlin kid, as much as I am a maudlin adult.

Of course, there’s a natural progression from here. I bought Welcome to the Monkeyhouse and then I read Slaughterhouse Five and then The Sirens of Titan, and then and then and then. By the time I reached my senior year of high school, I’d read every novel Kurt Vonnegut had published as well as three of his collections of essays. I walked around the hallways saying “ho hum.”

I remember watching Can’t Hardly Wait and thinking that Preston Meyers was an idiot for even thinking about skipping a workshop with Kurt Vonnegut. I wanted to be Kurt Vonnegut. I still kinda wanna bit Kurt Vonnegut.

Yesterday I went out for a drink with a professor to talk about my recent workshop submission. He started talking about Kurt Vonnegut. It turns out they were friends, Kurt’s daughter Edith was Bruce’s daughters’ babysitter, and “Kurt” was Bruce’s (my professor’s) mentor. Bruce still had Kurt’s phone number programmed into his cell.

And so, in honor of Kurt Vonnegut and in honor of Bruce, who in a lot of ways reminds me of my imaginary Kurt Vonnegut, I will tell you Bruce’s stories.

I brought my daughter to Kurt’s office one afternoon. ‘This is Kurt Vonnegut’ I says to her. ‘Who?’ she says. ‘Kurt Vonnegut.’ She continues to stare at me. ‘Edith’s dad,’ I tell her. ‘Oh!’ she says, ‘I love Edith!’ And Kurt looks at me says, ‘well that teaches you a bit of perspective.’ – Bruce Dobler

He once wrote a list of his best students in an essay. Years later they had him re-edit the piece and update it, and he kept everyone else on the list and took me off. I called him that day, and he told me to go write. So I did. And eventually he made it up to me. – Bruce Dobler

He really did. From The Independent:

INTERVIEWER Do you really think creative writing can be taught?

VONNEGUT About the same way golf can be taught. A pro can point out obvious flaws in your swing. I did that well, I think, at the University of Iowa for two years. Gail Godwin and John Irving and Jonathan Penner and Bruce Dobler and John Casey and Jane Casey were all students of mine out there. They’ve all published wonderful stuff since then. I taught creative writing badly at Harvard – because my marriage was breaking up, and because I was commuting every week to Cambridge from New York. I taught even worse at City College a couple of years ago. I had too many other projects going on at the same time. I don’t have the will to teach anymore. I only know the theory.

So… my thoughts. I’m glad that one of my mentors was mentored by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s comforting in a way. I think if I’d actually met him, I would either been gushy and inarticulate, or I would have been disappointed if he wasn’t exactly as I pictured him. But I’m close enough, two degrees of separation. While he was living, I could have asked someone for his number. And that’s a good feeling. Because if Kurt Vonnegut is human and accessible and a ball of needed energy, that means we all have a shot. And I’m a part of that ‘we.’

So yeah, Jon Stewart is right, the world just got a little less interesting, but that’s no reason to abandon the pulpit.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind. -Kurt Vonnegut