So, I read today that Random House is releasing some previously unpublished Kurt Vonnegut short stories as “single-story” e-books before the release of a posthumous collection in the fall. On may levels, I don’t have any beef with this news whatsoever. Kurt Vonnegut novels got me back into reading when I was in high school (and coming off a rare year of being too good for books for some reason I’ve never understood), so having more Vonnegut in the world is nothing I intend to whine about.
But then I have this memory of seeing him read, and it changes things a little. The reading was in a church in downtown Saint Paul, and I was in college at the time. I waited for an hour outside the enormous front doors to get good seats in a front pew. I hadn’t been this excited to go to church since I was confirmed a Methodist and got a Star Wars cake. I held copies of books that I later learned would not be autographed (I didn’t protest when I saw how frail he looked).
When Vonnegut finally came on, he read a little from Timequake, I believe. Then he maligned republicans for awhile, and gave curt ironic answers to some lousy audience questions. At some point though he went on a brief rant about how computers were taking up all our time and keeping us from enjoying other lost pleasures.
And that’s when I remember him uttering this line, “Listen people, put down the damn fool computers!” It was the loudest he’d said anything all night. And coming from a gawky adored writer it was a little spooky. I imagined for a moment that he had traveled back from the future to bring us this message.
His outburst shouldn’t have been a surprise, I guess. Technology never really plays a good role in his work. And often times, like any good sci-fi writer, he asserts that it will be our doom. But the crowd, which seemed to contain a healthy section of nerds (myself included), was probably internet-addicted and confused by their leader’s staunch disapproval of their new passtime. So it went.
As Vonnegut got older, I didn’t read too many of his last interviews. Maybe he changed his mind about computers. Maybe he became a World of Warcraft fan. Still, I can’t help but wonder how he would feel about all this e-book hoo-haw. Would he see evil computers or the next version of movable type?
If he could talk right now, he’d probably say something like, “I’m dead. I don’t care about this.”
So I won’t give it much more thought.
But man, e-vonnegut?
