RIP Kurt Vonnegut
Photo credit: Me, 1995. Shot during an interview for The Daily of the University of Washington. Horizontal lines courtesy of the craptastic original Nikon Coolscan negative scanner. Those were the days; Film, crappy scanners, web pages emblazoned with low-res GIF files, good times.
Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84. I used to like his books, a lot, but admit I haven’t picked any of them up for a long while. I met him in 1995 when he visited the University of Washington and I shot some photos to accompany an interview in the school paper.
He impressed me at the time as a cranky old man and a bit of a luddite, the latter a surprise. The forward-thinking man who could conceive a novel in which characters and story shuffle through space and time with abandon did not take to the new online world. This at a time when a techno-utopian vision, such as that expressed in then two-year-old Wired Magazine, were stoking the imaginations and aspirations of us geeky liberal arts majors who were soon to staff the coming wave of online startups. Kurt didn’t feel the internet was all that, and thought buying products online was a completely inferior experience to walking to the local store and interacting with the sales clerk. In hindsight I could substitute “humanist” for both “cranky” and “luddite” in the topic sentence of this paragraph and spin the statement in a different and equally true direction about his prescience (or I could just substitute for “luddite” and leave “cranky” be; Crankiness can be charming and such an accusation could be seen as complimentary). There’s truth to the idea that us net-connected folk spend too much time poking at keyboards and looking at increasingly large monitors, but on the other hand, I’d bet he made at least a few online purchases in his latter years.
Luckily I was not conducting the interview, as I would likely have spent the session trying to convince him of the merits of the wonderful world wide intarwebnet (wwww) and would have missed the opportunity to shoot one of my favorite portraits. It’s too bad I’m 5500 miles away from the negative or I’d post a few frames at better quality.
There’s a video of Kurt Vonnegut’s 2005 appearance on The Daily Show available for view on onegoodmove.org. It’s nice to see that he kept his wicked sense of humor so late in the game, though it pains me to see that he speaks a lot more slowly in that video than he did 10 years previously in his interview with The Daily. It’s tough to see such clearcut evidence of the toll that the aging process takes on people.
So long Kurt and thanks for all the books.
