{"id":518,"date":"2007-04-12T08:18:39","date_gmt":"2007-04-12T08:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/2007\/04\/12\/kurt-vonnegut\/"},"modified":"2007-04-12T08:18:39","modified_gmt":"2007-04-12T08:18:39","slug":"kurt-vonnegut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/2007\/04\/12\/kurt-vonnegut\/","title":{"rendered":"Kurt Vonnegut"},"content":{"rendered":"

In seventh grade I read Cat’s Cradle<\/i>, my first Vonnegut book. I remember standing in front of the class and giving a book report. I played a newsreporter delivering the play-by-play from the book’s closing scene (“a tragedy today, here in the beautiful island of San Lorenzo…”). There was an ad in the back of all those Vonnegut paperbacks that said, essentially, bet you can’t eat just one, and they were right.
\nNo books, aside from Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes<\/i>, had a bigger impact on my brain in middle school and high school. I’d sometimes hear folks disparage Vonnegut’s novels as lightweight, comparing them unfavorably to, say, Catch-22<\/i>. That always seemed off-point to me. These weren’t book you were supposed to roll around in for a month. They were a different kind of beast. Thin, portable devices that delivered high voltage electric telegrams direct to the nervous system. And if you read them in a certain frame of mind (and most especially at a certain age), they really did change the way you saw the world.
\nIf you’re planning on reading a Vonnegut book today, may I recommend Sirens of Titan<\/i>? Or perhaps God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?<\/i> Or mebbe Slapstick<\/i>? Or what about Bluebeard<\/i>? Oh, who are we kidding? The book to read today is Mother Night<\/i>.
\nMother Night<\/i>, a book so gigantically good that when I finished it back in freshman year of college, I hopped up, flung it down the hallway, and scrambled out to the street to recover with some New York City air. And see, if it had been Catch-22<\/i>, I might have really hurt somebody.
\n\"Kurt\"
\nKurt Vonnegut 1922-2007<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In seventh grade I read Cat’s Cradle, my first Vonnegut book. I remember standing in front of the class and giving a book report. I played a newsreporter delivering the play-by-play from the book’s closing scene (“a tragedy today, here in the beautiful island of San Lorenzo…”). There was an ad in the back of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-and-also-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}