Monday, October 17, 2011

Late-night ramblings about Fourth Generation German-American writers (now deceased)

I've just finished reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for the first time (well, second; books that good deserve immediate second readings). Vonnegut's prose is the best I can remember reading for at least a decade.

I thought, after 354 pages, that I loved Vonnegut completely then I came across the following and fell in love with the dear man all over again and then some:

In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at a blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and left.

Mr Vonnegut, you're alright by me.