Friday April 13, 2007

Breakfast of Champions

I shared a cigarette with Kurt Vonnegut once. Actually, he had his own and I had mine, but we were standing near each other outside Bachelor Hall, which houses the English Department at Miami University in Ohio. He was alone before we got there—me and some friends I was leaving for a debate tournament with. He was taking a break from one of those intimate seminars visiting writers give in the morning when they’re about to give a much bigger (and more lucrative) talk in the evening. I wasn’t in the seminar (it was for aspiring writers and I wasn’t one) and we were headed to an out of town tournament, like I said. We were going to miss the big talk, so we asked him if we could smoke with him and he said sure.

He looked very craggy even then, in 1989, although I spotted him once in Midtown more than 10 years later and he didn’t appear to have gotten any craggier. He just got craggy relatively young and held steady, I guess.

He asked us what we were doing, we told him, and he told us he had a friend who’d coached a debate team and made all his debaters dress like Boy Scouts, since Boy Scouts aren’t allowed to lie. This story probably wasn’t true, but it was funny, and it lasted about as long as a cigarette.

One of my favorite things that Vonnegut wrote relatively late is this 1995 item from Inc. Technology (it also appeared in Harper’s). It’s about the author’s relationship to technology, but I’ve never forgotten how it ends: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

Posted by jim at 05:34 PM ||