Special deleted scene

My various primal needs to eat and/or be sheltered have, in their own little complex way, led me to spend this past evening assembling a portfolio of writing samples. Funny, this life thing.

So just to be totally clear, it was that—rather than unbridled vanity—that prompted me to go digging through my hard drive in search of pieces of writing from assorted degrees of back in the day, and then indulging in a little bit of self-reading. And yeah, I'd be lying if this didn't make for a somewhat soppy nostalgic exercise with the occasional exhortation under my breath of how goddamn awesome I used to be. I tried to cut down on the creepy old-lady-scrapbooking vibe by watching Fridays without Borders on Showcase at the same time. I think that helped.

(Aside: This exercise in barely-watching/mostly-listening prompted the discovery that those ads for Quest telephone personals that they run wall-to-wall during commercial breaks in that programming lineup—for reasons that boggle, absolutely boggle my mind—have ripped off the baseline from "With or Without You" by U2. You heard it from me first, Island-Records-copyright-guy ...who's accidentally surfed here-for-no-obvious-reason. I want a cut of the settlement. And a bass signed by Adam Clayton.)

Somewhere between hearing Paul "P.T." Thomas expound about his desensitization to breast implants and watching Adam Glasser tell a therapist about how his girlfriend left him, unbeknowst to me, in some previous episode of Family Business, I stumbled across an old chunk of copy from November 2004 that I did for my column "View from the Rear" in Incite magazine. As best I can recall, it began life as a digression within one month's piece that I had clipped out and set aside as a neat starting point for some other month. In fact, I distinctly remember feeling rather chuffed that I'd be coming at that month's deadline with a 300-ish word head start. It smacked of, well, organization.

Anyway, me being me, "some other month" turned out to be 40 and counting. And not doing that column anymore, and not feeling particularly inclined to add another 900-odd words onto what I had, and having actually had parts of what I'd written now be, in that great authorly phrase, superseded by events, I had this dismal realization that it was sort of useless.

Except, thinks I, as filler for the blog! Requires limited effort, maintains illusion of fresh content, re-emphasizes brand strength of back catalogue. Sheer genius.

Besides, George Lucas takes shit like this, sticks it on DVDs, and gets people to already own a Star Wars box set to buy whole other ones. I present my leftover crap for free.

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Samuel Huntington is a creepy old bastard who gave the field of international relations a delightfully dreary new theory a few years back which he dubbed “the clash of civilizations.” Sam basically carves the world into about ten ethnic chunks, claims that the cultural and values-based gulfs between them are unbridgeable, and postulates that we’re destined to spend the next century or so slaying one another across these fault lines. I bet Sam was a real hit at parties.

The theory can be fairly readily summed up as “the clash of funny headgear.” Essentially, people in turbans will never get along with people who wear baseball caps, people with yarmulkes will never get along with people who wear headscarves, and people in ushankas will never get along with whatever hats people in sub-Saharan Africa can afford.

If you’ve ever meandered through some banal corner of Brampton, you probably will not have noticed a significant amount of mortar fire hitting neighbourhoods with sombrero-wearing inhabitants originating from some apartment building reportedly containing a guy in a fez. I don’t think Huntington has ever been to Brampton, though.

Neither, to the best of my knowledge, have two notable followers of his thinking: George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. Now, speaking as someone who’s dealt with the eyestrain and brainstrain that customarily follow slogs through a thick wad of Huntington in poorly-photocopied coursepack form, I can assure you that Bush probably hasn’t read him—the Flesch-Kincaid grade level being the primary barrier. (Thankfully, George has Dick, Donald, Condoleeza and Paul to do his reading for him.) Likewise, I don’t know if bin Laden finds time for reading pompous crap from some old white guy when he could be sacrificing a goat or something.

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So it goes

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. He was 84, and had been openly relishing the prospect of this day for at least ten years now. Good for him, I guess.

I'm not going to be presumptious enough to call myself a "writer." I write stuff. So do meat inspectors, and they're not writers, either. I may never really earn the status of "writer"—or aspire to it, for that matter. And unless you're really a writer, it's really pompous to list "influences" on your style. But whatever the analgous concept is for duffers like me, I'd like to believe reading Vonnegut's stuff really shaped how I express myself.

Fans of Stephen King or Patrick O'Brian or Douglas Adams can certainly speak of their appreciation of the common threads that run through the collected works of those authors—particular patterns of language, themes, narrative structures, or even fairly subconscious things you might barely pick up on like word choice. Vonnegut was no exception; a passage of text can feel "Vonnegutian" the same way it might feel "Blytonian" or "Orwellian" or "Conradian" ("Conradine?").

What I think made Vonnegut different was how strongly rooted this basket of Vonnegutian literary particularities was in the character of the man responsible for them. I mean, entire lit degrees have been put together by connecting the characteristically clipped "masculine" prose of Hemmingway to his predeliction for drinking things and shooting things and fucking things. Hell, who knows, probably someone's found a way to find a basis for his writing style in Hemmingway's peculiar habit of raising feral cats.

But read three or four things by Vonnegut, boil it down to the common denominators, and you start to feel like you actually know the guy. Now, this is hardly accidental, and Kurt himself embraced this objective, especially later in his career, when he flirted all the more openly with all sorts of fun fourth-wall breaking stuff. Vonnegut knew he was at his best when he was unafraid to inject the personal. The obituaries speak of him as one of literature's great satirists, but I think over and above the satire, and even overshadowing his distinguishing streak of dark humour, he should be remembered as a a master of the semiautobiographical, with an emphasis on the semi.

I think that's why his passing hurts a little more. We'd all made peace with the fact there weren't going to be any more Vonnegut novels, just as there aren't going to be any more Roald Dahl books or Back to the Future movies. But his passing isn't so much about an end to a steady flow of great art as the end of an endearing cantankerous old man that you couldn't help but root for.

The mildly amusing part to all this is that I haven't read his complete works, and I've even missed a few of the essentials. On a purely relative basis, my Vonnegut-fu is fairly weak. But I feel as if I uniquely connected with the man, that his uniquenesses spoke to uniquenesses in me. What shakes me somewhat is how ridiculous the preceding sentence is, at least at fact value. Throughout my enjoyment of Vonnegut, I've all the while known damn well that entire classes of humanities grads spanning the last half century in the English-speaking world have felt exactly the same way.

I guess that's the underlying paradox to Vonnegut: someone who built his career on his deeply individualized disdain for the collective ridiculousnesses of mass society nonetheless engendered a tremendously warm reception from, by all measures, a rather significant slice of that society. He was precisely the sort of favourite writer you didn't like to share with the emo kid down the hall from you in residence. But you probably did. And with the really dumb-sounding girl from two floors up. And with your irritatingly-detached-from-reality chemistry prof. And with the angry fat woman who was interviewed on the news that night after organizing a protest against unethical tomato farming practices.

Poor Kurt. You're stuck with us all.