So it goes...

Kurt Vonnegut died this past week. It seems a little impossible not to mention this--even briefly--on my blog.

For the NY Times article following his death, click here.

Nearly all of the articles I read about Vonnegut this past week ended with the following lines from his poem, Requiem:

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

When I tried to find the full text of the poem, I found instead a short fiction piece that Vonnegut wrote called "Requiem for a Dreamer." It's a transcription of a conversation Vonnegut had with his famous character, Kilgore Trout, who promises to commit suicide if George W. Bush is reelected to the presidency. While the whole thing is worth reading, my favorite part was when Vonnegut is talking to Trout about graduate school, and the conceited nature of it all:

KV: ...OK, try this: After the Second World War I enrolled in the graduate division of the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago, the most conceited university in the country. And in a seminar for about eight of us, half of us vets on the GI Bill of Rights, my favorite professor, in fact my thesis advisor, put this Socratic question to us: “What is it an artist does?”
TROUT: Hold on: What makes Chicago so conceited?
KV: That it isn’t Harvard.
TROUT: Got it: That it isn’t high society.
KV: Bingo. Anyway, I’m sure we all came up with smart-ass answers, since a graduate seminar in any subject is a form of improv theater. But the only answer I remember is the one he gave: “An artist says, ‘I can’t do anything about the chaos in the universe or my country, or even in my own miserable life, but I can at least make this piece of paper or canvas, or blob of clay or chunk of marble, exactly what it should be.’”
TROUT: OK.

Okay, so the bit about what an artist can and cannot do isn't bad either, but I enjoyed the bit about graduate school being a form of improv theater. I couldn't have put it better myself. Which makes sense...since...you know...he's Vonnegut and all.