H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks...

[dxmachina]

It has not been a good couple of days. For one thing, my back has been killing me, and for no reason I can discern. The pain comes and goes, and doesn't really affect my strength, i.e., I can lift stuff without the pain getting worse. On top of that, yesterday, when I was supposed to go down to Jersey for my cousin's 50th birthday bash, I got hit

Comments

[jonquil]

I thought at the time that including Vonnegut, although true to Dante's practices of settling his scores in an imagined Hell, was remarkably mean-spirited.

[dxmachina]

Apart from the two main characters, that was the one detail I remembered about the book. It is mean spirited, although the first time I read it I think I was more amused than anything else. That may have had something to do with having read (and almost flung) Breakfast of Champions not long before. It was also not long after the dust up between Vonnegut and Philip Jose Farmer over Farmer's having written Venus on the Half Shell as Kilgore Trout, so they may have been getting even in support of Farmer.

It was more jarring to me this time around, especially since they sort of singled him out by making him the one really recognizable unnamed soul. Plus, he's actually dead now.