Last month, Berkley Trade released Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of 12 previously unpublished Kurt Vonnegut stories about, naturally, war and peace. In his preface, Kurt's son, Mark, writes about his father's less-than-spectacular career as a Sports Illustrated writer:"He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950s, he was employed by Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that had jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, 'The horse jumped over the f------ fence,'' and walked out, self-employed again.' ''
I've always been a big fan of Vonnegut's dark humor, particularly when he pointed his sharp instrument at himself, like in this passage from Slaughterhouse Five:
An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains.Or these scenes from the Rodney Dangerfield classic, Back to School.
That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.
