And So It Goes No More

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One of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, died Tuesday, April 10. He was 84. Cause of death was related to brain injuries resulting from a fall weeks earlier. When I was a student in the 1960s and 1970s, he was my literary idol. He had invented a new literary model, full of one sentence paragraphs, exclamation points, elipses, and italics -- all the things my English teachers told us not to do. It was heady stuff back then. His books -- 14 novels as well as plays, essays and short fiction -- were part autobiography, part fiction. I took his recurring character Kilgore Trout to be his alter-ego. "So it goes" was a Vonnegut signature phrase, featured in his book "Slaughterhouse-Five". "Slaughterhouse-Five", based on the firebombing of Dresden in World War Two, was published in 1969, a time of racial unrest, social upheaval, and the war in Vietnam. It soon became the catchphrase of opponents to that war. That war is "over" but we have other wars now. So it goes...