Kurt Vonnegut Passed Away.

I thought Art Buchwald's NYT farewell video was kind of strange, but now I find myself yearning for one from Kurt Vonnegut that I guess was never made. I'm going through the times obituary hoping to find something from him about his last days, something new and with the perspective of the end. Though he was so dark it's almost as if most of his post-Dresden life was lived with the perspective of the end.

In grad school, when I was learning how to use SoftImage in an independent study on 3D modelling, I developed a very short and very ham-handed 3D animation of the cave creatures(were they harmoniums?) from Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan that fed and thrived on soundwaves.The image of these flat, flounder-like creatures that glowed and were nourished by sound was a very powerful one to me. I was a hack of an animator, but in the end I was pleased that I'd learned at least enough to get an image that a book had conjured up in my head out into a form that other people could see. It wasn't far off from what was in my head, either.

Although I never met him, I miss him already and his absence makes me extremely sad. He was one of the most human of human beings, a tribute to what we all are really made of and from. The fact that he was in the world meant there was a poetic and extremely amusing witness to how weird things are and always will be.