Keep your hat on

Kirk Vonnegut used to tell just the punchline of an old joke. "Keep your hat on," it went. "We could end up miles from here."

I have just realized tonight that, not only do newspaper people not know where journalism is heading in the internet age, no one does.

And that is a level playing field.

Thanks to Paul Westerdawg for linking to this today, out of the blue, on the 9th anniversary of my coming to work at The Macon Telegraph:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. ...

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. ...

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

How about them Dawgs. And I'll have that gin and diet now.

It was one of the boys over at Georgia Sports Blog that said, we're three wins from a National Championship.


Meanwhile, strange, personal things happen to us all the time.

"That Hardy guy was born in Harlem"

- Kid at the gas station, when I asked him, "What's the deal with the Laurel and Hardy Museum in Harlem?"
...
Oliver Norvell Hardy was born in Georgia. His father died the year he was born, and is buried in Harlem Cemetery not far west of Augusta. Hardy's mother managed the Baldwin Hotel in Milledgeville after the family moved from Harlem, and Hardy later managed Milledgeville's first movie theater.

He became very famous in Hollywood, and has a star on the walk of fame there. He died in 1957.

I went to the museum while it was closed. So you know I'm recommending it. I think the sign said Open Tuesday through Saturday.



Harlem High School teams are the Bulldogs, by the way. 2008 Baseball Regional Champs. Perhaps that bodes well.

I wish I could remember, verbatim, something Vonnegut said about Laurel and Hardy. Something about them being so sweet, that they could easily be killed in the situations they got into.

It may have been in Slapstick, where he's quoted as saying this:

The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test. They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies...

So may we all.

AND: I found the quote online.

I don't consider Bob Hope a humorist, really. He's a comedian. It's very thin stuff; nothing troubling is mentioned. I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy and could still do it now. And there's terrible tragedy there somehow, as these people are too sweet to survive in this world and they are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed.

- Kurt Vonnegut, 1976 or 1977

Jan. 18, 1892, Harlem, Georgia, baby.

"He laughed a lot and was kind to everyone"

- Dan Wakefield, who went to high school with Kurt Vonnegut

I would like to know what is written on Kurt Vonnegut's gravestone, if he has one. But I can't think of a better epitaph for any human being.

May we all be as we were at our best as children.
...
Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers.
- A man without a Country.

I share a problem, perhaps you could call it a tragedy, with most human beings: a tendency to lose contact with my own intelligence. It's almost as if there were a layer of fat upon the part of us that thinks and it's the writer's job to hack through and discover what's inside.
- interview, 1980

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
- Cat's Cradle

All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.
- Timequake

Never trust a survivor... until you find out what he did to survive.
- Bluebeard

No matter what it is, you say, "It's all right."
"It usually is," I said.
- Jailbird

The economy is a thoughtless weather system.
- Jailbird

I observe how profoundly serious nature has made (my dog) about a rubber ice-cream cone — brown rubber cone, pink rubber ice cream. I have to wonder what equally ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I myself have made. Not that it matters at all. We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.
- Jailbird

During that war, which was about nothing but the ammunition business, there was a microscopic possibility, I suppose, that I called in a white-phosphorous barrage or a napalm strike on a returning Jesus Christ.
- Hocus Pocus

We had better make the best of a bad situation, which is a wonderful human skill. We had better make use of what has poisoned us, which is knowledge.
- Palm Sunday

If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin and the sky is black with flying saucers.
- Palm Sunday

Seems like the only job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.
- Breakfast of Champions

I said, "Saul, are you gifted?"
Six seconds passed, and then he growled, "No, but what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."
- A Man without a Country, quoting Saul Steinberg

adapting to chaos there in the cocktail lounge

Friday will be the one-year anniversary of American author Kurt Vonnegut's death. I know, because I looked it up.

"You know what truth is?" said Karabekian. "It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, 'Yeah, yeah--ain't it the truth?'"

- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Goodbye, Blue Monday

I quoted some of this in a Veterans Day story I wrote for The Telegraph. It's from a Kurt Vonnegut book called "Breakfast of Champions." There's an alternate title, too, that isn't exactly hidden.

Humanity should just fall silent more often.*

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

Castles? Indianapolis was full of them.

Last night I bought Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut, for no particular reason. Check out the first section of the first chapter:

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and that was that.

They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old.

Blah blah blah.

The man could write.