Morning reading: I seem to remember Vonnegut

Adam feels like he’s the one unstuck in time…

Robert Weide began making a documentary about Kurt Vonnegut in the 1980s. I heard about it in 2000. In 2015 they funded a Kickstarter to finish the film. A release date has finally been set for this November. The film’s subject matter now includes the four decades it took to make it. I’m not sure what to make of that.

One of my great reading memories is buying Welcome to the Monkey House and Slaughterhouse-Five trade paperbacks in a Borders books when I was about 15 years old and falling into the world of Vonnegut in the backseat of my parents’ car.

And because this section of the blog is called Morning Reading, here is Nick Hornby’s memory of meeting Kurt Vonnegut:

Smoking is rubbish, most of the time. But if I’d never smoked, I’d never have met Kurt Vonnegut. We were both at a huge party in New York, and I sneaked out onto the balcony for a cigarette, and there he was, smoking. So we talked—about C. S. Forester, I seem to remember. (That’s just a crappy and phony figure of speech. Of course I remember.) So tell your kids not to smoke, but it’s only fair to warn them of the down side, too: that they will therefore never get the chance to offer the greatest living writer in America a light.

That was originally published in one of Hornby’s first Stuff I’ve Been Reading columns for The Believer, which will publish its last issue in February. I have been a subscriber since the very first issue in 2003 (those salad days I mentioned a couple days ago).