Structural thinking

Kurt Vonnegut Junior is dead. He was... he wrote stories that were filled with ideas that gave me a structure when I was approaching and in my early teens. It wasn't a rigid structure and I embraced its fluidity. It was almost a non-structure, like the space you see between two buildings. The buildings are structures, and they make the space between them look structured, but in that space everything is possible. Like the spaces between the strings of a cat's cradle.

Vonnegut wrote of the spaces in between.

Ice-9 captivated me and terrified me. It foreshadowed a scare that subsequently occured in the 1960's, when a number of scientists claimed to have found another form of water-ice that froze at a different temperature than regular ice. They called it polywater and the idea spread through portions of the scientific community (primarily in the Soviet Union) and is now used as an example of "pathological science." It seems ironic that the idea of polywater spread much the same way as ice-9 spread.

The book that most captured me was The Sirens of Titan. I think it was a combination of many things, not the least of which was my age, that made the book so iconic in my mind. Vonnegut wrote of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, "those places ... where all the different kinds of truths fit together." For someone just old enough to be questioning a strict Catholic upbringing, such a thought was more than amazing, it was like breathing for the first time. I was never the same again.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater brought rafts of new ideas to my mind, and Slaughterhouse 5 moved me. I don't remember why it did, I don't remember much about it, but I remember being very moved by it. Perhaps it was the co-mingling of Tralfamadorian fatalism as a philosophy and the the lusty promise of Montana Wildhack, the porn actress.

Maybe it was more the Montana Wildhack than the philosophy. I'm not sure.

I'll miss him.

Hi ho.