Vonnegut (1922-2007)

don doggett · 13 Apr 2007, 18:46 · from 2007-April.txt.gz

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From: kingwukong at yahoo.com (don doggett)
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:46:47 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Vonnegut (1922-2007)
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370704131038r5941fe99rd563b503c17565e7 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <537975.56599.qm at web32411.mail.mud.yahoo.com>


--- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 4/13/07, don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > "Stuff happened" is almost everything. "Someone
> made
> > stuff happen" is usually laid over it by people
> trying
> > to make sense of that "stuff". Christians hardly
> have
> > a lock on interesting fiction, nor are athiests
> > excluded from it.
> 
> The last point is certainly true; the first has some
> truth to it -- but,
> really, in terms of narrative (and we are creatures
> of our narrativity),
> intentional actions are far more interesting than
> agentless actions.
> 
> One of the most impressive narrative tours-de-forces
> I have ever
> read was _Fire_, by George R. Stewart (author of the
> SF classic
> _Earth Abides_), which took a firestorm as its
> more-or-less
> protagonist, and managed to give it agency without
> personializing
> it. He did the same thing, less successfully, for a
> storm in a book
> called (of all things) _Storm_.
> 

After I sent that letter, it occured to me that all
fiction  by nature is theistic, since the writer is
nothing if not God over the page. Perhaps even
polytheistic if there are editors involved. I have a
copy of Earth Abides, but somehow it has fallen into
my backlog and I don't know when I'll get to it.

Don

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