Sublime

I am teaching very hard, since I am so hopelessly square. My kids can write, unfortunately. Algren’s kids can probably write, too, but he is doing himself and them a favor by telling them to get out of town. Jane is out here for a week. She has to go back to nurse her mother, who has a busted hip. And I gave her a polaroid for her 43rd birthday, an

The sermon of the panorama was that even a man without a friend in the Universe could still find his home planet mysteriously, heartbreakingly beautiful.

The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before—years ago, in the veterans’ hospital. It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.

He was working on a one-volume history of the United States Army Air Corps in World War Two. The books were about bombings and sky battles that had happened before Lily was even born.

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected.

So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.

Vonnegut “… uses the rhetorical potential of the short sentence and the short paragraph better than anyone now writing, often getting a rich comic or dramatic effect by isolating a single sentence in a separate paragraph or excerpting a phrase from context for a bizarre chapter-heading. The apparent simplicity and ordinariness of his writing masks