I guess this means the price of my autographed copy of Hocus Pocus just went up

There will be a lot of eulogizing of Kurt Vonnegut in the next days. Almost all of it by people who knew him and/or his work better than I. But I wanted to post this quote Mark Evanier found.

I've quoted this before but someone once asked Kurt Vonnegut to explain the meaning of life. He said...

Well, I have a son who writes very well. He just wrote one book; it's called The Eden Express. It's my son Mark, who is a pediatrician and who went crazy and recovered to graduate from Harvard Medical School. But anyway, he says, and I've quoted him in a couple of my books, "We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

Otherwise, let me have a go at a brief appreciation from a slightly different angle. One of the things I always liked about Vonnegut, besides the books which I enjoyed, was that he was never an aesthete.

He once said that he wished he'd written Cheers, he appeared as himself (and as one of the best jokes) in a Rodney Dangerfield movie, and he wrote the foreword to a Bob & Ray retrospective.

You gotta respect a man like that.

ETA: I should've said-I also always liked his term Foma for "harmless lies."