Vonnegut and Libraries (So it goes)

Many great bloggers have posted very nice things about Kurt Vonnegut in the last few days.

Thanks especially to Library Journal for putting up the 1973 article from the interview they did with him. And thanks to Jessamyn West at librarian.net for posting a link to this article.

I just want to take this space to post a few quotes, pulled from some of his writings, about libraries and librarians.

In a 2004 piece in In These Times, Vonnegut wrote:

I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

In a 2003 ACLU ad campaign, he said,

I am not an American who thinks my government should secretly get a list of the books I read. I am an American who knows the importance of being able to read and express any thought without fear.

And, true to form, in the Library Journal piece he is quoted as saying,

I discovered and read all of O. Henry’s stories going through the library when I was a kid, [which was] like sticking your prick into a light socket.

In the introduction to God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, one of his last books (and republished in In These Times), Vonnegut wrote,

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an AHA memorial service for my predecessor I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored…

So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, “He’s up in Heaven now.” Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this. My epitaph in any case? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.” I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.

Well, Kurt is up in Heaven now. So it goes.