More on Kurt

Because I'm sure no one actually reads the comments section on this blog, I feel the need to pass along some great info from the birdseed lawyer, which he actually got from the Wade Blogs, possibly one of the best blog titles I've e'er come across.

Turns out Kurt Vonnegut was a staff writer at Sports Illustrated for a short period before the magazine was actually published. According to Vonnegut, the publishing company had hired such bad sports writers for the magazine that they had to hire good writers who really didn't care about sports at all. Kurt was of the second batch.

His short tenure at the magazine came to an end when he was assigned to write a story about a race horse that had jumped the rail and terrorized the infield at a local track. Apparentlty, he simply stared at his desk for hours before finally departing the building without a word. Inside his deserted typewriter was this:

"The horse jumped over the fucking fence."

Would you expect anything less from the man? I think that sentence, in that context, with all of its glorious sardonic contempt for the issues that distract our citizenry and its existential understanding of the absurdity of life defines both his career and who he was as a person better than anything else ever could.