Marc Leeds - The Vonnegut Encyclopedia

A working-class Englishman named Ned Ludd, early in the nineteenth century, smashed up some machinery that was making his skills redundant, thus giving our already rich language a word for a person wary of newfangled contraptions, such as myself, which is Luddite. A common irony, a virtually unavoidable irony in these times, is for a Luddite to be a beneficiary of a technological advance. I myself now find my lifes work as a writer, which I made with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp, transmogrified into something as insubstantial, ephemeral, and yet immortal as the ghost of Hamlets father on a parapet at Elsinor. Electrons. Ah me. What is one to think?

My most recent opus in the Gutenberg medium, Fates Worse Than Death, isnt at this writing all that recent anymore (1991). I set to work on another one, to be called Timequake, but I have been unable to complete it to my own satisfaction, so perhaps it will never be. Civilization will survive in any case. I hoped it to be a tragicomedy (what a language!) about the externalization in the form of compact, reasonably priced, and readily available electronic devices of all that is amusing or economically valuable about the nervous systems of human beings. Memory, given the circumstances that inspire this little essay, is the human capability that first comes to mind. Thanks to my good friend and Professor Marc Leeds, Ph.D., who fed my words to a computer, some machine will remember the two of us long after human beings have stopped giving a damn whether we lived or not.

Ha!

Kurt Vonnegut

Because I watched him write when he gardened and did carpentry and everything else he did, I know how much my father would love that there is now a second edition of The Vonnegut Encyclopedia. He is doubled over somewhere laughing that he pulled off something much harder than the Brinks robbery. Better than cheating death.

He made something out of nothing, saved his own life in the process, and made lots of people, including me, less lonely. Lots of people.

It reads well, especially for an encyclopedia, because there was a wholeness and seriousness and earnest hard work in my fathers work that resonates. There is very little, if any, tin.

I used to think he was a talented spoiled brat who got lucky and popped out a few good books. Now Im just amazed.

Thanks, Dad.

Thanks, Marc Leeds.

Thanks to anyone anywhere who reads anything.

Mark Vonnegut, M.D.