News of Kurt Vonnegut’s death reminded me of my encounter with the author in 1990. I had just moved to New York six month before when David Talbot, who was then working at the SF Examiner’s Sunday magazine, Image, asked if I would interview him on the occasion of the publication of his 13th novel, Hocus Pocus.

Like most children of the sixties, I came of age reading Vonnegut. His early books — Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five — were the I-can-read books for the stoned generation, and their simple prose belied a more complicated amalgam of despair and humor. Meeting him would be like meeting Joseph Heller, or Ken Kesey — absurd and wonderful, like his best novels.

As a green kid from California, I was amazed at how easy it was: I called his publisher and they gave me his home number. He answered and in a voice thick with alcohol and Pall Malls invited me over to his house the next morning. He lived in the little neighborhood of Turtle Bay (his neighbors included Katharine Hepburn and William Paley, if I’m not mistaken) and he was sitting on the stoop, nursing a Coke at nine in the morning when I arrived.

I had done my homework, reread most of his canon and some interviews, and he was in fine form for most of our talk. When I asked him what he said to the college kids he was lecturing to he replied, “I’m telling them the human experiment is over and we’re a failed species.” A beat. “Of course, you could always hire a lawyer to argue the other side.”

That kind of gag sums up his outlook: a scientist’s certainty in our unregenerate ways mixed with a cynic’s hard-won knowledge of how the world works for most people. Money and illusion may not set you free but it can keep your mind off the score through much of the game. His mother was a suicide, and think he approached his life — smoking and drinking with no sign of letting up — with a kind of grim determination at times. I heard a clip of him in a more recent interview this morning, imagining Beethoven at the end of his run saying, “Okay, can I quit now?”

My most lasting memory of that morning was how, at the end of an hour, I turned the tape over and all the life seemed to go out of him. My next question concerned the bombings he witnessed at Dresden, the central event of Slaughterhouse Five and some say of his life, and he waved it away. “It’s absurd to say one event is any more important than another,” and then he stood up. “I’ve got to quit,” he said, “I can’t talk anymore.” I later learned he had thrown a reporter from Entertainment Weekly out that same week, saying, “It doesn’t seem to me we’re on the same wavelength.” At least I didn’t get the bum’s rush. I was on his wavelength there, for a moment.

You can quit now, Mr. Vonnegut.

My definition of the optimist is the Mr. Softee man who patrols our neighborhood in his ice cream truck, playing his maddening jingle and hoping for customers at the first sign of spring — despite the snow flakes that have been appearing like radioctive waste in NY the last couple days. (My daughter said they reminded her of the days after 9.11, ashes falling from clear blue sky.) He’s out there now, combing the streets of Brooklyn, blowing on his hands as he tries to move some Sponge Bob-sicles.

Our president coined the new term for an optimist when, speaking to Juan Willliams on NPR, he called Cheney “a person reflecting a half-glass-full mentality” because of his outlook on Iraq. Even long-time Bush watchers, who count on his malapropisms the way Van Halen fans count on Eddie’s trips to rehab, were stunned. An easy lay-up and he blew it!

But listen to the link above: Was he unaware he was getting it wrong, as he did when he tried to define “dissembling” to the press corps, or was he actually, uh, dissembling as when he said, pre-invasion, “there are no war plans on my desk”? I suggest it was neither. Note the way Bush emphasizes the expression, with evident self-satisfaction. I put it to you that he is creating a new paradigm, a new language if you will, and we are all trying to decipher it.

At least I think it’s him doing it. After seeing those pictures of Cheney lurking behind the hedges, watching W at his last Rose Garden press coference, I once again wondered if this was a clear and simple case of mind control, provided that you need two minds to play that game.

Half glass full. Come on, say it with me. It has a certain je ne sais quoi, a kind of rock and roll logic, like “I am just a jeepster for your love,” or “It balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.” Dig the sounds George is laying down. And give that man a Sponge Bob-sicle.

Peggy and I spent a few days in Charleston, South Carolina this week for no particular reason: Our daughter was in Mexico, we had not been anywhere alone in over a year and neither of us had been to Charleston despite its relative proxmity to NY (an hour and change) and some personal connection on her part. Her father had lived there as a boy, and a famous ancestor of hers, Charles Pinckney, had called the city home when our nation was new.

Like a lot of colonial cities, Charleston has gone to great lengths to preserve and restore its historical houses and buildings, catering to the tourist trade. (We stayed, coincidentally, in the Charles Pinckney room at the John Rutledge Inn. Meaning if you do something as significant as represent your state at your nation’s first Constitutional Convention, someone may someday leave little mints on a pillow in a room named in your honor.)

A lot of people told us how much they loved Charleston — great food, they said and we did eat in a few good restaurants — the best of which was the Hominy Grill. It bills itself as beloved by locals and there was a lot of neighborhood trade in evidence, though our cab driver warned us, “Don’t let them stint you on the grits!” He told us of wandering the streets of Harlem, a white man in a suit, in search of grits only to have waitresses ask him to repeat the word, which he stretched in southern fashion into three syllables: “Grr-ee-yits.”

But my friend Jess Greenbaum had offered another opinion. “I hate Charleston,” she told me, with some passion. “Everything is so nice and friendly, as if slavery never happened.” The history of slavery in the south pretty much begins and ends in this city and true, there are monuments to the “flowers of Southern manhood” who died defending, well, people’s right to own other people. But most of the historical tours we took kept the issue front and center. I didn’t hear any of this “War of Northern Aggression” BS I had heard in Savannah, for instance — though I did blanch at the sight of a carriage tour guide in a confederate cap. Would the guides at Auschwitz wear swastikas, smile and say “Do we have any Bavarians here today?”

What creeped me out about Charleston was the vision of American retirement it presented: elderly couples shuffling about in golf clothes, looking at bad art, eating in good restaurants and generally acting as if they were just passing time until they died. I’m sure I’m being unfair (I usually am) but it was a bracing vision for a man in his fifties, a reminder to make a note to myself to find another way to live the rest of my days than wandering the earth as a semi-detached overfed spectator, poking at history until I become part of it myself.

No sooner had I put up my last post when the website to which I linked, Dylan Hears a Who, was taken down. No explanation but I suspect that the estate of the late Dr. Seuss (the site featured a “lost” Dylan album, with full cuts of Bob singing “Green Eggs and Ham” etc. complete with Hammond organ and old LP scratches and pops, and one of the funniest graphics — Carnaby St. era Bob in a Cat in the Hat hat) demanded it’s removal. Seuss’s widow Audrey Geisel has been quick to quash parodies and such that infringe on the Seuss legacy in the past. Which would be all well and good had she not given her blessings to the loathsome Mike Meyers film of the Cat in the Hat. That featured a scene of the Cat ogling a Playboy-style fold-out of the kids’s mother, meaning I suppose its okay to imply that this beloved childhood character — who is, you remember, a cat — wants to shag your mom but not to let some Dylan parodyist sing your beloved husband’s rhymes.

O the thinks that you’ll think.

Also, Charley and Stephanie were not going to see the Bunuel film Exterminating Angel but rather the contemporary exercise in French soft porn, Exterminating Angels. No word back from them yet. Charley and Stephanie, that is. Not the angels.

The beauty of Dylan Hears a Who went beyond the funny concept. What made it note (or link) worthy was the loving detail that went into its production. It was a labor of love by someone who clearly DID love Dylan and Seuss equally — just as the similarly litigation inspiring Grey Album was made by a deejay who loved Jay Z and the Beatles.

The web of course is rife with change: I threw the I Ching yesterday (a line that Dylan, speaking of who, threw out of his first version of “Idiot Wind”) and consulted the same I Ching site I had recommended in this space last year. But where once there was a fairly full and faithful rendering of the Bollingen Series’ Wilhelm translation of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, what’s left looks like a handful of fortune cookies. Tossing the virtual coins I came up with hexagram seven, The Army with this explanation:

The army encamps to the left.
Without fault.

There is not much work to do, so one steps back. Nothing wrong with that.
(“Encamping to the left” means that the army encamps while it has no war to fight.)

Compare this to the five page reading Wilhelm gives the same hexagram (“The attributes of the two trigrams are danger inside and obedience outside”) is enough to send you back to the library. See you there.

News of funny stuff travels fast on the internet, even when people don’t use email to spread the word. Franny and I were having dinner at a place called Go Sushi in Greenwich Village on Thursday night, amusing ourselves by watching the teeming masses that converge at the corners of Sixth and Eighth and Greenwich and, yes, Gay streets at rush hour when Charley Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek spied us through the glass. Living four blocks from me in Brooklyn, I never see them and have to run into them in Manhattan. They were having your average film critics’ night out — meeting a friend at a bar and then going to see Exterminating Angel — when Charley asked what would become the question of the moment:

“Have you seen Dylan Hears a Who?”

I got home to find the link in an email from Steph, followed by another — subject line: Click immediately — from my friend Jeremy Epstein. I won’t ruin the gag for you except to say that it has nothing to do with The Who.

People have been parodying Dylan pretty much since he started singing, and small wonder. As former Bowie sideman Mick Ronson, who toured with Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue once remarked, “He sounds like Boo Boo Bear.” That’s not completely fair, of course, though it is funny. Sort of like my son remarking upon hearing Tom Waits for the first time, “Is that the Cookie Monster singing?”

To the delight of us diehard Dylan fans everywhere, Bob is still having the last laugh: recording some of his best albums in his sixties, writing one of the best rock star bios to date (and it’s just volume one!), and hosting the delightfully bizarre Theme Time Radio Hour on XM. Some scoff that his is not a voice for radio but whose was? Wolfman Jack?

I’d like to know what Dylan thinks of Dylan hears a who. For that matter, I’d like to know what Alicia Keys thinks of being name-checked in a Dylan song. The answer is out there, I’m sure. Email me if you know. Word travels fast on the internet.