Kurt Vonnegut on Imagination

Kurt Vonnegut appeared on the Daily Show Tuesday night to promote his new book 'A Man without a Country'. Although he's in his early eighties he seems to have lost none of his acumen and humour. Vonnegut never enjoyed appearing in public and his interview was much too short.
There are not enough humourists around anymore, at least those able to be humourous without the shock value of foul language which is used so much anymore it no longer has any value.

The essay in his new collection on imagination, however, I will disagree with. He likens the slick productions of movies and television and the information highway as having displaced the need for imagination circuit teachers who, by using reading and story telling in the classroom, built these imagination circuit in youngsters of his day (which was my day too). He writes: "Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will be just a face." I would argue that these new forms of media will only enhance imagination and the rampant illiteracy on the information highway will eventually disappear because, much like a badly written novel, the badly written discourse on the information highway will simply be ignored.

In her essay, 'The Future is Now', in this Octobers issure of Writer's Digest, Kevin Smokler deals with this issue and I think she's right on track.

My point is, without imagination, no matter how the circuit is created, none of the media would or will be possible...and, for writers, there will always be the old question hanging in the air: 'What if...'. Nothing gets a writer going more than a good old "What if?"

Our job, especially as bloggers (and sometimes actually published writers) is to encourage the new and sometimes not-so-literate blogger to keep writing, but to keep writing better. And, of course, you're always going to have those whom take no one's advice, but they'll soon be offline and never in print.