He’s gone, and we will miss him. The NYT obit captured his essence nicely.

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” summed up his philosophy:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography in a vernacular voice, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

Like many baby boomers, I loved his work. During a sojourn in the UK, he once said something very generous on TV about a newspaper column I had written, and one never forgets compliments from people like him.

[Warning: retired colonel rant upcoming. Sensitive souls look away now.]

I’ve just listened to the first of this year’s Reith Lectures, delivered by Jeffrey Sachs, billed as “one of the world’s foremost economists and advisor to several governments around the world”. It was held in the Royal Society before an invited audience. And it was ‘introduced’ by the fragrant Sue Lawley, a broadcasting celeb, the high point of whose career to date has been hosting Desert Island Discs. The event consisted of a short sermonette by Sachs, followed by an inane Q&A session moderated — if that is the right word — by Lawley.

This has been the pattern for the Reith ‘lectures’ for the last few years. The old idea of a lecture as an hour-length talk, preferably covering terrain that is intellectually demanding, has been abandoned. And not by some brain-dead commercial broadcaster, but by the BBC. Investing the Sachs/Lawley travesty with a Reithian aura warrants prosecution under the Trades Description Act. One of the glories of the ‘real’ Reith Lectures was that they made no concessions to intellectual feebleness or short attention spans (just look at the list of past lecturers and subjects). I still remember wonderful Reith series given by, for example, Edmund Leach, Donald Schon, Richard Hoggart and Daniel Boorstin.

Bah!

Update…A friend tells me that one of the luminaries who asked a ‘question’ was a former Spice Girl. Only David Beckham was missing from the stellar line-up.

David Hare is IMHO one of the great men of our time. Also, in my experience, one of the nicest (I knew him when I was a television critic in the 1980s and 1990s). Yet according to this Telegraph profile, he is racked by anger, guilt and low self-esteem.

Hmmm… Maybe what makes him such a valuable person is the fact that he is perpetually dissatisfied with himself. The real menaces are self-made men who worship their creator — like the late Noel Annan. An academic friend of mine was once seated next to him at a dinner. “How many honorary degrees do you have?” was Annan’s opening question. “Perhaps he was being ironic”, I said afterwards, when told about the exchange. “I don’t think so”, replied my friend.

Karen Sparck Jones died on Wednesday morning. She was the widow of Roger Needham and one of the people for whom the Reader’s Digest‘s ‘Most Unforgettable People I’ve Met’ feature might have been invented. Strikingly handsome, with a magnificent head of white hair, she was also the kind of person for whom the term ‘bluestocking’ might have been coined.

She was one of the most cerebral people I ever met. She never developed any aptitude for small-talk, but would plunge straight in — as if responding to a seminar paper. She once ruined a dinner party that Sue and I gave. One of the other guests was a friend who had done a lot of work on location sensing. Karen fixed him with her gimlet eye and proceeded to interrogate him about the privacy implications of his work, apparently oblivious to the social consequences of the interrogation. She went on and on — way beyond the point where it made sense. Roger, meanwhile, blithely swirled his Burgundy and let it rip. A long marriage to Karen had inured him to the futility of interfering with a force of nature!

They made a fascinating couple. Both were fiercely intelligent — and blithely indifferent to the pressures that cause us lesser mortals to compromise. They met when they were graduate students in Cambridge, and remained here all their working lives. As students, they bought a plot of land in Coton, a nice village about two miles from the city, and built — with their own hands — a modest wooden house, in which they lived contentedly for several decades. They moved, in the end, because the noise of the M11 — which now runs close to the village — was too irritating.

I liked Karen enormously. When she was diagnosed with cancer in 2002 and spent some time in hospital, I offered to get her some books. What would she like? “You choose”, was the brusque reply. So I chose a couple of novels and had Amazon deliver them. Her reaction was astonishing — I had the impression that she had never in her life read a novel. Fiction was clearly too frivolous to be bothered with.

The last time I saw her was a few months ago. I was lunching with a friend in the ‘Shack’ — the cafeteria on the West Cambridge site where the computer scientists go to eat. Karen came in, spotted me, and said in a loud voice, “I have a bone to pick with you”. She then went to get something to eat. My friend departed hurriedly. Karen came and sat opposite me and proceeded to give me a hard time about something I had written in a newspaper column six weeks earlier. It was, of course, unnerving in one way; but it was also exhilarating to be taken seriously by such a serious intellect.

There’s a nice obit here which covers her academic career. In recent times, she was awarded the Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society, and the Allen Newell Award and Athena Lectureship by the American Association for Computing Machinery. With her characteristic, unsentimental efficiency, knowing that she would not live to attend the ceremonies, she video-recorded an acceptance lecture last month, which I hope will eventually be available online.

She and I were Fellows of the same College — Wolfson. The photograph is a detail from the mural commissioned to celebrate its 40th anniversary. Yours truly is the untidily-dressed chap to her left!

Update… Quentin has a lovely photograph of Karen.

At last! A technical advance the rest of us can relate to.

A New Button
Now in Gmail, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and we’ll send it to you in the mail.

Simplicity Squared
Google will print all messages instantly and prepare them for delivery. Allow 2-4 business days for a parcel to arrive via post.

Total Control
A stack of Gmail Paper arrives in a box at your doorstep, and it’s yours to keep forever. You can read it, sort it, search it, touch it. Or even move it to the trash—the real trash. (Recycling is encouraged.)

Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe
Google takes privacy very seriously. But once your email is physically in your hands, it’s as secure as you want to make it.

“But what about the environment?” I hear you cry. They’ve thought of that too.

But what about the environment?

Not a problem. Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment. For every Gmail Paper we produce, the environment gets incrementally healthier.

The really neat thing is that Quentin can use his fancy scanner to turn it all into PDFs.