xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

So a friend came over tonight. We hadn’t talked in a while, and he wanted to meet the baby, and so we talked and ate and some small and great things were exchanged, including two books. For the baby there was The Monster at the End of this Book, and he took our copy of Vonnegut’s Bluebeard.

How this is relevant to visual thinking involves a couple hops, but it seems natural to me:

Kurt Vonnegut wrote. He wrote 14 or so novels, an equal number of collections, and some plays. He was good enough at it to make it his profession. And of course he left a lasting mark on the pliable morality of many teenagers who were lucky enough to have his books on their summer reading lists. He did this with words.

But he also drew stuff. Although I struggled tonight to remember the plot of Bluebeard (what was the fate of Rabo Karabekian’s secret?) what will forever be burned in my brain is Vonnegut’s glyphic resampling of the asterisk. I remember meeting it at the bottom half of a right-facing page in the early pages of a paperback book, and it’s been in my head ever since.
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