Ever heard of Robert Bolaño? Me neither. But apparently he’s pretty hot, for a dead writer. So says the LA Times.

While norteamericanos were rereading dog-eared copies of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera,” a dyslexic, globe-trotting high-school dropout and ex-heroin addict was publishing the most celebrated Latin American novels in three decades.

Then, in 2003, he died.

But the reputation of the Chilean-born Roberto Bolaño, whose old pictures make him look like the guitar for a psychedelic garage band, continued to grow: Young Latin writers in particular sang his praises, and he became, in the Spanish-speaking world, the most admired author of his generation.

“I want my father. Where is my father?” 11-year-old Sajad Kadhim cried out as he lay on the grounds of the hospital, where doctors were treating his burns.

“All I remember was we were shopping. My father was holding my hand and suddenly there was a big explosion. I don’t know where my father is. I want my father,” the boy cried.

Here is a really splendid essay/obituary by Harvey Wasserman, on the life and passing of Kurt Vonnegut. No kidding, it's good.

As the media fills with whimsical good-byes to one of America’s greatest writers, lets not forget one of the great engines driving this wonderful man—he HATED war. Including this one in Iraq. And he had utter contempt for the men who brought it about.Kurt Vonnegut was a divine spark of liberating genius for an entire generation. His brilliant, beautiful, loving and utterly unfettered novels helped us redefine ourselves in leaving the corporate America in the 1950s and the Vietnam war that followed.

Kurt Vonnegut was a force of nature, with a heart the size of Titan, an unfettered genius who changed us all for the better. He was possessed of a sense of fairness and morality capable of inventing religions that could actually work.

Now he’s having dinner with our beloved siren of social justice, Molly Ivins, sharing a Manhattan, scorching this goddam war and this latest batch of fucking idiots.

I never cease to amazed and amused by the statements of criminals and crazies. Of course, Shrub tops the list, but check out the ramblings of the woman who killed her preacher husband last year:

“It’s just a lot of stupid stuff,” she said. “I love him dearly, but gosh, he just nailed me in the ground. … The first of our marriage, I just took it like a mouse, didn’t think anything different. My mom just took it from my dad — that stupid scenario.”

But Winkler said she got a job at the post office and that experience taught her to stand up for herself. “That’s the problem. I have nerve now, and I have self-esteem. My ugly came out.”

I’m reminded of a man, years ago, who killed his wife, at least two of their children, another adult or two … and slashed the throat of his small daughter and left her to die. I think she survived. This took place up the Napa, as I recall. As they were bringing him back from Mexico on a plane he said this:

I don’t know, I guess for me I just got a little nervous.

Ain’t that something?

www.earthjustice.org/wolf

Kurt Vonnegut is dead, in this moment. In many other moments he is alive. So it goes.

On the radio, I heard his wife say he was still writing up to the end, that he died on the top of his game. Or he played at the top of his life.

So it goes.

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of type 1 diabetes!

Looks like researchers are on the brink of a treatment for this epidemic disease. Someone I love has type 1 diabetes; maybe someone you love, too.  And we have a president who's doing all he can to stymie this vital research. That's just not right. I'm a religious conservative. Bush and his ilk are just religious reactionaries. The difference between us is that I believe in God, but I don't believe I'm Him.

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

-Hal Borland, journalist (1900-1978)

ALBANY, N.Y. – Cartoonist Johnny Hart, whose award-winning "B.C." comic strip appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers worldwide, has died. He was 76.

Hart died Saturday while working at his home in Endicott.

"He had a stroke," his wife, Bobby, said Sunday. "He died at his storyboard."