Several people today have emailed me with links to the plays of Cho Seung Hui, the student behind the Virginia Tech massacre. Click here if you’d like to read them yourself.

They don’t tell us much beyond this: Mr. Cho was a very bad playwright. Really bad. The dialogue is forced and expositional, the staging doesn’t work, and characters such as the stepfather are set up as paper tigers for other characters to express their viewpoints. In fact, the only thing I like is the stepfather character’s name, Richard McBeef, but then only for a play in the style of Alfred Jarry.

Here’s the statement that these plays do not — repeat, do not — make: that because these are dark, troubled plays, Cho was clearly a dark, troubled person, someone who was going to be a murderer. No. These are dark, troubled plays that happen to be by someone who turned out to be a dark, troubled person who happened to turn out to be a murderer.

It always troubles me when people confuse the unattractive character in a play with its creator. Just because you’ve written racists, pederasts, murderers, and even Republicans into your play doesn’t mean you are one. It means that you are writing about them. Ian Fleming was in no way James Bond, Edgar Rice Burroughs was not raised by apes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe did not have an uncle named Tom.

These things may seem obvious to most of us reading this. Yet all across the net tonight people are reading the plays of Cho Seung Hui and deciding that someone “should have known.” If Cho gave other signs of mental distress, that’s one thing. But the writing in these plays tells us only that he had no future as a playwright.

Except — and here’s an irony — I guarantee that some enterprising director or producer somewhere is right now printing out those plays and getting ready to produce them. Remember, you read it here first.

Tonight in class one of my students looked up and announced, “Oh, Kurt Vonnegut died. A friend texted me.”

And so he had.

Vonnegut was an early and lasting hero to me. My brother introduced me to his books starting when I was 11 and I was quickly hooked. In fact, the first book I ever bought myself was a Vonnegut book. I had read “Cat’s Cradle” and one or two others already, including probably “Sirens of Titan,” when David Evans, one of my teachers at Arthur Rann Middle School, noticed my interest and started talking about “Breakfast of Champions.” I asked if I could borrow it. (That one didn’t appear to be in my brother Ray’s library.) The teacher agreed. Later that day, though, there was a call at home from Mr. Evans asking to speak with my father. I put my father on, then ran upstairs and listened in on the other line. Mr. Evans said something like this: “Your son is very bright and he’s reading books by a man named Kurt Vonnegut. Lee would like to borrow his new book, and I would lend it to him, but I wanted to check with you first because it has adult themes.” Mr. Evans stressed that I was already reading things along these lines. My father had a question or two about the adult themes, Mr. Evans filled in some additional information, and finally my father said, and I’ll never forget these words, “Don’t lend it to him.” I hung up the phone, went downstairs, got my bicycle out of the garage, rode a mile through the woods to Goetsch’s Market, and bought “Breakfast of Champions” for myself. I took it home and read it cover to cover, outraged that my father was trying to ban it, and eager to find the adult themes. When I was done I couldn’t imagine what the objectionable part was, unless it was the little line drawing of what looked like conjoined parantheses and which was clearly identified as “a cunt.”

(And let that be a lesson to all would-be censors everywhere: Your actions only foment demand.)

Vonnegut taught me early lessons in thinking for myself, both in this example and in his actual writing. Being of a pragmatic bent, I don’t share his dour view — I always think we can make life even just a little bit better, and in the meantime there is much that is glorious. One of the glorious things was his string of bitingly funny and wise books.

A couple of years ago when my son Lex was between books I plucked “Cat’s Cradle,” a book that for some years I reread every year, and handed it to him. He liked it a lot and moved on to “Slaughterhouse Five.” In “Slaughterhouse Five,” Billy Pilgrim famously “comes unstuck in time.” Similarly, other characters throughout Vonnegut’s oeuvre find themselves transported to distant times and places, whether on Earth, Trafalmadore, or elsewhere. One thing that will not be coming unstuck and leaving us is Vonnegut’s body of work.

My good friend, actor-playwright-director Trey Nichols, is written up in this week’s LA Weekly, in a special issue devoted to the perils and pitfalls of doing theatre in LA.  I’m always happy to see talented colleagues get noticed, although perhaps not in this light:

Employee of the Month

In the summer of 1996 at Moving Arts’ Silver Lake venue, playwright Trey Nichols was on the frontlines, by himself, in his first assignment as box-office/house manager. The audience was due to start arriving in minutes. After using the theater’s one lobby toilet, Nichols observed to his dismay that a blockage by his own fecal matter threatened an immediate overflow after a weak flush. With little time for rumination, Nichols was faced with one of two difficult choices: to walk away and deny all knowledge of what he had done, or to take corrective action. This was just between Nichols and his conscience. Our protagonist explains what happened next:

“I grabbed a big handful of my own excrement to clear the blockage. I had seconds to act, and it was the only thing I could do. The performance proceeded without a hitch, though I didn’t shake any hands that night.”

Nichols has been too modest to speak of his heroism until now. If the Weekly had been aware of his actions in 1996, he surely would have received one of this publication’s Special Recognition awards. The play, by the way, was a work by Nat Colley, aptly named A Sensitive Man.

When something similar happened to me once with our theatre’s notoriously weak plumbing, I… used the plunger.

Newsweek has a great little sampler of the books some noted writers say are most important to them. Here’s Walter Mosley’s list, which seems closest to my own reading — you’ll note that in addition to Camus, Garcia Marquez, and Freud (all represented by books I read, and some of which wound up on Doug’s Reading List), it includes Fantastic Four issues 1-100 (also a prominent suggestion to Doug — and to you). Mr. Mosley is a man of taste.

I have a great deal of respect for Dana Gioia’s work at the National Endowment for the Arts in bringing art to people who’ve never gotten much of it before, and his speech at a national conference several years ago similarly impressed me. One of the things he talked about was the death of his child, and how when something like that happens to you it burns through your life like a prairie fire, bringing instant clarity. It was thereafter that he set about quitting his (very successful, very lucrative) corporate marketing executiveship and dedicated himself to being a full-time writer. Here is his list of the five most important books to him; given his personal story, I think I’ll be reading the Merton book.

Over on Slate, Joshua Green urges Democrats to adopt the mythologizing tactics of the GOP.

I understand — and agree with — the advice not to be boring. (And not to remain stuck in the 60s.) And I well recognize the power of myth. After all, that’s what got us into Iraq.

A review in today’s LA Times Book Review of “Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach Boys’ Founding Genius” has me thinking that I love Wilson’s music too much to read an academic dissection of its tonal underpinnings. Musings I would read. A discourse might ruin it forever. In the way that seeing the brain-damaged Wilson “perform” (and I’m using the word generously) “Smile” two summers back almost did.

Why will I be seeing the new film “Next”? Because it’s based on a Philip K. Dick story, “The Golden Man.”

Meanwhile, Paul Giamatti is working on a Dick biopic, with himself in the lead. A couple of years ago Giamatti wowed me in back-to-back leads in “American Splendor” and “Sideways,” so to me this bodes well.

Finally, Cornel Bonca in the OC Weekly does a nice roundup of recent and forthcoming Dick events, as well as a generous review of the recently published “Voices from the Street.” She admits the book’s faults, but greatly oversteps when comparing it favorably with “Revolutionary Road,” a far superior novel by Richard Yates, a truly haunted man I knew briefly the one semester he taught at USC before dying. (Yates had a host of health problems, one remaining lung, and nearly choked to death at dinner.)

Regarding “Voices,” while my regard for Dick is undiminished, the book is nearly unreadable; I feverishly ordered it as soon as it was available and while trying to get through it I’ve finished three other books instead. At the moment it’s mostly gathering dust on my nightstand, two-thirds unread. The first of Dick’s “mainstream” novels I read was “Confessions of a Crap Artist,” a book with a tripartite point-of-view storytelling style that qualifies it as postmodern; it is also a compelling read that rewards one, page after page, with insights into male-female relationships and how the truth of such stories can never be known. It’s a great book. The next one I read, “Mary and the Giant,” was odd and rambling, but each page was such an affront to the sensibility of the 1950s that I couldn’t put it down; among other things, it concerns a tryst between a large black man and a young white girl. Had this been published in the 1950s it’s unlikely that Dick’s obscurity would have continued. But now that I’m reading “Voices,” I see the same faults identified by the editors who turned it down — its rambling, its passivity, the two-dimensional characterizations, Dick’s bad case of adjectivis — and I remember them in “Mary” as well.

All of Dick’s books will wind up kept in print and studied, not because they’re all good, but because he is becoming a canonical writer. As someone with a 30-year enthusiasm for his work, it’s odd to find myself in agreement with those editors who long ago decided that some of these books weren’t good enough and rejected them. From the descriptions and from the rejection letters published in several Dick biographies, I’m starting to suspect that the rest of the mainstream books are even worse than “Voices.”

Just when I thought I was finally done talking about my admiration at The Road here, Oprah (of all people) jumped on the bandwagon.

As if we needed any further proof of Ms. Winfrey’s all-powerful influence, the famously reclusive Mr. McCarthy has actually agreed to a guest appearance with her. That will be his first television appearance ever, and his first interview in decades.

Didn’t quite believe me when I said the U.S. auto industry plays games (and sometimes flat-out lies) about mileage?

Read up.

Here’s my favorite ironic quote of the day (and again, please bear in mind that in this context “favorite” means I actually don’t like it, except for its irony), and it’s from this piece:

“If you want to reduce gasoline usage—like I believe we need to do so for national-security reasons as well as for environmental concerns—the consumer has got to be in a position to make a rational choice,” said a beaming Bush.

Uh, yeah. That’s why you shouldn’t allow automakers to LIE about it.

Comic-book artist Marshall Rogers, best known for his definitive work in the 1970’s and 80’s restablishing the gothic nature of Batman in “Detective Comics,” died Saturday, Newsarama is reporting.

I always loved his work, and reading of his death just now reminded me that I met him once about 25 years ago at a comic-book convention. But then I seemed to recall something else, and picking through the cluttered attic of my brain finally helped me stumble across the lost memory I was seeking: I interviewed Rogers over the phone in 1985 for The Comics Journal. I pulled down the relevant issue — #100 — and there it is. And here it is transcribed online if you’d care to see it.

Rereading it just now resulted in these immediate observations:

1. I was a really bad interviewer. At least this time, and at least at first. The beginning of the interview is, well, flat-out rude: “First off, what have you been doing for the past few years?” That’s information I should have already known — and I suspect I did — but there is a better way to get it. My followup, “So more or less, over the past few years, one strip has been your job,” has a similar attitude that I regret. In retrospect, Rogers was nicer than I would’ve been.
2. I suspect I was also picking up Journal editor Gary Groth’s pugnacity. I recall his recurring snipes to me about Denny O’Neil (whom I also interviewed in this issue) for being a heavy drinker; later, after the interview, I made nice with O’Neil and we wound up having a very pleasant Chinese lunch in Manhattan on the Marvel expense account. I also remember that I discussed with Groth the angle he wanted for each of the five pieces I have in this issue. Why he assigned me to interview Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of both “Mad” when it was a comic book and “Little Annie Fannie” in Playboy, I’ll never know, because I was completely unqualified — something Kurtzman glommed onto instantaneously, threatening to hang up.
3. The interview, like all things from 1985, is incredibly dated. In the wake of “Shatter,” the first comic book done on a computer, I ask him if he’s afraid computers will supplant artists. Twenty years later, all mainstream comics are done on computer. You can also see how much the field was in transition in the mid-80’s, with the shift to creator-owned vehicles and profit-sharing.
4. Hey — I too am one of the people whose intellectual property is being stolen on the internet. I say that because I sold one-time rights to the Journal for this interview, and here it is on the web for free. I guess we’d all better get used to that, if we’re not already. Either that, or I can emulate David Thomas of Pere Ubu and countless others who spend long hours hounding people around the globe to take things down. (And I’m linking to the interview — which I hadn’t even remembered conducting — so how put out am I truly?)

Please pardon my bringing these things up in what is, to some extent, a death notice; I just feel like a part of my life from more than 20 years ago came knocking.

Rogers’ work on Batman was clean and moody at the same time (and at its best when inked by Terry Austin); his Mr. Miracle had a sharp plastic snap to it that made it ping off the page. I’m not well-versed enough in the technique behind these tricks to explain how, but Marshall Rogers’ covers always stood out on very crowded newsstands. They belonged to what was a highly plastic era, but had a rigor and a punch that a lot of comics were missing. I’m sorry I won’t be seeing any more of that work, or any more of him at conventions.