How nice you all are! Logging in this morning, I found an email-box full of sympathy for the mild & transient affliction I noted yesterday—including one from a horologist friend who tells me that Frances Cornford’s watch is “out of beat.” You can’t argue with technical expertise. Vonnegut: Is Wikipedia amazing, or what? They had the death date right there in his entry early this morning. As to his sci-fi—I always thought there was something a bit “off” about it. He used sci-fi themes and scenery, but not in the real sci-fi spirit. True sci-fi is raw entertainment. It is, as Kingsley Amis said in his book on the subject, a “naive American art form, like jazz,” whose purpose is to “arouse wonder, terror, and excitement” in the reader. As someone else said about a different medium: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” Supposing I am right, that Vonnegut’s books are something other than, or other than *just*, sci-fi, are they any good? I can’t say I ever thought so. He was fatally attracted to whimsy and the feebler kinds of experimentalism. “Slaughterhouse Five” had a certain force, as well it should have had, considering the appalling experiences that went into it. I would rather have read it as a plain memoir, though, without the whimsical trimmings.