Boston, MA-Real life has been a very tough concept for Kurt Vonnegut, Jr to grasp these days. The author of over a dozen quasi-surrealistic novels , including Five Easy Pieces, Slaughterhouse Five, and Breakfast of Champions, gave a commencement address to MIT's graduation class and was booed off the stage.
"We know about the Internet hoax and it's old news," said one nerd, 21 year old Myron Skolnik. "We weren't about to fall for that one again."
The famed author had been the subject of a now-legendary Internet hoax last year. A columnist's article had been appropriated and credited to Vonnegut as a commencement speech given at Harvard University in Cambridge. In reality, Vonnegut neither gave nor wrote the address.
"I don't know who's responsible for this," said Marvin Peebles, a computer science major at MIT, "but whoever it is deserves the Pakistani Brain virus, after getting an email bomb."
Vonnegut himself was equally unimpressed with MIT's reception. Although he was personally unavailable for comment, he released a statement through his publisher, which was at first also suspected to be a hoax until the author had shown their public relations department his driver's license and two other forms of ID.
"Now I know why J. D. Salinger's a hermit," wrote Vonnegut. "I haven't been this humiliated since Rodney Dangerfield tricked me in Back to School."
The comedian had lured Vonnegut into appearing as himself in the hit comedy only telling him that Vonnegut would win the Nobel Prize according to the script. Instead, Vonnegut's character wrote a paper on his own work which was then rejected for plagiarism.
Is it art imitating life or vice versa?
Soon after the introduction by MIT's president, the upperclassmen began booing theprize-winning author, hurling epithets such as poseur, charlatan, and you Internet joke. After being pelted with tubes of Clearasil and empty asthma inhalers, Vonnegut walked out from behind the podium and left the auditorium.
"I thought," Vonnegut's statement ended, "that they would've been more kindly disposed toward a fellow nerd and would at least be possessed of a rudimentary ability to distinguish reality from the Internet."
Vonnegut's next novel will be out next month, pending forensic verification by his agent.