Kurt Vonnegut Passes Away, Age 84

[boffo]

One of my favourite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, passed away on Wednesday this week at age 84.
The thing I enjoyed most about 3rd year university was reading every single book and short story he ever wrote. God I loved his work. Especially Jailbird and Breakfast of Champions.
I'm glad he never committed suicide. He wrote so many times that he wished he was dead that he had me nervous and concerned for his safety.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070412/ap_on_re_us/obit_vonnegut

 

[blackdog]

Wow, kurt Vonnegut shaped the way I see the world. He was one of the most important writers on the 20th century. I really feel sad that he's gone. His view on reality was truly origional, ironic and insightfull. He contributed so much to the idea of looking at the world in a different and realistic, yet surreal way. My favorite was Slaughterhouse five. The concept of "not being stuck in time" still boggles my mind. The way he expressed his experience of being a POW in dresden and surviving the firebombing has stayed with me since i read it as a teenager. He was a genius. His writing taught me to love absurdity and the contridictions of reality, and that has helped me survive alot of shit. Thanks Kurt you helped...

 

[Mcluhan]

So he went..

 

[Never Compromised]

I remember in universtity, bringing up the firebombing of Dresden, and the prof immediately asking me if I had read Slaughterhouse - 5.

In many ways, Vonnegut forced us to look at what was going on around us, and to think critically.

Without him, I doubt many of us would have ever heard of the Dresden event.

 

[MissCroft]

Shows how much I know - I thought he had already died a few years ago...The only book I've read of his was Cat's Cradle which was pretty good. I've been meaning to read Slaughterhouse Five for ages now - the list just keeps getting longer (maybe if I spent less time on Terb, lol).

 

[Mcluhan]

Shocking to me, is that there are so few posts in this thread. I would have thought Kilgore Trout (aka Kurt) was a national Icon right up there with Johnny Carson...

I guess there aren't that many Boomers here afterall..

So it goes..

 

[Cinema Face]

I believe he wrote Player Piano. I read that years ago and loved it.

 

[Mcluhan]

Here's an interesting point i just learned from wiki...

"At least one actual published work is attributed to a Kilgore Trout: the novel Venus on the Half-Shell, written by Philip José Farmer but published under the name "Kilgore Trout." For some time it was assumed that Vonnegut must have written it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused"; in an issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it."

 

[LancsLad]

Shocking to me, is that there are so few posts in this thread. I would have thought Kilgore Trout (aka Kurt) was a national Icon right up there with Johnny Carson...

I guess there aren't that many Boomers here afterall..

So it goes..

Most likely because we are all to busy hurling insults in the politics section.

I remember reading Slaughter House Five during high school English class. Loved the book .

 

[boffo]

Here's something a guy named Joe Palermo wrote today that is right in the mark.

"In the mid-1990s, I heard Kurt Vonnegut speak at Cornell University where he briefly majored in chemistry before leaving in 1944 without earning a degree. He told the assemblage at Bailey Hall, filled with fawning professors of English and Comparative Literature, along with their students, that the last place on campus anyone would find a good writer was in the academic departments.
Vonnegut said the place to look for the important writer would be in the "boiler room" maintaining the college's furnace, or in the janitorial service, or serving burgers to students in the cafeteria, toiling without recognition.
...
The baby boom generation has its stars writers, but Vonnegut had something far more bold and authentic to say than any novelist born after World War II. The world has lost one its best, most imaginative writers ever to crawl out of the muck. We need Vonnegut's voice more than ever today with all of the misguided policies and authoritarian politics spewing forth from Washington.

With luck, Vonnegut's ideas and words may live on to influence a new generation of young people who can follow his example of the artist who encapsulated the feeling of pessimism of the intellect with an optimism of the will. Vonnegut's love for the human species, while hating the violence humans inflict upon each other, sets a high standard for all of us to follow."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/kurt-vonnegut_b_45679.html

 

[WoodPeckr]

Kurt Vonnegut on Dubya

From wiki:

With his columns for In These Times, he began a blistering attack on the administration of President George W. Bush and the Iraq war. "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas in December."

In A Man Without a Country, he wrote that "George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography." He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism; speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."

 

[someone]

I found his work to be very mixed. Sirens of Titan was one of the best book’s I ever read. However, I found other books like Gapapagos to be so, so, at best. Still, his best stuff more than made up for the rest.

 

[LancsLad]

I loved " Atlas Shrugged " and " The Fountainhead", oops thats Ayn Rand.

 

[peteeey]

I agree with you on Sirens of Titans. It's not only one of his best books but also one of the best I've ever read.

I found his work to be very mixed. Sirens of Titan was one of the best book’s I ever read. However, I found other books like Gapapagos to be so, so, at best. Still, his best stuff more than made up for the rest.

 

[Mcluhan]

I remember in universtity, bringing up the firebombing of Dresden, and the prof immediately asking me if I had read Slaughterhouse - 5.

In many ways, Vonnegut forced us to look at what was going on around us, and to think critically.

Without him, I doubt many of us would have ever heard of the Dresden event.

I second that point. Nobody was talking about it. It was buried under the sheets because we good guys in the anglosphere didn't do those horrible inhumane war crimes like firebomb 'white' civilian populations, even if it was considered a payback bombing for Coventry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Coventry

You could write an entire thesis with the points you have just made as the core. Vonnegut was an prime mover of influence over certain writers of his day too, like Joseph Heller for instance.

While writers like Hemingway produced a new style and had huge impact on the development of 20th C writing, I am beginning to see that Vonnegut created a genre of thinking. So in that sense he was more of a 20th C social philosopher than just simply a writer, introducing his own class of thought to the human perspective, or perhaps of being; "Vonnegutism" something like a cross between anti-authoritarianism, egalitarianism minus the God effect, mixed with a twisted spiritualism that replaces the Christian notion of God with a deep and profoundly unjust cosmic irony; all of it bundled and transported via the blackest comedy. Its no wonder he suffered bouts of depression...

Reflecting on his life today as an artist, I thought of Django Reinhardt who created a new style of guitar playing. It occurs that Vonnegut was to post-war 20thC literature, what Django Reinhardt was to the jazz guitar band, having no drums or rhythm section with the percussion played on a guitar. Like Reinhardt, Vonnegut produced a movement, his followers were cult-like. As Blackdog said above, " he shaped the way (we) see the world". Man, what could be more profound than that? And isn't that what philosophers do?

So it goes..

R.I.P.

 

[LancsLad]

Dresden was most assuredly payback, Bomber Harris saw to that. Gand slams and tallboys first then the firebombs. Bomber Command loss ratios were horrific but their effect on civilian moral on the home front was beyond measure.

My family suffered through the bombings of Manchester and Liverpool and it made the people have hope when they heard of jerry getting his own back.

Times were very different almost 70 years ago, no one does war like Britain and germany. We should use the same extrem total measures on those that threaten us now.

Sitting in our modern and fuzzy world of political correctness today we have no place questioning what was done to win the war.

 

[Mcluhan]

Dresden was most assuredly payback, Bomber Harris saw to that. Gand slams and tallboys first then the firebombs. Bomber Command loss ratios were horrific but their effect on civilian moral on the home front was beyond measure.

My family suffered through the bombings of Manchester and Liverpool and it made the people have hope when they heard of jerry getting his own back.

Times were very different almost 70 years ago, no one does war like Britain and germany. We should use the same extrem total measures on those that threaten us now.

Sitting in our modern and fuzzy world of political correctness today we have no place questioning what was done to win the war.

I for one was not questioning it. And btw, lots of my family (and my friend's family) signed up for the duty. The odd thing was, I could never get them to talk about it much. I regret now that I had not been more persistent in some cases.

 

[Aardvark154]

Dresden was most assuredly payback

As mentioned on another thread several weeks ago. The Dresden raid was on the strategic level (rather than the specifically tactical e.g. bomb loads and timing) at the direct request of the Soviets.

 

[LancsLad]

As mentioned on another thread several weeks ago. The Dresden raid was on the strategic level (rather than the specifically tactical e.g. bomb loads and timing) at the direct request of the Soviets.

And payback, the people of Coventry deserved no less.

 

[LancsLad]

I for one was not questioning it. And btw, lots of my family (and my friend's family) signed up for the duty. The odd thing was, I could never get them to talk about it much. I regret now that I had not been more persistent in some cases.

Dad didn't speak much of the war but one thing I remember him speaking of was telling of seeing the hundreds and hundreds of bombers assembling in the night sky. He said in a way it was moral building after being on the ground fighting the germans to see the sky filled with the night bombers on their way. No one today could even concieve of what it must have looked like to see a thousand bomber raid and support fighters assembling for their run to gift the 'fatherland".

If the same measure of dedication and destructive might was applied to todays foe we may very well see results.