As of midnight on Wednesday, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut are all dead.My favorite Vonnegut novel: Mother Night (1961).
The quote from Mother Night that sticks out most for me: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
Last Vonnegut novel I read: Hocus Pocus, published in 1990. I read it not long after it came out.
This comes from Slaughterhouse Five (1969):When Mari and I were recovering from a Portugese Man o' War attack in the summer of 1992, we tried to rent a copy of the film version of Slaughterhouse Five at a video store in Macon, Georgia (we also rented a VCR). The video store employee asked us, "Did they make a fifth part to that?"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
I don't think the film versions of either Mother Night or Slaughterhouse Five are very good.
Here's some more recent Kurt, from "I Love You, Madame Librarian," published in In These Times (August, 6, 2004): "In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were."
Kurt was one cool string bead.
4 comments:
I never knew was one of your favorites as well. Maybe that's why we're friends. I also love the movie. Maybe that's why we're not the same person. I'm sad to see him go.
wow---don't know how i missed this event, but i'm also really sad about it. how did i miss hearing this news??? i also loved kurt vonnegut and mother night was also my favorite. i don't know if you recommended it to me or if it was assigned to me in one of my classes or if dad recommended it to me. thanks for the post, the news and the words.
I have never read Vonnegut but I did hear on the radio that he was in a basement butcher shop when Dresden was bombed. Was he a Nazi?
No.
According to Wikipedia: Kurt Vonnegut was born to third-generation German-American parents in Indianapolis, Indiana on November 11, 1922. He enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II.
As an advance scout with the U.S. 106th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge, Vonnegut was cut off from his battalion and wandered alone behind enemy lines for several days until captured by German troops on December 14, 1944. While a prisoner of war, Vonnegut witnessed the aftermath of the February 13–15, 1945 bombing of Dresden, Germany, which destroyed much of the city. Vonnegut was one of just seven American prisoners of war in Dresden to survive, in an underground meatpacking cellar known as Slaughterhouse Five. The Nazis put him to work gathering bodies for mass burial.
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