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KURT VONNEGUT
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut has died at 84.
OT and it might have been mentioned in previous posts but, internal European Union directives now advise government spokesmen to avoid the term “Islamic terrorism” because it is “offensive”.
Other banned terms reportedly also include “jihad,” “Islamic” and “fundamentalist.”
So wash your mouths out
Posted by Whale Spinor on 2007 04 12 at 01:14 AM • permalink“Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.”
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago ...
Not bad. Not bad at all. Of course he would have preferred to have died by being shot in the head by an old enemy with an ancient greivance on 13 February 1976 while addressing a huge audience on the true nature of time.
But wouldn’t we all?
So long old friend. We disagreed about the current war, and I probably shouldn’t have swallowed everything of yours I could when I was 16 and depressive (but I repeat myself). I did finish Galapagos, before I realized I had the option not too finish lousy books that even great writers sometimes produce.
And I’ve left too many years go by without rereading Player Piano, your 1952 (!) classic which, if preserved, will keep your message alive for generations to come. Your key theme was the importance of families we make, networks of friends closer than blood.
Goodbye uncle Kurt.
Read an interview with him last year- crazier than a shithouse rat. I used to think Slaughterhouse 5 was brilliant, now I think it’s bollocks.
All the old literary pinups of the left are croaking- what about a bet on who’s next?
Germie would be a hoot, but I think it’s more likely some carping,creaking, commie coffin-dodger like Norman Mailer.
Thought he was a great writer when I was in high school. Not so much now. So it goes.
Posted by Ernst Blofeld on 2007 04 12 at 01:43 AM • permalinkI’ve always wondered why Vonnegut was regarded so highly, he wasn’t ever even the best at what he did—Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme did it much better. Maybe he was the one everyone thought they could “understand.” Most overrated novelist of the post-World War II American literary scene.
Some of his early short stories were good, but of the eight or ten novels of his I read nothing lingers, not even from Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat’s Cradle, and even a bad novel you remember how bad it was and why it sucked. Vonnegut’s books just evaporate from your mind after reading.
I read a couple of his books in high school as well, but I was not much taken with him back then, and less so now.
For me, Slaughterhouse 5 came across as too wooden and cynical. Of course, I did not survive WWII as he did, but he did write that book for my generation, among others, so I have the right to that opinion.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 04 12 at 01:51 AM • permalink#5 Whatle, jsut as well I’m not a member of the EU.
Jihadi! Jihadi! durka durka baklava!
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2007 04 12 at 01:53 AM • permalinkBugger. Sorry Whale Spinor, I didn’t pervue.
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2007 04 12 at 01:54 AM • permalinkAnother untimely death. Curse you, sweet nicotine.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2007 04 12 at 02:02 AM • permalinkI brought Galapagos to read while waiting for my car to get fixed, left it in the waiting room, and never missed it. Kinda wish he’d died before he defended terrorism.
Posted by Jim Treacher on 2007 04 12 at 02:13 AM • permalinkOn another literary note, has anyone read Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 04 12 at 02:40 AM • permalinkOTT - Crikey has a nice line on KRudd’s devotion to the Global Warmening cause
“So Kevin Rudd drives a Ford Territory. Tsk tsk tsk. What does a petrol-powered four litre, six cylinder four-wheel-drive do to your carbon footprint?
Which is one thing. Careless politics is another. Even Malcolm Turnbull has the wit to drive a hybrid. Galumphing around the countryside in the Australian version of the car cited by Wikipedia as ‘‘one of the vehicles instrumental in turning the SUV from a special-interest vehicle into one of the most popular vehicle types on the road’’ is a pretty clear signal that the Opposition Leader’s publicly paraded Greenhouse piety is at odds with his level of personal environmental commitment.
It’s also more indicative of a certain intellectually sloppy hypocrisy than any amount of faultily recalled family history. If not a bridge too far, it might well be testing the waters for the last straw.”
I can forgive Vonnegut for everything he wrote either before or after “Harrison Bergeron”.
Anyone who regularly reads this blog, and hasn’t read this short story, should do so. You can Google it up, and it will take about five minutes to read.
And when you have finished, ponder what sort of people would lead a government like that in the story?
People who would read Blair and Steyn? Or people who would read Anonymous Lefty and New Matilda?
And for that small, blinding flash of perception, ‘I dips me lid’ to the late KV.
Posted by Apparatchik on 2007 04 12 at 03:03 AM • permalinkTwo memorable things about Kurt Vonnegut:
1. His brief appearance in Back To School with Rodney Dangerfield (in which Dangerfield hires Vonnegut to write his term paper on the works of Kurt Vonnegut and gets an ‘F’).
2. A Rolling Stone interview in which he talked about celibacy and noted that for a state that is, for some, more usual than the state of non-celibacy, it was dismaying that it didn’t get a single mention in the book The Joy of Sex, “not even a blank page”.
—Nick
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2007 04 12 at 03:13 AM • permalinkThe last interview I heard with Kurt was with Phillip Adams. He sounded disillusioned with life itself, a real grouch.
Asked if he was still a Marxist, he said that he thought it was a pity it hadn’t been more successful BUT he still believed it was a very good idea!
Some people don’t grow wiser with age and experience.One of the writers I (and all my friends) loved at 15.
Now I think he’s rubbish…Posted by Honkie Hammer on 2007 04 12 at 03:33 AM • permalinkWe were forced to read Slaughterhouse-5 in Hich School, like many others here. And like a lot of you, I thought it was great back then. I now realize how torn up his mind was after witnessing Dresden’s destruction and aftermath. You don’t just walk away from events like that unscathed. Farewell old warrior, nonetheless.
And another thing, Vonnegut, you’re fired!
(Rodney Dangerfield, Back to School)
Posted by Young and Free on 2007 04 12 at 03:59 AM • permalinkGiven his war record, he was undoubtedly a brave man. He seemed determined, however, that the next generation inherit a world in much less better shape than the world he inherited. Maybe, if he’d spent a few nights in a cellar in Stalingrad, he would have emerged as a flag waver for capitalist liberal democracies.
His praise of terrorists (particularly suicide bombers) in an interview in The Oz a couple of years back was appalling. For me, those statements consign him to history as a supreme hypocrite and a despicable human being .
So no. He doesn’t deserve an RIP.
No amount of bleating by Vonnegut or his intellectual descendents will change the real history. Unfortunately, the understanding of or knowledge of history can be played with.
“In February of 1945, with the Russian army threatening the heart of Saxony, I was called upon to attack Dresden; this was considered a target of the first importance for the offensive on the Eastern front. Dresden had by this time become the main centre of communications for the defence of Germany on the southern half of the Eastern front and it was considered that a heavy air attack would disorganise these communications and also make Dresden useless as a controlling centre for the defence. It was also by far the largest city in Germany - the pre-war population was 630,000 - which had been left intact; it had never before been bombed. As a large centre of war industry it was also of the highest importance.”
(Air Marshall Arthur Harris)
Firebombing was done to both London and Coventry by the Germans, with devastating impact. In a time of total war (a phrase fraudulently foist on the long suffering Germans by Goebbels), such things are avenged, if possible.
Interesting to note that in the current ongoing conflict there are no rules. The west had better understand this before it is too late.Bruno
Agree. I liked several of Vonnegut’s novels. He wrote about the human condition and what was absurd in life, in often an absurd way. Much in the same was as Joseph Heller in Catch 22. Both Heller and Vonnegut were WW2 veterans and their experiences are evident in some of their works. Spike Milligan is another humourist who had his delightful absurdity shaped by war.
I think many of Tim’s posts can be categorised as describing the absurdities we face in the 21C, such as politics, hypocrisy, religion and culture. Ah, culture ... best left in a tub of yoghurt.
BTW, if you read your novels based upon the author’s political leanings, you might have a bare bookshelf. Same goes with deciding to see a film from actors or directors who don’t have the same political viewpoint as yourself. The latter is not a bad idea, maybe I already use that criteria when seeing a film or watching TV. I haven’t been to the cinema in several years, and I probably watch 30 minutes of TV a week (outside of the cricket season).
Even author George Orwell had very left leanings throughout his life, despite writing some great novels against totalitarianism.
blogstrop
Don’t disagree on your history. Bomber Harris was criticised after the fact, so was Curtis LeMay on his bombing of Japan. England were into their sixth year of war. The Allies wanted it ended from people I talk to who were alive through the war. It’s easy to judge if you weren’t there.
Rules of war? We need them in the West. We also try to win the “hearts and minds” through humanitarian works and pushing democracy. It works in the West. It worked in Germany and Japan after the war. What do we do in our current conflicts? IMO, we need to wean people off religion, a superstition and a political movement where some of the major conflicts today are being waged. Maybe I’m a bit extreme, but religion is very divisive. Get rid of it. People can be spiritual without religion.
Sorry, my “losing my religion” attitude is coming through.
Other than that, I dunno. I don’t mind saying don’t know, I don’t have all the answers.
Cheers
One reason for the high death toll in Dresden was the fact that there was almost unbelievably little air raid protection. The Nazi functionary for Dresden, Martin Mutschmann, was captured in 1945 and confessed that he hadn’t built shelters in the city because “I kept hoping that nothing would happen.” But he did build a shelter for himself and his family and other high officials.
And as Andrew Roberts notes in his great History of the English-Speaking peoples, Dresden had huge railway connection yards and significant quantities of war-supporting optics, electronics and communications industries.
Does the EU directive apply to teh terrorists themselves who love the terms jihad, islam, terror.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2007 04 12 at 08:24 AM • permalinkI still reread Vonnegut when I’m in the mood. That’s less and less as time goes by, but it happens.
The man could amass an incredible pile of perfectly correct evidence, apply what was obviously a rather penetrating intelligence to that evidence, and come to a wrong conclusion eleven times out of ten. Watching him do that is worth the price of admission.
Regards,
RicLike many here I read a lot of Vonnegut’s stuff when I was a kid and liked him a lot. His most recent screed, however, is almost perfectly incoherent.
In the end he was left with writing a column for “In These Times”, the most consistently Stalinist of American publications, so that he might still be heard. RIP.
All previous correspondents- Dresden was thought to be impervious because it was a university town. Even more reason to put a 1,000 Lancaster raid on the buggers, before they come up with the idea of post-modernism.
BTW- the staging point for the 22nd SS Division didn’t have anything about it’s targetting.
Personally, I’d have loved to have been on the crew of one of the Avro Lancasters that provided such a window on the end of the war.
Of course, I did not survive WWII as he did, ...”
You died in WW2, The_Real_JeffS?
And does anyone know if Martin Mutschmann moved to New Orleans after the war?
Posted by andycanuck on 2007 04 12 at 09:56 AM • permalinkEven author George Orwell had very left leanings throughout his life, despite writing some great novels against totalitarianism.
I liked what someone once said of Orwell, that he was the conservatives’ favorite socialist, and the socialists’ favorite conservative.
Posted by The Sanity Inspector on 2007 04 12 at 10:40 AM • permalinkHmmmm.
Not bad. Not bad at all. Of course he would have preferred to have died by being shot in the head by an old enemy with an ancient greivance on 13 February 1976 while addressing a huge audience on the true nature of time.
But wouldn’t we all?
Not me.
I want to die after drinking a gallon of the finest scotch ever made and a night out with a dozen hookers.
And maybe not even then.
Posted by memomachine on 2007 04 12 at 11:20 AM • permalink# 53
“If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me”
—Alice Roosevelt Longworth
I read many of Vonnegut’s novels between the ages of 13 and 17, but never more than once.
That seems to have been the essence of the man. His writing wasn’t worth revisiting. Like the little marshmallow peeps you ate as a child at Easter. Quickly consumed and then as quickly forgotten.
Now when will that great bag of wind Norman Mailer finally meet the reaper?
Posted by joe bagadonuts on 2007 04 12 at 11:24 AM • permalinkHere’s another who enjoyed his stuff as a young woman—I can remember laughing out loud at Cat’s Cradle although I don’t remember why—but ultimately found his writing about as substantive as a Bill Clinton speech. And his politics sure did puncture the afterglow. God speed, Kurt; I have a feeling you’re in for a real education.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2007 04 12 at 01:48 PM • permalinkFor what it’s worth, I thought that George Roy Hill’s film of Slaughterhouse Five was quite good. Much better, in fact, than the book itself.
Posted by Urbs in Horto on 2007 04 12 at 01:52 PM • permalinkAnd here’s a link to Harrison Bergeron which is very much worth a read. Vonnegut was a conflicted man.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2007 04 12 at 01:55 PM • permalinkYou died in WW2, The_Real_JeffS?
Yeah, andycanuck. I came back as a ghost to haunt lefties. ;-P
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 04 12 at 03:03 PM • permalinkI didn’t agree with much of Vonnegurt’s political leanings, but damn he could made you think.
I particularly liked his short stories about equal rights, and that if you followed the liberal logic of the day to its conclusion that taleneted people needed to be handicapped to bring them back to being equal with the rest of society.
#59 Kyda,
Thanks for that link. I re-read Harrison Bergeron and found myself moved. I’m glad I read it and glad it still meant something to me.
I had been surprised and saddened earlier this year when helping my high school aged son do a report on Cat’s Cradle. I realized what crap it is and I had once loved it. My son has a great sense of humor and he thought it was shit, too.
Like many here, I idolized him when I was a teen and have assiduously avoided him since college because he became a let down and an apologist for horror.
As with Hunter Thompson, John Lennon, and myriad figures* of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, he was dead years ago.
__________________________________
*Camille Paglia really rips Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovitz over at Salon.comSo you’re not actually the real JeffS, just the somewhat translucent JeffS?
So, you see right through me, huh, PW?
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 04 12 at 09:48 PM • permalinkI have come to the conclusion that Vonnegut can best be described, like Joyce Carol Oates, as an excellent writer who creates mostly highly forgettable stories. With the exception of Harrison Bergeron (which I occasionally assign to Intro Am Gov students) and Slaughterhouse 5 I can never even remember which ones I finished.
And don’t forget that he apparently thought the villains in Bergeron were McCarthy-ite conservatives.
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2007 04 12 at 10:58 PM • permalinkAn LA writer, I think it was Michael Ventura, once wrote, that Vonnegut’s work, like Harlan Ellison’s, was something teens read on their way up to serious writing…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 04 13 at 12:08 AM • permalinkRe #69, richard, that is so true. I devoured Harlan Ellison as a teenager; Vonnegut considerably less so, but still valid in the same vein.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 04 13 at 01:25 AM • permalinkre. Dresden, firebombing of. I once read an alarming comment on the reasons behind this event that downplayed the manufacturing contribution Dresden was making to the war effort, but did say that the hospitals were full of hundreds of thousands of German wounded from the eastern front.
Thus the bombing was attributed to a cynical inhumanity I find hard to reconcile with the ethics behing strategic bombing, even in a time of total war.
Does this seem plausible to anyone? Does it even matter?
Fire bombing of Dresden
The city was essentially destroyed by the RAAF and the USAF over a period of about fifty hours. The number killed is unknown because of the refugees and wounded troops from the East in the city at the time. However the best most recent estimates put the figure at about 25,000 or less.
Horrific as this number is, it has been vastly exaggerated. Firstly by the Nazis who claimed 300,000 were killed but later by the Dresden Was a War Crime crowd, and people like David Irving, who liked to bounce around figures like 150,000-250,000. Vonnegut himself claimed the number was higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Nonsense of course but people naturally were inclined to accept this, given that Vonnegut was there.
This kind of calculus is pretty pointless of course, even as perspective, but for it’s worth about 43,000 people in Britain were killed by German bombing raids between September 1940 and May 1941. Contrary to popular legend there were excellent strategic reasons for the attack on Dresden.
From The Australian, November, 2005:
ONE of the greatest living US writers has praised terrorists as “very brave people” and used drug culture slang to describe the “amazing high” suicide bombers must feel before blowing themselves up.
Kurt Vonnegut, author of the 1969 anti-war classic Slaughterhouse Five, made the provocative remarks during an interview in New York for his new book, Man Without a Country, a collection of writings critical of US President George W. Bush.
Vonnegut, 83, has been a strong opponent of Mr Bush and the US-led war in Iraq, but until now has stopped short of defending terrorism.
But in discussing his views with The Weekend Australian, Vonnegut said it was “sweet and honourable” to die for what you believe in, and rejected the idea that terrorists were motivated by twisted religious beliefs.
“They are dying for their own self-respect,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It’s like your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you’re nothing.”
Asked if he thought of terrorists as soldiers, Vonnegut, a decorated World War II veteran, said: “I regard them as very brave people, yes.”
He equated the actions of suicide bombers with US president Harry Truman’s 1945 decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
On the Iraq war, he said: “What George Bush and his gang did not realise was that people fight back.”
Vonnegut suggested suicide bombers must feel an “amazing high”. He said: “You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation - it must be an amazing high.”
Vonnegut’s comments are sharply at odds with his reputation as a peace activist and his distinguished war service. He served in the US 106th Division and was captured by German forces at the Battle of the Bulge.Like many posters here, I read a lot of his books in the ‘70s. I quite liked the concept of “Ice-9” but quickly tired of his pov and whimsical wafflings. Kilgore Trout and Thomas Pynchon did indeed do it better - and so it went….
Haven’t read him but, along with Ernest Hemingway, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Max Power it’s one groovy name.
Any other favourite names you would want to touch, but you mustn’t touch?
Posted by David Hardcastle on 2007 04 13 at 07:40 AM • permalinkThis was one of the Quotes of the Day on Google today, from Vonnegut:
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
I read that and thought, “Kurt, WTF does that even mean?”
But I will say that I really liked his short story “Who Am I This Time?” Very sweet and romantic.
Kurt Vonnegut was a great writer.
He was extremely anti-war. He would have never labelled himself as ‘counter-coulter’.
I have personally disagreed with many of his views, but so what.
When I read ‘Slaughterhouse Five”, at the age of 20, it shook me to my bones. No book has ever had that effect on me, nor probably will.
Adieu my friend,,,,,,,,,,,
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Some good early stuff. (Harrison Bergeron still stands up). Mind turned to mush somewhere around 1970. His later novels were all but unreadable. Did anyone finish Galapagos?