April 12, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut: 1922-2007

I don't know what to say.

posted by Uncle 17 years ago
  • bye
  • So it goes.
  • Welcome to the Monkey House.
  • I was just recommending 'Cat's Cradle' to a friend this weekend. .
  • Somewhere, he's having a drink in a Tralfamadorian pub, right now. And always will be. Cheers.
  • .
  • *
  • This one is really, really hard. If I were to compile a collection of scriptures for myself, writings that inspire me and create an ideal for the type of person I want to be, there would be several works by Vonnegut in between those two covers. When I read things like this...
    "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'" (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965)
    or this...
    I've worried some about why write books when Presidents and Senators and generals do not read them, and the university experience taught me a very good reason: you catch people before they become generals and Senators and Presidents, and you poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world. (Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, 1988)
    ... I want to run out and save people. Kurt Vonnegut wasn't just my favorite author, he was just about my favorite person ever. He's been ready to go for a few years now, I believe, and I think he's said everything he's ever needed to say (and honestly, how many people can say that? Isn't that fucking awesome?), and yet the world is still a worse place for his passing. I'm tempted to say that, with his death, the world now officially sucks... the only thing keeping me from doing so is the fact that he's left behind an immense body of work with which I can commune anytime. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.
  • I made the tragic mistake of reading Timequake while the sedation was kicking in for my dental implant surgery. I can't read it now without feeling a tingle in my maxilla. What I remember of it was great, and I know how much influence he has had. A sad loss.
  • Still sad. .
  • ...
  • God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!" "See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars." And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night. I will go to heaven now. I can hardly wait... To find out for certain what my wampeter was... And who was in my karass... And all the good things our karass did for you. Amen.
  • He was raising hell with folly right up to the end. In his last book of essays, A Man Without a Country, he railed against Western society's addiction to petroleum with the same vigor he did against war and other madnesses in the past. .
  • Vonnegut was one of my pivotal authors, and gave me a signpost to acceptable craziness. I read Cat's Cradle and discovered "religion", and Sirens of Titan and got the purposelessness of life. You can write about shit and make it sound authoritative and meaningful, V turned that around on me. He deserves better than a period. Rather, a memorial hole in collective literature. He finally foud a way past Diana Moon Glampers.
  • Guess it's time to dust off that copy of Slaughterhouse 5 and have another dive in. .
  • Ah, hell. Not how I wanted to start my day today. One very bright light has gone out. Thanks for everything, Papa Kurt. You did good. You did real good. And Zanshin put it best: *
  • Damn it all. I was foolish enough to believe he'd keep going.
  • I do not wish to undermine the sincerity of this thread, nor to sneer at the passing of such a great artist, yet I must submit: monkeyfilter: a tingle in my maxilla please forgive.
  • .
  • This was the first headline I saw on the news this morning as I got to work, and all I could say was, "for fuck's sake!" I credit the genius that was Kurt Vonnegut, for giving me a sense of direction, purpose and hope during a turbid moment in my life. His work slapped me with profound emotion and clarity. I will never forget those moments, the first initial pages of exposure to his writing (was in fact, Breakfast of Champions). I was literally never the same person after. Sad to see you go, but nonetheless, grateful for what you gave to this world. Following Zanshin's lead, which gave me a good chuckle -----> *
  • Two hours later, I still have no idea what to say. Man was a giant.
  • And thanks, Zanshin. Good one!
  • "We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap," he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.
  • If today, every English department assigned a book by Vonnegut, and today, every adult on this planet picked one of his books up and read it, the earth's orbit would shift slightly. “I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.” MonkeyFilter: 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' [Vonnegut, 1922-2007, RIP] .
  • From the beeb's obit: Vonnegut said he was often surprised to have lived for so long, having been a heavy smoker. He once joked: "I'm suing a cigarette company because on the package they promised to kill me, and yet here I am."
  • MonkeyFilter: I can't read it now without feeling a tingle in my maxilla. and .
  • So much for subtlety.
  • Oh nonononono.... *cries*
  • . I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife -- Timequake, 1996
  • When the news of a person's death brings forth such an outpouring of gratitude for his work and joy in his memory, one should think it indicates nothing but a life well spent. From what I've read of Kurt Vonnegut in interviews and articles he seemed like a delightful and irascible man, who endured the world's atrocities with dignity, humour and intelligence. As for his literary work ... I can admit only to reading Cat's Cradle, Timequake and The Sirens of Titan. Merely on the basis of these few novels, and while I enjoy much of his invention, his pacing, and his plotting, I would like to say that I abhor the mind-numbing stupidity that coats next to every sentence. For me (and aesthetics is always a subjective pursuit) Vonnegut's writing – but I really mean Vonnegut’s style - is ninety-nine percent pretentious, vacuous, idiotic bullshit. It is utterly lacking in grace or wit of enough substance to counter the piss-sweet smell of masturbatory pseudo-wisdom that stenches out from every creak of his good-ol' home-spun rockin'-chair pronouncements. His style is not so much infantile as unforgivably teenage. No aphorism is too trite for him, no verbal tick too meaningless - and these are trotted out as examples of such great profundity - so it goes ding-a-ling hi-ho - as if his great invention was just a mirror for a thousand people who, like him, thought themselves simultaneously deeply wise and zanily hip, and who, like him, didn't actually have anything to say (or think). God made mud lucky me lucky mud. I cannot help but think that Vonnegut sought his own apotheosis in the paragraph. There he could be the wise overlord of the world, who characters his novels with himself, who can call down lovingly to the babies to welcome them (on behalf of all creation) to Earth. Welcome to Earth, idiotic children, my readers. I will describe it for you. I can summarize it for you. I can understand it for you. It is simple. Everything is simple. Be simple. Ding-a-ling. In Timequake, Vonnegut grants his readers the boon of double-spaces between paragraphs, so that they might have sufficient pause to ponder his near-infinite sagaciousness. For me, the audacity - the hubris - of this typographical strategy saved the book from being completely lacking in interest.
  • Zanshin, good comment. The memory is vivid - I recall the summer sun, the feel and smell of the paper under my hand when I turned the page and read, "it looks like this *". So it goes.
  • .
  • .
  • Vonnegut’s style - is ninety-nine percent pretentious, vacuous, idiotic bullshit. Izzat you, Kurt? Hey, he's not dead after all!
  • His style is not so much infantile as unforgivably teenage. No aphorism is too trite for him, no verbal tick too meaningless - and these are trotted out as examples of such great profundity - so it goes ding-a-ling hi-ho - as if his great invention was just a mirror for a thousand people who, like him, thought themselves simultaneously deeply wise and zanily hip, and who, like him, didn't actually have anything to say (or think). I think this is more than a bit unfair. These ticks aren't supposed to be profound, but rather characteristic of the...not meaninglessness, necessarily, but the absolute futility of life that comprised the core of his philosophy. Vonnegut's "humanism" is a paradoxical (some might say inconsistent) admixture of both wonder and awe of man and the universe and the absolute goddamn certainty that we're doomed, we've fucked things up so badly they can't be fixed, and it's all downhill from here. So it goes, ding-a-ling. Might as well make these noises as do all the ultimately pointless shouting and musing and pontificating we're doing now, so he says. Ultimately, it's all pissing in the wind. There are no profundities to be found in a race that has doomed itself to death from the first moment it picked up a stick and hit somebody with it. No, his style isn't graceful or full of bone-dry wit, but neither does it need to be. In fact, that's what draws me to it. I could count the number of writers of his generation with his mastery of verbal economy and have fingers left over. I could count with just one hand the writers who have made me laugh as hard. There's often a kind of rhythm to his writing that's half beat poetry, half a drunk old man dancing at his daughter's wedding, and to me, it works — but hey, I'm a Tom Waits fan too. YMMV. In Timequake, Vonnegut grants his readers the boon of double-spaces between paragraphs, so that they might have sufficient pause to ponder his near-infinite sagaciousness. I read that completely differently. Timequake has at its core the idea that time is not as linear and entrenched in bedrock as we suppose it to be, but rather much more vulnerable to randomness and circularity. The spacing between the paragraphs and his tendency to leap around between ideas and different points of the narrative I took to be consistent with that theme, that we should regard each of these paragraphs (and events, and ideas) not as part of a linear narrative flow but on its own, and perhaps play with them and reassemble them and resequence them as we see fit. Personally, I think the book would have been best published on index cards so we could do exactly that. Again, I don't think Vonnegut viewed himself as particularly wise. I think he thought he was right, but that's not nearly the same thing, and hey, we all think that about ourselves. The only "wisdom" to Vonnegut was in a sense of morality and decency and (when the occasion calls for it) shame. Not the profundity of your utterances or the nimbleness of your mind, but the quality of your soul is what truly mattered to him. The soul of all wisdom for Vonnegut: don't be a dumbass, don't be a dick, and enjoy it while you can. Ding-a-ling.
  • *
  • Hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye.
  • We've lost an interesting voice.
  • Kurt is in heaven now... bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
  • Thanks MCT.
  • I was so sad when I heard the news. God Bless You Mr Vonnegut. So it goes. .&*
  • I was surprised to realize that I have never read one of Vonnegut's books. I have, however, had the opportunity to read many of his personal letters as I indexed part of his personal archives at the Lily Library in Bloomington, Indiana. He was a humorous and intense man and I'm sorry to see him go. The Vonnegut Collection is available for perusal to anyone with a valid piece of photo identification. Should you find yourself in this neck of the woods, there are few things more enjoyable than sitting in the Lily's reading room looking through boxes of photographs, musings, and letters by a man like Kurt Vonnegut.
  • but I really mean Vonnegut’s style - is ninety-nine percent pretentious, vacuous, idiotic bullshit. Yep, and KV was one of the few writers who let his art imitate life and made it look easy.
  • I've been crying off and on since last night. Weird, huh? The guy made a big difference in my life, clearly. Or maybe its menopause.
  • Fair enough, middleclass.
  • monkeyfilter: the piss-sweet smell of masturbatory pseudo-wisdom
  • Thanks for the heads-up, bibliochick -- I was sold on having a look when the first bit of correspondence was from Laurie Anderson. And what would Vonnegut and Gunter Grass be talking about? But to be a real pain in the ass -- the Faber files, box 18. There's no 'd' in 'granfalloons'. Sorry.
  • The inhabitants of Earth and Tralfamadore will miss you Mr Vonnegut.
  • Fair enough, middleclass. Ha. I win. God, you suck. *takes victory lap*
  • AND TOM WAITS SUCKS ASS TOO
  • I agree with tqk for the most part (even though he is obviously not being genuine), but the quirks he mentions seem unavoidable in all literature under the umbrella of "speculative fiction" (a redundancy, if there ever was one). Vonnegut at least had the sense to be interesting. I prefer his style over that of his protégé, John Irving, though the latter is by far the more fluent in the art of storytelling.
  • Cap't. Renault sez, "But to be a real pain in the ass -- the Faber files, box 18. There's no 'd' in 'granfalloons'. Sorry." S' okay, Cap't, I didn't type the list or index that part of the collection. Vonnegut was donating his papers to the Lily long before I was there (I'll put a bug in the archivist's ear, though). You'll enjoy having a look, at the collection, I'm sure!
  • "She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing." 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will
  • Bookburning is just around the corner... I guess now that scientists have confirmed time travel is impossible, all literature using it as a plot mechanic will be banned as well.
  • Strangely, graven images of the Bible have become as idols to that book banning school board. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments." Exodus 20:4-6 (Deuteronomy 5:8-10) As it rightfully predicts, their own children will suffer from such as their iniquity.