“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.’ ”
this caught my eye...the irony of seeing a man like vonnegut at the top of the broadsheet on nytimesdotcom juxtaposed with a headline about the imbecile radio host don imus.
that right there captures a pretty broad spectrum of american thought.
player piano and jailbird have continued to rock my world for many years.
i think his books kept me from being too rotten and spiteful as a teenager..
my friend matt's gonna be really sad when he hears, and then he'll talk about how dissapointed he was the time he got kicked out of one of vonnegut's lectures, and then i'll say "yeah, i remember you telling me that, that's really too bad"
I saw him in the grocery store a couple months ago and meant to ask him if I could bum a Paul Mall. Like John Stewart said in the linked video, his books helped me survive adolescence.
kurt vonngut jr. (another legend from indianastan) is the reason i read books. always a terrible student, it was slaughterhouse five that turned me into a reader. hello. goodbye.
i love his comment in the daily show video about how there must be an intelligent engineer/designer running evolution, because why else would we have hippopotami, giraffes and the clap.
I've been meaning to read "A Man without a Country". I think I will re-read all of his books, starting from this one and working in reverse chronological order, just like Billy Pilgrim watching the WWII movie in Slaughterhouse-V....
SH5 is my favorite book I have read in my 27 years.
The scene he describes when he is watching tv about the bombing of europe, however, he is seeing it in reverse. The bombs rise back up into the planes, the planes return to the base, the bombs are unloaded off the planes, the bombs are dismantled and the components are returned back to the earth.
How incredibly beautiful. That passage almost makes me cry everytime I read it.
-so it goes-
sad passing indeed...ya'll probably know his father and grandfather
were architects in Ind. I've followed his life on the tangent over the years...my grandfather was a staff writer with KV on the Cornell Daily Sun back in the 40's. They'd often skip the events they were supposed to cover, i.e. some stage production on campus, and hang out at a local pub to hear the reaction from the event goers for their story lines. KV wrote a short story some time ago (in the 80's?) about a young couple named George and Hazel who had a smart kid... so smart, that the government took their son away. My grandparents names are George and Hazel...strange coincidence.
Another shameless name drop...my father's residential college master was Joeseph Heller...a good friend of KV.
i read "slaughterhouse-five" in one sitting at a coffee house one saturday night when i was in college. never done that before or since.
my emotion right is that we're driving down a road where nobody knows where it goes -- and we're getting kind of nervous about things -- and the map just flew out the open window.
of course that wasn't my first exposure to kurt vonnegut. i'm surprised nobody's mentioned it. but who could forget his cameo in the 80s lowest-common-denominator classic "back to school?" rodney dangerfield paid kurt to tutor him on his own work.
I came to the East Coast in 1970 from the High Plains of
Mid America. So I was just a country boy when I arrived on the
East Coast with a full scholarship to one of those high flying educational experiments. I was tossed in with the high rolling
prep school kids who were looking for something different than
enrolling in English 101. It was a wild and crazy year. I saw excesses which you can not imagine. On the other hand I came to
know some very interesting people who have danced their way thru
life without missing a step, of course they had some deep pocket books to back them up over the year. Anyhow one of my remembered experiences of the year was venturing to the Atlantic
Ocean on Cape Cod in late April. I had never seen and ocean, so it was a wonderful experience. It was one of those Thrusday night deals, where we packed as many people into two cars and headed to this place called Hyanis Port, Massachusetts. Personally I had no idea who lived in Hyanis Port than I do know who lives in Bumble Bee, Arizona. I was along for the weekend and we were going to the Ocean. We were to stay at the summer home of a fellow friend. We pulled in late in the evening, to a house which was with out electricity.
Seems like the power company had not turned on the power for the summer season when they said they were going to. It was no big deal, we had candles and booze which had been moved from the suspected bar to a closet upstair for safe keeping over the winter,
along with our sleeping bags. The next morning we tailed it into the commercial district of town and found a place where we could get breakfast, then shopping for food and back to the Dutch Gamble for the remaining of the weekend. It was over the weekend I came to know the high stockade fence which enclosed the property across the street, was the Kennedy Compound. It was a couple of years later I was reading one of the Short Stories in "Welcome to the Monkey House." When I came upon Kurts story about the obsessed Barry Goldwater Loving neighbor who lived across the street from the Kennedy Compound. I just had a great laugh, and from that moment on I always felt close to his writtings.
I remember there was a rumor about that time that he Married
J.D. Salinger's daughter. From reading the Obituary, sounds like it was, "Writter's Legend."
my wifes friend in Brazil posted this:
ou mais apropriadamente, GOODBYE, MY LOVE
Hey, Kilgore Trout, you Man Without a Country , you Deadeye Dick, you dog, you. Finally worn out your Welcome to the Monkeyhouse , huh ? Don’t worry, you've always been Pearls Before Swine anyway. Now that you have accepted the call from The Sirens of Titan , got shipwrecked in the Galapagos , fell asleep in a Cat’s Cradle , walked into Slaughterhouse 5 , responded to Mother Night’s dark embrace, was hit hard by the Slapstick, just like a Canary in a Cat House , a proper Jailbird , now that no Bluebeard can save you... now that no Breakfast of Champions can bring you back, no Player Piano can make you dance or sing again, no Hocus Pocus can revive you, no Timequake can undo what is done, and there are no Fates Worse Than Death on your horizon, is it too late to say that to me you were Sun, Moon, Star ? That I love, I always have loved and I always will love you? Well, I do, I have, and I will, and though neither of us really believes in Him, I just have to say, God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut .
tis friday night.....waiting for company to arrive from Canada.....they are now 41/2 hours late.....but still welcome.....cause they come all the way from Central America.
however, i'm really happy to see that so many archinecters are familiar with his work. his writing really helped shape my own views on life and humanity.
Apr 14, 07 3:46 pm ·
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Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84
I loved Slaughter House V, RIP.
R.I.P. Truth-teller
OH no. He was so wonderful.
He was especially great on The Daily Show last year.
What an outstanding individual.
oh no!!! he was my favorite author, ever.
i'm reading "a man without a country" right now.
damn, that sucks. i'm really bummed about this. =(
i like drawing assholes, too.
mine looks like this
*
ha ha, holz.box! you know, supposedly the red hot chili peppers were inspired by vonnegut's drawing of an asshole and so used it as their logo.
check it out:
bless this man...
Without him, I might never have discovered I was a Bokononist.
you know, i've always loved the idea of the karass.
Sirens of Titan - chrono-synclastic infundibulum...only Vonnegut.
this caught my eye...the irony of seeing a man like vonnegut at the top of the broadsheet on nytimesdotcom juxtaposed with a headline about the imbecile radio host don imus.
that right there captures a pretty broad spectrum of american thought.
player piano and jailbird have continued to rock my world for many years.
totally way too sad. we read his work in english class in high school, and have loved his work since. brilliant writer, brilliant wit.
slaughterhouse five is abs a classic, as is sirens of titan.
vonnegut once proposed carving the following into a wall of the grand canyon, as a message for flying saucer creatures:
"we probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap."
...so it goes...
"Welcome to the Monkey House"
i think his books kept me from being too rotten and spiteful as a teenager..
my friend matt's gonna be really sad when he hears, and then he'll talk about how dissapointed he was the time he got kicked out of one of vonnegut's lectures, and then i'll say "yeah, i remember you telling me that, that's really too bad"
I saw him in the grocery store a couple months ago and meant to ask him if I could bum a Paul Mall. Like John Stewart said in the linked video, his books helped me survive adolescence.
may we have a moment of silent please for the author who brought us works as 'breakfast of champions' and 'a man without a country?'
...................................
thank you, mr. vonnegut.
kurt vonngut jr. (another legend from indianastan) is the reason i read books. always a terrible student, it was slaughterhouse five that turned me into a reader. hello. goodbye.
anybody want to get together and touch feet?
Thank you Kurt....so it goes.
i just thoguht i would write something since i do enjoy hsi work
beautiful steven.....
i loss indeed....I hope younger generations do find their way to him/his work.
so thought provoking
i'm with you on that squirrelly
i love his comment in the daily show video about how there must be an intelligent engineer/designer running evolution, because why else would we have hippopotami, giraffes and the clap.
I've been meaning to read "A Man without a Country". I think I will re-read all of his books, starting from this one and working in reverse chronological order, just like Billy Pilgrim watching the WWII movie in Slaughterhouse-V....
i only read SL 5, but liked it alot
SH5 is my favorite book I have read in my 27 years.
The scene he describes when he is watching tv about the bombing of europe, however, he is seeing it in reverse. The bombs rise back up into the planes, the planes return to the base, the bombs are unloaded off the planes, the bombs are dismantled and the components are returned back to the earth.
How incredibly beautiful. That passage almost makes me cry everytime I read it.
-so it goes-
wonderk,
i'm only about half way through "a man without a country" but i can tell you that he paraphrases a lot of his own writing.
in reading the essays i was constantly going "oh, i've read that before!" and "oh, that was in so and so book!".
still, it's his last published work, so it's definitely worth picking up if you're a vonnegut fan.
< cat's cradle spoiler alert>
i can only hope he passed in the manner of the hero...extending his arm in a single-digit salute.
, meta!
ting-a-ling!!!
sad passing indeed...ya'll probably know his father and grandfather
were architects in Ind. I've followed his life on the tangent over the years...my grandfather was a staff writer with KV on the Cornell Daily Sun back in the 40's. They'd often skip the events they were supposed to cover, i.e. some stage production on campus, and hang out at a local pub to hear the reaction from the event goers for their story lines. KV wrote a short story some time ago (in the 80's?) about a young couple named George and Hazel who had a smart kid... so smart, that the government took their son away. My grandparents names are George and Hazel...strange coincidence.
Another shameless name drop...my father's residential college master was Joeseph Heller...a good friend of KV.
i read "slaughterhouse-five" in one sitting at a coffee house one saturday night when i was in college. never done that before or since.
my emotion right is that we're driving down a road where nobody knows where it goes -- and we're getting kind of nervous about things -- and the map just flew out the open window.
of course that wasn't my first exposure to kurt vonnegut. i'm surprised nobody's mentioned it. but who could forget his cameo in the 80s lowest-common-denominator classic "back to school?" rodney dangerfield paid kurt to tutor him on his own work.
Salty,
I came to the East Coast in 1970 from the High Plains of
Mid America. So I was just a country boy when I arrived on the
East Coast with a full scholarship to one of those high flying educational experiments. I was tossed in with the high rolling
prep school kids who were looking for something different than
enrolling in English 101. It was a wild and crazy year. I saw excesses which you can not imagine. On the other hand I came to
know some very interesting people who have danced their way thru
life without missing a step, of course they had some deep pocket books to back them up over the year. Anyhow one of my remembered experiences of the year was venturing to the Atlantic
Ocean on Cape Cod in late April. I had never seen and ocean, so it was a wonderful experience. It was one of those Thrusday night deals, where we packed as many people into two cars and headed to this place called Hyanis Port, Massachusetts. Personally I had no idea who lived in Hyanis Port than I do know who lives in Bumble Bee, Arizona. I was along for the weekend and we were going to the Ocean. We were to stay at the summer home of a fellow friend. We pulled in late in the evening, to a house which was with out electricity.
Seems like the power company had not turned on the power for the summer season when they said they were going to. It was no big deal, we had candles and booze which had been moved from the suspected bar to a closet upstair for safe keeping over the winter,
along with our sleeping bags. The next morning we tailed it into the commercial district of town and found a place where we could get breakfast, then shopping for food and back to the Dutch Gamble for the remaining of the weekend. It was over the weekend I came to know the high stockade fence which enclosed the property across the street, was the Kennedy Compound. It was a couple of years later I was reading one of the Short Stories in "Welcome to the Monkey House." When I came upon Kurts story about the obsessed Barry Goldwater Loving neighbor who lived across the street from the Kennedy Compound. I just had a great laugh, and from that moment on I always felt close to his writtings.
I remember there was a rumor about that time that he Married
J.D. Salinger's daughter. From reading the Obituary, sounds like it was, "Writter's Legend."
Anyhow is has and always will be a hero for me!
my wifes friend in Brazil posted this:
ou mais apropriadamente, GOODBYE, MY LOVE
Hey, Kilgore Trout, you Man Without a Country , you Deadeye Dick, you dog, you. Finally worn out your Welcome to the Monkeyhouse , huh ? Don’t worry, you've always been Pearls Before Swine anyway. Now that you have accepted the call from The Sirens of Titan , got shipwrecked in the Galapagos , fell asleep in a Cat’s Cradle , walked into Slaughterhouse 5 , responded to Mother Night’s dark embrace, was hit hard by the Slapstick, just like a Canary in a Cat House , a proper Jailbird , now that no Bluebeard can save you... now that no Breakfast of Champions can bring you back, no Player Piano can make you dance or sing again, no Hocus Pocus can revive you, no Timequake can undo what is done, and there are no Fates Worse Than Death on your horizon, is it too late to say that to me you were Sun, Moon, Star ? That I love, I always have loved and I always will love you? Well, I do, I have, and I will, and though neither of us really believes in Him, I just have to say, God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut .
[img}http://farm1.static.flickr.com/241/456516791_4de54543fa_m.jpg[/img]
tis friday night.....waiting for company to arrive from Canada.....they are now 41/2 hours late.....but still welcome.....cause they come all the way from Central America.
i once paid Kurt to write me a book report on slaughter house V. i received a C- on the paper. i demanded my money back
Found the short story about George and Hazel's son.
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html
Still get a little creeped out when I read it.
wow, i still can't get over it.
however, i'm really happy to see that so many archinecters are familiar with his work. his writing really helped shape my own views on life and humanity.
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