R.I.P. KURT VONNEGUT
The first story I ever remember penetrating my small mind and making me think -- really think -- was Harrison Bergeron, which for some reason we read at the totally mediocre elementary school I attended. I still think about those buzzers going off; it reminds me of some men I've dated. You know - the minute you start to form a thought it's interrupted by them opening their big yap, and then you lose the thought and go back to being a moron again. I suppose children and stepmothers serve a similar purpose (I actually used to get in trouble for reading: Get your nose out of that book and join the real world).
Vonnegut attended to the University of Chicago and honed his chops at the City News Bureau. He called Midwesterners "fresh water" people, and East and West Coasters "salt water" people. Fresh water people tend not to think or care so much about other countries. Read more in this recent interview.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
yes, i read about it on the internet this morning. he will be missed. seems every morning i get up someone else bites the dust. call it age, i guess.
ReplyDeleteRolling Stone had a superb interview with Vonnegut last year.
ReplyDeleteHe was so interesting.
A few of my favorite Vonnegut quotes, just a few here>
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
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Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
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1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
Found this more recent quote
ReplyDelete"I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy—because we’re experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that’s what’s going on now"
Vonnegut on the Daily Show, 2005