As a fellow monkey boy reader
it was a little sad to hear today that
Ice Nine creator KV died today
He was one of my favorite scifi/social parody reads as a youth
mahalo K
for you and the silver surfer were my dream heros
and sorry Ambrose
I know you quote him often…
His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs firebombed the city.
“The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,” Vonnegut wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death,” his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW’s inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.
In the Tralfadorian(sp) view of time,isnt he is still with us in some dimension? Great author. Sad news.
from–
UNDERNEWS
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
APR 12 2007
Edited by Sam Smith
KURT VONNEGUTHello, 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.
Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in
all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And
every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military
science in Vietnam. So it goes."
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is
preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and
attacked a hot fudge sundae.
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on
the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I
myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
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.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and
finds himself no wiser than before. . . He is full of murderous
resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their
ignorance the hard way.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on
television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained
us.
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.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know
what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be
president.
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons.
They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.
All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person
immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in
a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and
nobody wants to do maintenance.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to
be.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made
sense from things she found in gift shops.
How nice–to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
What the Gospels actually said was: don’t kill anyone until you are
absolutely sure they aren’t well connected.
The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to
membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a
congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person
fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a
person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.
I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a
lot).
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school
class is running the country.
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?
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
I am extremely sad to see him go…
I’ve read his stuff so many times I can’t even keep it straight anymore–it’s just one great world. And no book ever had a villain in it (a concept that is addressed at the end of Shelter).
As the honorary president of the American Humanist Society, I hope he finds a little humor in this–I’m sure KV is up in heaven now. All kidding aside, if there is a heaven, I am sure KV is in there–and I hope everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
As a high school teacher, I can tell you that he is the ONE writer than I can ALWAYS count on… universally loved by young and old. He always brought the big ideas in accessable leanguage with a perfect sense of humor.
I have a student putting a KV tribute online–look for it soon.
I heard about it this cloudy chilly morning in SD (Coronado Island …) I was very sad about it and homesick to boot. Now I am home in lovely springtime Texas, and I remember the spring of 1998 when I was hit by a car, had a brain bleed, which got caught and stitched closed, and while recuperating, I read every single one of KV’s books, in another perfect Texas springtime, in a hammock, watching a big pecan tree leaf out in fine frills and being very happy about living. I think about how KV said to practice being aware of your moments of happiness. I am happy. I am happy he was here. I am happy to be home. I always thought of him as my favorite uncle. Rest in peace, Uncle Kurt.
I saw a flash on the tele
but wasnt convinced
turned to page two here
and saw the oneula >ambrose
indicator and read this thread
admirable V
you validated me
made it plain to see
that alone in the universe
and this here culture
is just not so.
there are kindred spirits
and minds
aloft
look up
there was a bierce
a salinger a steinbeck
and a vonnegut.
thanx god.
or whatever your name is .
mutual love and respect makes
a diffrence.
oh yeah and thanx
for not making ice nine a reality.
I never could read
slaughterhouse
…ambrose…
aint gonna study war no more.
peace and rest
elder kurt.
Slaughterhouse is a must-read. Sounds very unpleasant, though, don’t it? Or watch the movie–KV liked the movie, from what I remember.
fell asleep in the movie too.