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Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84
Within the next 24 hours somebody will write "Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. So it goes." It won't be me. Vonnegut hated the trite and obvious, and he hated sentimentality.
Kurt Vonnegut, 1922 - 2007
by RJ Eskow
Within the next 24 hours somebody will write "Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. So it goes." It won't be me. Vonnegut hated the trite and obvious, and he hated sentimentality.
But he didn't hate sentiment. He was comfortable with sentiment, despite living in a culture where deep emotion is sometimes treated as a social disorder.
In fact, as a writer and public figure Vonnegut was more richly suffused with sentiment than most writers, or for that matter most people, that I know. He had feelings and he wasn't afraid to use them. Anger came up often, and so did outrage. But love showed up just as often. Love, and nostalgia, and hope.
All those emotions, each one a pedal on the organ of the human soul. Vonnegut pressed every one when he wrote about politics. And he played on some others, too, like sadness. And fear. And astonishment.
Mostly he wrote fiction, of course, not political commentary. Vonnegut had a great science-fiction imagination. His sci-fi inventiveness was almost as good as that of his peer Philip K. Dick. His great heart, his social consciousness, and his engagement with the human race were, however, considerably more vibrant than Dick's (although we don't know what might have happened had Dick mastered his demons).
Kilgore Trout was his alter ego, the science fiction author who had great ideas but was a lousy writer. Vonnegut was clearly thinking of himself when he created Trout. Unlike his creation, however, he was sometimes capable of striking prose. His style was unique.
In his books, science-fiction novels like The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle alternated with more "reality-based" works like Player Piano and Mother Night. Vonnegut found his thematic core in Slaughterhouse-Five, integrating sci-fi themes with his own experience as a prisoner of the Germans in World War II.
Vonnegut was a prominent atheist who was nevertheless fascinated with religion as a human phenomenon. He invented the religion of Bokononism in Cat's Cradle: "Be like a baby, the Bible say/so I be like a baby to this very day."
And he created "The Gospel From Outer Space" in Slaughterhouse-Five. That's the one where an alien decides that the flaw in the Jesus story is that Christians had apparently not understood the intended moral lesson - don't torment the outcast - but instead had come to a more perverse conclusion: "Oh boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!" Because he had a powerful Dad ...
So the alien rewrites the Gospels. In this new Bible, Jesus does and says the same wonderful things, but God only adopts him at the moment of his Crucifixion, saying that "from this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!"
Kurt Vonnegut was a secular humanist who said of his newly-deceased predecessor as head of the American Humanist Society, "He's in heaven now." He said it as a joke, since it was a nonbelieving group. Yet Vonnegut also wrote: "If Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being."
He let nothing, including his own opinions and his profound disappointment with human flaws, stand in the way of seeing the positive wherever it could be found.
I mean no slight to the depth or profundity of Vonnegut's work when I say that I, like many others, was most struck by his novels between the ages of 13 and 15. That doesn't mean he wrote young people's books. It means he wrote books that dealt with issues that were big, deep, and profound. And for some reason, in our warped culture it's mostly young people who choose to deal with those big issues. "Adults" (as they're commonly known) seem to stop caring about them after a certain age.
Perhaps the finest way Vonnegut influenced me was by encouraging me to keep on thinking about those big issues as I moved through adulthood. And I mean the big ones: Why are we here? How will our race die? Can we be a good species?
"Be like a baby ..."
"God damn it," Vonnegut famously wrote, "you've got to be kind." That's from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which I mostly remember today for its hilarious opera scene. (Vonnegut could be very, very funny sometimes.)
The New York Times quotes a family friend as saying that Kurt Vonnegut died of brain injuries he received in a fall several weeks ago. In this insane age, we will deeply miss the insights that came from his unique - and very American - brain.
by RJ Eskow
Within the next 24 hours somebody will write "Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. So it goes." It won't be me. Vonnegut hated the trite and obvious, and he hated sentimentality.
But he didn't hate sentiment. He was comfortable with sentiment, despite living in a culture where deep emotion is sometimes treated as a social disorder.
In fact, as a writer and public figure Vonnegut was more richly suffused with sentiment than most writers, or for that matter most people, that I know. He had feelings and he wasn't afraid to use them. Anger came up often, and so did outrage. But love showed up just as often. Love, and nostalgia, and hope.
All those emotions, each one a pedal on the organ of the human soul. Vonnegut pressed every one when he wrote about politics. And he played on some others, too, like sadness. And fear. And astonishment.
Mostly he wrote fiction, of course, not political commentary. Vonnegut had a great science-fiction imagination. His sci-fi inventiveness was almost as good as that of his peer Philip K. Dick. His great heart, his social consciousness, and his engagement with the human race were, however, considerably more vibrant than Dick's (although we don't know what might have happened had Dick mastered his demons).
Kilgore Trout was his alter ego, the science fiction author who had great ideas but was a lousy writer. Vonnegut was clearly thinking of himself when he created Trout. Unlike his creation, however, he was sometimes capable of striking prose. His style was unique.
In his books, science-fiction novels like The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle alternated with more "reality-based" works like Player Piano and Mother Night. Vonnegut found his thematic core in Slaughterhouse-Five, integrating sci-fi themes with his own experience as a prisoner of the Germans in World War II.
Vonnegut was a prominent atheist who was nevertheless fascinated with religion as a human phenomenon. He invented the religion of Bokononism in Cat's Cradle: "Be like a baby, the Bible say/so I be like a baby to this very day."
And he created "The Gospel From Outer Space" in Slaughterhouse-Five. That's the one where an alien decides that the flaw in the Jesus story is that Christians had apparently not understood the intended moral lesson - don't torment the outcast - but instead had come to a more perverse conclusion: "Oh boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!" Because he had a powerful Dad ...
So the alien rewrites the Gospels. In this new Bible, Jesus does and says the same wonderful things, but God only adopts him at the moment of his Crucifixion, saying that "from this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!"
Kurt Vonnegut was a secular humanist who said of his newly-deceased predecessor as head of the American Humanist Society, "He's in heaven now." He said it as a joke, since it was a nonbelieving group. Yet Vonnegut also wrote: "If Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being."
He let nothing, including his own opinions and his profound disappointment with human flaws, stand in the way of seeing the positive wherever it could be found.
I mean no slight to the depth or profundity of Vonnegut's work when I say that I, like many others, was most struck by his novels between the ages of 13 and 15. That doesn't mean he wrote young people's books. It means he wrote books that dealt with issues that were big, deep, and profound. And for some reason, in our warped culture it's mostly young people who choose to deal with those big issues. "Adults" (as they're commonly known) seem to stop caring about them after a certain age.
Perhaps the finest way Vonnegut influenced me was by encouraging me to keep on thinking about those big issues as I moved through adulthood. And I mean the big ones: Why are we here? How will our race die? Can we be a good species?
"Be like a baby ..."
"God damn it," Vonnegut famously wrote, "you've got to be kind." That's from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which I mostly remember today for its hilarious opera scene. (Vonnegut could be very, very funny sometimes.)
The New York Times quotes a family friend as saying that Kurt Vonnegut died of brain injuries he received in a fall several weeks ago. In this insane age, we will deeply miss the insights that came from his unique - and very American - brain.
For more information:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/kur...
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Kurt Vonnegut
NEW YORK (AP) - Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
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, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing 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 created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in 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.
NEW YORK (AP) - Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
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, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing 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 created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in 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.
For more information:
http://www.legacy.com/SFGate/DeathNotices....
Kurt Vonnegut
By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
(04-11) 21:58 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) --
Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
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, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing 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 created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people in 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.
The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.
"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.
"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."
Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a "fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker," and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army.
When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan,""Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.
Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union. The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.
His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with little control over their fate. Pilgrim was an ungainly, lonely goof. The hero of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" was a sniveling, obese volunteer fireman.
Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
"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.
He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.
He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."
In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor and columnist at "In These Times." Editor Joel Bleifuss said he had been trying recently to get Vonnegut to write something more for the magazine, but was unsuccessful.
"He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more to say. He realized, I think, he was at the end of his life," Bleifuss said.
Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005.
"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."
___
By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
(04-11) 21:58 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) --
Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
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, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing 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 created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people in 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.
The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.
"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.
"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."
Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a "fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker," and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army.
When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan,""Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.
Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union. The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.
His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with little control over their fate. Pilgrim was an ungainly, lonely goof. The hero of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" was a sniveling, obese volunteer fireman.
Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
"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.
He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.
He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."
In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor and columnist at "In These Times." Editor Joel Bleifuss said he had been trying recently to get Vonnegut to write something more for the magazine, but was unsuccessful.
"He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more to say. He realized, I think, he was at the end of his life," Bleifuss said.
Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005.
"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."
___
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