DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Kurt Vonnegut Won't Be Coming Down For Breakfast...

...of Champions

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/...b-0412obit.php

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It seems the enormous handicaps have finally been removed for good. He's escaped the realm of the Handicapper General for greener pastures.

AAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLrighty then


KING

Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84 By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writer
2 minutes ago



NEW YORK - 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.

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 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."

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."



LINK

Believe in whatever harmless lies make you happy, healthy, brave and kind.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. "Cat's Cradle:"

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil.
The triumph of anything is a matter of organisation.
If there are such things as angels, hope that they are
organised along the lines of the Mafia.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The Sirens of Titan

God Dammit, you've got to be kind!
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater:"

The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

R.I.P

R.I.P. Kurt

aw geez...

Excellent writer.. RIP

RIP
Kurt was one of my favorite authors. I've read more of his books than any other single author. He was a gifted story teller. He'll be missed.

Too bad, RIP. I really liked Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five.

RIP Kilgore Trout

Writers praise Kurt Vonnegut
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

NEW YORK - Like his friend Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut was a hero to baby boomers — though he was raised in an earlier time. The president he mourned was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not John F. Kennedy. His war was World War II, not Vietnam.

Nearly 40 when the 1960s began, Vonnegut was less a peer of the young rebels who loved such novels as "Cat's Cradle" and "Slaughterhouse-Five," than a wise, eccentric and cranky uncle, scorning the world's madness but rarely failing to get some laughs or challenge some minds.

Vonnegut, who died Wednesday at 84, didn't need Vietnam to figure out that the system didn't work, that the 1950s were a lie and that you shouldn't believe what grown-ups tell you. His absurdist humor, the survival tactic of a former prisoner of war whose mother had committed suicide, proved as useful and as up-to-date to the postwar generation as a Bob Dylan song.

"Growing up when I did, at a time of widespread alienation and disgust, Vonnegut's irreverence was very appealing, and certainly influenced my own views of contemporary life," said novelist Ken Kalfus, 53, a National Book Award finalist last year for "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country," a satire of marriage, Sept. 11 and the Iraq war. "His work opened up new space to think about politics and society and also to think about what literature was good for."

Norman Mailer, another World War II veteran who found an audience with younger readers, noted that Vonnegut was "an icon to several generations of young Americans who rushed to read everything he published."

Novelist Rick Moody, not even born when Vonnegut started publishing, recalled reading his books "several times" and wondered if "I could have gotten through my middle teens without him."

"I liked him for world-weary gentleness, warmth, and comedy. And he was pretty darned imaginative, too, which is never a fault in my world," said the 45-year-old Moody, best known for "The Ice Storm," a satire set in the 1970s.

"He was the kind of writer who made people — young people, especially — want to write," added Jonathan Safran Foer, the 30-year-old author of "Everything is Illuminated." "He wrote the kinds of books you pass around."

For countless teenagers, reading Vonnegut was as much an entry into adult life as your first beer. The world became funnier, more dangerous, more exciting. If you were looking to send up authority, question life's meaning or face the worst and keep your sense of humor, Vonnegut was your teacher.

Novelist Jess Walter, also a National Book Award finalist last fall, recalled working on his nominated book "The Zero," a Sept. 11 story "with satire about our culture." Walter would joke that he wore a wristband that read, "WWVD — What Would Vonnegut Do."

"I became a writer because of him," said Walter, 41. "It was his compassion, humanism and great humor in the face of 20th century horrors that made me realize all that a writer could do. He was deceptively simple and because readers discovered him when they were young, they sometimes made the mistake of dismissing him later, but what he was doing was so complex, so difficult."

Kalfus, too, found that Vonnegut was an author who stayed with you long after you thought you had outgrown him. You don't have to be young to appreciate that "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be" or agree that "laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion."

Some learned though his books, others from the man. John Irving studied at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop in the 1960s, when Vonnegut was a faculty member then known, and often dismissed, as a science fiction writer.

Irving, who went on to write "The World According to Garp" and "The Cider House Rules," remembered Vonnegut as a self-effacing presence who "didn't have an agenda about what `the novel' should be." Vonnegut also appreciated that you didn't have to be in the classroom to get your work done.

"I had a young child at the time and when he heard about that he said, `You mean you have to work in writing whenever you can?'" Irving explained. "He then told me, `You're certainly giving me enough pages every week, so why not forget about the class part and stay home and take of your kid?'"

RIP Kurt...

Time to break out a copy of "Back to School" to see him in action again.

Some do.

Yes, I'm taklking about reading just for the fun of it. I actually know some teenagers who read because...get this... they LIKE it