Kurt Vonnegut, R.I.P.

[Holden Pike]

http://blogs.library.jhu.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/vonnegut.jpg

I don't cry when many celebrities die, but I'm crying now. Not only a great, amazing writer, but a deeply caring and intelligent human being. I did get to hear him speak once (at Virginia Tech) and actually met him and shook his hand another time (at the New York Film Festival). He truly and powerfully helped shape how I see the world.

I don't know what to say.

He's been sick for years and swore he'd never publish another book - that is until the state of the post-9/11 Bushworld got him so angry and insane he had to get his thoughts down on paper (his last book of essays, A Man Without a Country, is now available in paperback). And thank the Literature Gods for that.

So many wonderful, hysterically funny, dark, insightful, weird, perfect and painful thoughts about humanity in his work. Do yourself a favor and pick up any six or ten of them immediately.

If you can admire and respect and delight in somebody you don't really know to the point of loving them, I most definitely love Kurt Vonnegut. I'm crazy about him. Always will be. From the second I finished reading Player Piano and then rushed to the library and read his entire body of work (to that time) in a matter of five weeks, he's been not only my favorite author but one of my favorite earthlings.


And so it goes.

[Holden Pike]

Maybe I'll post more in a few days after I stop weeping?

[blibblobblib]

This is a shame. I was going to read one of his books a while back, had it on my list but never got around to it, i think it was called TimeQuake or something like that. Recommend it HP?

[Zeiken]

I've read 4 or 5 of his books, and have been fully excited to read the rest of them. I just recently finished Slaughterhouse Five.

I'll be mourning the loss, as well. :(

[Holden Pike]

This is a shame. I was going to read one of his books a while back, had it on my list but never got around to it, i think it was called TimeQuake or something like that. Recommend it HP?

I liked Timequake. It was his last novel. Not necessarily where I would start with Kurt's stuff, but you can't really go wrong with any of them.

In one of his non-fiction pieces, Palm Sunday maybe (??), Vonnegut grades his own books. The only one he was hard on himself was Slapstick. I'd agree that's probably the least of his fiction. But having said that, Vonnegut's "worst" is a damn sight better than most writer's "best".

I find it hard to rate them all myself, and I wind up favoring whichever ones I've most recently re-read. Slaughterhouse-Five is certainly his most famous and celebrated piece, and it's a great one, no doubt. Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Player Piano, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Bluebeard, Jailbird, Mother Night, Sirens of Titan and on and on. Really, you can't go wrong with any of them.

Considering how popular a writer he was, relatively few of his books were ever turned into movies. After you read a couple, you'll see why. The writing is frickin' brilliant, but it's about tone and narrative voice and when books are adapted into film so much of that stuff has to be jettisoned in favor of plot. His plots are often outlandish and many are Science Fictiony, so when you try to put that on the screen...it's tough.

Slaughterhouse-Five was turned into an OK movie by George Roy Hill in 1972. It's a noble attempt, but doesn't come close to the novel. The worst by far is Slapstick (1982) starring Jerry Lewis followed closely by Breakfast of Champions which Alan Rudolph butchered in 1999. The best by far is Mother Night, adapted very well by Keith Gordon in 1996.

And the best bit with Vonnegut in the movies is in Back to School (1986) when Rodney Dangerfield's obnoxious slacker hires Vonnegut to write his Vonnegut paper for him. He has a cameo as himself (coming face to face with Keith Gordon, who later directed Mother Night) and the teacher gives the paper a harsh grade telling Melon that he "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!". Classic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQnAhSzb4gY


But don't monkey with the movies, even Mother Night. Get thee to a library or bookstore as soon as possible, if not sooner.

[Caitlyn]

I knew his name and that he was the author of Slaughter House Five… but not much more… and it sounds like I have really been missing out... so thank you for "introducing" him to me Holden.

May he RIP…

[SamsoniteDelilah]

Sometimes, it's amazing, when such a bright light goes out that the world doesn't seem darker.
I guess that's the power of writing.

[nebbit]

Maybe I'll post more in a few days after I stop weeping?
Poor Pikey, very sad, heres a hug http://bestsmileys.com/hugging/1.gif

[Equilibrium]

For anyone interested...you can read most of his work for free online..

click (http://vonnegut.cultish.org/archives/)

[nebbit]

Thanks Liby :)

[Equilibrium]

Thanks Liby :)

No problem...sweet avatar haha.

I have no idea why i was neg repped for posting that link..but oh well.

[mr. 45]

The fact that Vonnegut existed and thought and wrote as he did makes the dark world he writes about so much better. He is the cure to his own misery, at least as far as I'm concerned. Here's a wonderful quote of his, from his invented religion Bokononism featured in Cat's Cradle:

"I wanted all things to seem to make some sense, so we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense. And I made up lies, so they all fit nice, and made this sad world a paradise."

[Swedish Chef]

The past month or so has been pretty chaotic for me and, in an attempt to sort through that beating wad of stress in my noggin, I've been re-reading a lot of favorite books. I just haven't been feeling or acting like myself lately, but I do get the sense that revisiting some of these cherished relics of my youth has brought me back to Earth a bit. Anyway, maybe I'm just a little older or wiser or what have you, but I don't think I ever fully appreciated the level of importance Kurt Vonnegut's "voice" had on shaping my own perception of life and the world at large. I haven't read all of his fictional works yet, (and I really should've by now) but Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five and especially Breakfast of Champions, for whatever reason, are all books that mean so much to me. Don't know why I took them or him for granted before but, in the here and present lump of amber I'm stuck in now, I get it.

Thanks, Kurt Vonnegut

[n3wt]

Such a shame indeed,

R.I.P Sir

[Harry Lime]

He's one of my favourite writers. So it goes.