Kurt Vonnegut

re being careful about what we pretend to be, Nietzche said it a century before Vonnegut, I can't quote it exactly, but the nutty german said something along the lines of "a hypocrite who maintains his facade ceases to be a hypocrite", it's either in the gay science or human all too human.

re dresden, the RAF have a lot to answer for. the deal was that the allies wouldn't bomb dresden if the axis didn't bomb oxford. they didn't. we killed 100,000 in a week whilst skilfully avoiding the (brit owned) shell oil depositories.

p.s. BOC the movie was godawful

And honestly he has one of my favorite senses-of-humor of all authors I've ever read.

I thought Breakfast of Champions was way funny, especially with the illustrations and the details about all the male characters penises, which is one of the most hilariously simple-yet-thorough ways to explore each character's identity in any story ever, imho.

Loved the chinese people in Slapstick, and the gravity stuff, very amusing.

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Revive.

Does anyone remember the line, I think it's in Hocus Pocus, where he talks about the downside of cursing is that it gives people an excuse not to listen to you?

There are no dirty words in this book except for “hell” and “God,” in case someone is fearing that an innocent child might see 1. The expression I will use here and there for the end of the Vietnam War, for example, will be: “when the excrement hit the air-conditioning”. Perhaps the only precept taught me by Grandfather Wills that I have honored all my adult life is that profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

Excellent, thank you.

slaughterhouse-five is some bleak shit.

i think the scenes in new york are the best. i felt a pit in my stomach at the part when billy, in an adult bookstore in times square, discovers that the woman he thought he was locked up with in the "human zoo" -- a pornographic actress -- actually drowned herself. he like laughs it off, believing the tabloid headline was wrong and she is totally fine back on planet tralfamadore.

there is a kind of cruelty in billy's dissociation--even before he came up with the tralfamadore fantasy, he wasn't very present for his wife and children. his wife loved him but he didn't love her back and he sees her as kind of a ridiculous nuisance. of course, this isn't his fault as he is severely traumatized. but yeah--trying to see him from the perspective of his wife and daughter, characters that the text encourages you to *not* identify with, changed the whole thing for me.

i'm teaching this book now. i probably wouldn't have picked up vonnegut again on my own but i'm glad i did.

vonnegut ties this back to himself too. in chapter one, he writes about his own drinking, saying that at night his wife leaves him alone as he randomly dials up people on the phone, severely drunk. he says his breath smells like "mustard gas and roses," which is a phrase he uses later to describe the rotting bodies trapped in the "corpse mines" throughout dresden.

the novel's treatment of women -- and of men's treatment of women -- seems like something people haven't looked at enough.

You're making me want to read it again.

you should.

the reaction of my students has been interesting. some love it, and find it refreshingly honest. others are put off by his black humor and find it nihilistic. i try to explain that he was really just a curmudgeonly social democrat, angry at the vietnam war, and the nihilism is more of a provocation than anything else. but still, they're put off, which is their right. so it goes.

amazing book, just read it for the first time last year

mother night is my favorite, tightest plot-wise he ever got

Cat's Cradle is still my fave of his and I think he considered is his best work as well. He once marked all his own homework and gave it an A+ grade but I can't remember what he gave all the rest.

I've got very fond memories of Sirens of Titan, his most straight ahead sci-fi as far as I'm aware.

yeah Sirens of Titan is brilliant and the theme of futility and what a load of nonsense existence is - is expressed very well in it.

The stuff about taking a tablet that allows you to freely breath on the scorching surface of Venus probably hasn't aged well but it was the late 50's.

Saw Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time today (in a theatre--not sure if it's streaming, too). As usual, too much of the director for me (Robert Weide, who I guess is most known for Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I have to catch up with one day), but seeing as it took him 34 years (!) to get the film completed, he gets a pass. That aside, quite good. All I've ever read is Breakfast of Champions in university, 40 years ago--the film makes me want to go downstairs and find some of the paperbacks I bought back then and never read. Weide holds back some things about Vonnegut's life and drops them in at just the right moment.