Vonnegut
I just want to link one of the pieces memorializing Kurt Vonnegut. During my first break in service, from 1973-77, I was one of the baby-boomers — albeit one of the damaged goods coming back from Vietnam — who waited for more… and more… Vonnegut. I have to credit him as one of those who triggered a lifelong allergy to easy explanations, even if I was slow.
Vonnegut. Presente!
Kurt Vonnegut’s death on Wednesday does not end an era. In the age of globalisation, this bard – a champion of the simple, decent man being slapped in the face by one invisible hand after another – represents the future.
I last met Vonnegut as he sat in the morning sunshine on the steps of the building that houses the British Mission to the UN, a few yards from his 47th Street apartment. He was reading a newspaper he’d picked from the waste bin and was chain-smoking as well, which he had claimed to be a “fairly honourable form of suicide”.
A life-long reader FULL
Joshua:
I’m in favor of simple black-and-white explanations which is why I always felt somewhat uneasy after reading his witty novels. He was not unambigiously on any one side. His view was that we should be more courteous to each other.
I don’t think so. More discouretsy and less violence is the way to go. I always felt that he didn’t mind ‘honest violence’ despite his ambivlent pacifism, and that nothing could, or should, be done about it.
Still, overall he was a voice for bourgeois decency.
14 April 2007, 4:06 pmI was happy for him that the U of Chicago decided to accept his master’s thesis in anthropology after having rejected it decades ago, as I was dismayed by the servile sucking up to a popular author by Chicago.
DeAnander:
I loved his work despite occasional excursions into troubling sexism (“Welcome to the Monkey House”). I will really miss his caustic, fresh and cantankerous antiwar statements of recent years… another rather decent human being gone. At least we had him with us for a good long time. I consider the elderly Vonnegut a role model for my own old age: old doesn’t have to mean timid, compliant, or boring! PBUH.
18 April 2007, 8:16 pmBob:
I discovered Vonnegut about the same time Stan did. I was in the military, just out of high school, around the time Stan was out. “In the military” can mean a lot of things, my experience was very different from Stan’s. My MOS did not involve shooting, or being shot at.
I think it’s a little amug to dismiss Vonnegut as “a voice for bourgeois decency”. What is bourgeois about Slaughterhouse Five? Well, there’s his pal, shot for scavenging a ceramic figurine in the rubble of Dresden.
That passage parodies bourgeois values, and at the same time recognizes the human tragedy of the poor shmuck caught oblivously in those values.
And what really is “bourgeios decency”? Is this a bad thing? How is this different from ideologically pure, classless decency?
That’s not meant as confrontation, I’ve had my doubts about Vonnegut too. But on reflection I’m thinking those doubts don’t mean much. He did what he could to confront cruelty and stupidity, and to honor decency and kindness. We should all be worthy of that eptiaph.
20 April 2007, 8:03 pmMark:
Kurt Vonnegut is dead. So it goes.
29 April 2007, 9:56 pm