Kurt Vonnegut Jr., author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Cat's Cradle died Wednesday from complications related to a recent head injury he sustained in a fall. He was 84.
Vonnegut was a student, a soldier, a newspaper reporter, a Saab salesman, a funny pessimist, and an angry comic. His last book A Man Without a Country was published in 2005 and is filled with the kind of off-the-cuff shit that connects him more solidly to our world of a zillion counter cultures than anyone before, and certainly anyone after.
And so it goes.
PBS audio interview
Thursday, April 12, 2007
So it goes
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4 comments:
i saw him speak when i was in college. i think i went with ortiz and it was at the leid center. it was just him on that huge stage and a green chalkboard. he spouted things about politics and the current world situations, making us all laugh at times.
i was very confused when it was all over.
i'm glad i went.
We had to a lit a fire before that?, jah....
I remember picking up Slaughter House Five in the Olympus High School library. It was when I was a freshman and I was trying to figure out who I was going to be. Kurt Vonnegut once said “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” At the time I was pretending to be a debater, and I was thinking I should try and pretend to be a football player. It’s funny to think about how little you know about yourself and what makes you happy when you are 15. I only went to the school library 3 or 4 times, each time pretending to be someone who reads books, and each time I picked the book with the most interesting cover, and so it goes.
i always was a fan of those old 2-stroke Saabs.
--jarede@mac.com
We read Harrison Bergeron my freshman year and I ate it up. It was the first piece of social criticism I ever encountered (isn't that kind of what all comedy is based on anyway?) and the first time I ever got excited about an author. Or reading in general. It had this way of cutting through all the crap, which sometimes weighs heavier on the fourteen-year-olds of the world, and gave me this new and insane excitement and energy about my own ideas.
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