| Author | Message | ||
     Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 381 Registered: 09-2006 |
Kurt Vonnegut, passed away at 84 today. Haven't read him in a long while, but remember a time when I was semi-obsessed with his stuff...and everytime I've gone back since then the work has held up. | ||
| Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 382 Registered: 09-2006 |
Plus, he had one of the greatest movie cameos of all time. | ||
| Pádraig Collins Member Username: Pádraig_collins Post Number: 1380 Registered: 05-2005 |
You just beat me to the punch Allen. Vonnegut was an incomparable genius and gave me some of the greatest reading pleasures I've ever experienced. Slaughterhouse-Five alone leaves him in the pantheon of the greats. Nice article on him in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/ 12vonnegut.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slog in | ||
| Peter Member Username: Peterw Post Number: 5 Registered: 02-2007 |
I called my first dog Kilgore Trout many years ago.... | ||
| Jeff Whiteaker Member Username: Jeff_whiteaker Post Number: 543 Registered: 10-2004 |
Wow, sad news indeed. Vonnegut's writing had a profound impact on me as a teenager. I saw him interviewed by John Stewart about a year and a half ago, and although his old age was quite visible, he was still sharp as a tack. | ||
| Michael Bachman Member Username: Michael_bachman Post Number: 556 Registered: 01-2005 |
Kurt Vonnegut has become unstuck in time. | ||
| Kurt Stephan Member Username: Slothbert Post Number: 1341 Registered: 04-2005 |
I haven't read a lot by my semi-namesake Mr. Vonnegut (an oversight I need to correct), but I really liked what I read and always enjoyed stories about and interviews with him. A wise, witty, and great man indeed. | ||
| Little Keith Member Username: Manosludge Post Number: 1821 Registered: 03-2006 |
What an exemplary and fascinating human being. Yep, the world is definitely poorer for his absence. I guess there's some comfort to be taken from his having lived to a decent lifespan, unlike poor GM, who only made it to the reverse of Mr. Vonnegut's age. I haven't read as much of him as I should've, but I definitely enjoyed Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle. I got a huge charge out of the idea of Ice 9, when I read it... | ||
| Rob Brookman Member Username: Rob_b Post Number: 533 Registered: 08-2006 |
Kurt Vonnegut was - and still is - one of my favorite writers of all time. I don't have time to write a proper tribute now - I'm visiting my mom in Florida - but I had the chance to go to lunch with him in New York in 1987. I'll describe the circumstances here when I return to Chi-Town this weekend, but it was one of the highlights of my young life and still one of the most indellible experiences I've had. I can't believe he's gone, without having the grim pleasure of seeing Bush impeached. Life is cruel, a fact he knew well. I got an e-mail from an old girlfriend yesterday who accompanied me on the Vonnegut pilgrimage all those years ago. She said the world was a darker place with his passing. I believe that. But I'm glad the books remain, and he had a good run of it, far longer than he himself would have expected. RIP, indeed. | ||
| Little Keith Member Username: Manosludge Post Number: 1823 Registered: 03-2006 |
Florida, eh? Life is rough... I bet an avid reader like yoself has sampled the oeuvre extensively...any titles you recommend particularly, Rob, apart from the classic shit everybody knows? With all due respect to the greatness of his best stuff, some of the latter period titles I've tried didn't really do it for me... This does make me wanna go back an re-read Slaughterhouse, though...they made a pretty decent little movie of it, too, as I recall... | ||
| Jeff Whiteaker Member Username: Jeff_whiteaker Post Number: 544 Registered: 10-2004 |
LK - Slaughterhouse *is* brilliant. I re-read it about every 4-5 years and each time it never fails to floor me all over again. That's really cool that you know the film, not too many people seem to have seen it or heard of it. I have an old, deteriorating VHS copy and it's actually quite a good film. | ||
| Michael Bachman Member Username: Michael_bachman Post Number: 558 Registered: 01-2005 |
Jeff, I bought the DVD last year, its worth picking up and won't cost you an arm and a leg. Whoever cast that film did a great job. | ||
| Little Keith Member Username: Manosludge Post Number: 1824 Registered: 03-2006 |
I forget who was in it...I wanna say Nick Nolte, but that was some other Vonnegut based flick, wasn't it? I snuck, sorry sneaked, into that at tender age, with by buddy - we were probably 10 or 11. In Louisiana, R-rated flicks worked more or less like the bars there: you just had to be tall enough to reach the counter. We also had one of the exit doors perpetually propped open, so we may have gotten in that way.I think we were hoping to see Valerie Perrine or Victoria Principal, or whatever half-assed starlet was in it, naked... I didn't find out until years later, that much of those events were based on stuff that actually happened to Vonnegut. Let's see - do I have this right? After the bombing of Dresden, only 7 allied POWs survived, and he was one of them? Amazing. Obviously, that would start to mess with one's worldview. | ||
| Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 385 Registered: 09-2006 |
IMDB says that the lead actor in SH5 was Michael Sacks - the only other thing on his resume I've seen is "The Sugarland Express," where he plays the cop whose car Goldie Hawn and William Atherton hijack. The SH5 movie was the reason I first gave Vonnegut a try...I caught the tail-end of it on TV in the late '70s, and while understandably a little confused by the proceedings was intrigued enough to pick up the book, after which I devoured everything else he'd put out up to that point. Discovering him while a teenager has been a pretty common theme of the eulogies I've read here on the board and elsewhere. While he has plenty to engage the adult reader, his style is so welcoming, funny and skeptical it's for growing minds to latch onto and get their worlds turned up side down just a little. LK, of the other early stuff, "Mother Night" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" are deservedly treasured by many. In a book of essays he did (lemme check for the title..."Palm Sunday") he letter-graded all of his own books, and I found that it lined up with my own feelings pretty well...so you might try that.) | ||
| Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 386 Registered: 09-2006 |
Oh yeah, Nolte was in "Mother Night," which I heard was good. | ||
| Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 387 Registered: 09-2006 |
"The Sirens of Titan" and "Player Piano" are very good, too. The early short stories in "Welcome to the Monkey House" are a mixed bag, but there's some real gems. | ||
| Rob Brookman Member Username: Rob_b Post Number: 536 Registered: 08-2006 |
It's kind of hard for me to rank Vonnegut's stuff since I love it all, but of his later books I especially enjoyed "Jailbird" and "Bluebeard." I liked "Galapagos," too, particularly for its thesis, which held that our "big brains" are an evolutionary dead-end. |