The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Arts & Entertainment => Topic started by: AugustWest on April 12, 2007, 04:58:18 am
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So it goes. (http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/12/arts/web-0412obit.php)
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So sad.
People with elderly parents should seriously get them to move into one-story homes. My grandpa, who was an English professor of about Vonnegut's age, also died of a fall down the stairs a couple of months ago.
Reading that article reminded me of this:
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07112006
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So it Goes.
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damn.
my girlfriend didn't know who Kurt Vonnegut is.
so it goes.
I really need to re-read his stuff... I read a bunch of it in like 9th grade, and I probably didn't get most of it.
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I got to see him talk, once.
He was speaking at my college and... my dad drove in to see him with me.
Good Lord, it was glorious. He was glorious. Happy me, happy mud.
Whatever reward may or may not come next, his pain is over... and that's all he would've asked for.
Bye Kurt.
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I loved him so much. I'm sad that he's gone.
To Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," summed up his philosophy:
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' "
**EDIT, 1234 posts.
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Wow, one of the two people I admire most.
I don't know what to think. About a week ago I read Welcome to the Monkey House, and thought about what Vonnegut's last words would be. I think he probably spent a lot of time wanting to be dead, so this is weird.
Rest in peace.
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One of those people I never read but always meant to, I kind of just assumed he was long dead since people spoke of him with such reverence.
Like Douglas Adams someone I suspect I'll be kicking myself that I didn't get to write them a postcard saying how awesome they are while they were around to read it (pronoun OD).
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Kurt Vonnegut will live forever in my heart and book collection.
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Slaughterhouse-Five is my favourite book of all time, and it's one of my great regrets that I never got to meet Vonnegut and hug him for being so fuck*ng awesome.
R.I.P you fantastic human being.
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Oh so sad.
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A friend of mine heard he'd died and said maybe she'd reread all his books. I read them all, at least up to a certain age, and I don't want to reread them because I am afraid they are the kind of thing that you really love when you are like 15 years old, and I would just spoil a good memory. Am I wrong?
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A friend of mine heard he'd died and said maybe she'd reread all his books. I read them all, at least up to a certain age, and I don't want to reread them because I am afraid they are the kind of thing that you really love when you are like 15 years old, and I would just spoil a good memory. Am I wrong?
I still re-read (most of) them regularly, but I'm just that way. Also, if you haven't read his late works, especially Bluebeard, I highly recommend them.
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Do you know what a Humanist is? I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
We had a memorial services for Isaac a few years back, and at one point I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to a group of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in Heaven now." That's my favorite joke.
...I still don't know if I feel OK saying it, though.
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At the very least bump Slaughterhouse 5 to the top of your netflix queue.
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Ol Kurt is up in Heaven now smiling down on us.
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I re-read much of Vonnegut's work every year or two.
"Cats Cradle" has never gotten old for me, I can say that much.
Also: "Player Piano" is the only novel by a major writer I've ever read where my hometown, Little Falls, is mentioned. It's only mentioned twice as a train stop along the way from the Albany metro area into the western Adirondacks but... it always felt like a validation somehow.
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LFM-- I have a similar feeling that there are some works of Romare Bearden, the only artist I have ever heard of to come out of Charlotte, NC, in both the St Louis art musem and the Kemper Art Museum (the Washington U art museum.)
my best friend and I have a habit of saying "so it goes" to the point that... I sent him a message saying only that when I heard the news, and he thought I was commenting on something else he'd said because he hadn't heard that yet.
I didn't realize it was like, a thing that other people did.
So are the big three Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Cat's Cradle? I've never read BoC. I think I may re-read these this summer.
The illustration of Montana Wildhack's breasts was a big hit in my freshman writing class (high school, not college).
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You should re-read those three, but you should also make sure to check out his non-fiction and Mother Night.
Also, I just read Welcome to the Monkey House last week, it is pretty good also.
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You should re-read those three, but you should also make sure to check out his non-fiction and Mother Night.
And The Sirens of Titan; a bit more traditional Sci-Fi than most of the others but still excellent and contains several ideas that Douglas Adam would employ later in HHGTTG.
Its a real loss...
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Several of the obits mentioned that for some reason his writing was cool when one is a kid but apparently you aren't supposed to enjoy it as an adult. I guess it's the whole "big ideas and changing the world is kids' stuff" mentality.
I tend to re-read Vonnegut between major novels as a break for myself. Like After reading The Iliad but before starting The Odyssey I re-read Sirens of Titan
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I really want to know why everyone reads the Illiad and the Odyssey, but not the Aeneid. I don't' know, maybe it isn't as well-regarded... my Latin teacher always set it up as basically an Improvement upon that old Greek stuff.
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I really want to know why everyone reads the Illiad and the Odyssey, but not the Aeneid. I don't' know, maybe it isn't as well-regarded... my Latin teacher always set it up as basically an Improvement upon that old Greek stuff.
Actually I have the Fagles translation of the Aeneid in my wishlist right now. I'm just waiting for paperback or for my birthday.
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not going to lie-- I have no basis to complain about this. I've read books 1-4 and 8 in Latin, but not in English. And reading it in Latin means that... I basically didn't absorb very much, I was mostly focused on translating correctly. I might read it in English one day, though. That Vergil sure could come up with some good phrases.
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not going to lie-- I have no basis to complain about this. I've read books 1-4 and 8 in Latin, but not in English. And reading it in Latin means that... I basically didn't absorb very much, I was mostly focused on translating correctly. I might read it in English one day, though. That Vergil sure could come up with some good phrases.
I just hadn't found a translation that seemed worth the effort before. But I really enjoyed Fagle's translations of Homer, especially how he used footnotes to remind you of characters that hadn't been around for 9 books.
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"Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again."
As I said at the time: Don't mind me, I'll just be over here weeping.
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15 things Kurt Vonnegut said better than anybody else. (http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/15_things_kurt_vonnegut_said)
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15 things Kurt Vonnegut said better than anybody else. (http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/15_things_kurt_vonnegut_said)
I could've sworn that the "all person's...are coincidental" line was from Cat's Cradle. Way at the beginning. Like on the copyright page. My books are still packed from moving, so I can't look.
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15 things Kurt Vonnegut said better than anybody else. (http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/15_things_kurt_vonnegut_said)
You oughta cross post this in the "Fifteen Things I Have Learned" thread.
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I don't know why there are all of these sudden Top 15 lists lately, but I LIKE IT.