Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Conversation >

Goodbye, Blue Monday

The Ghost of Tom Winter

03:37 / 12.04.07

April 11th, 2007 Kurt Vonnegut has passed away.

He suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall weeks earlier.

His works shall live on. May he rest in peace.

*

03:42 / 12.04.07

Oh. Wow.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

04:40 / 12.04.07

RAW, Now Vonnegut, dare we hope that Tim LaHaye is going to get Raptured up in order to satisfy the law of threes?

04:52 / 12.04.07

KV came to my uni back in 1987 or so. He gave a chat in an auditorium, but b4 that evening event, he came to talk to the creative writing classes, which amounted to about eight people. So I sat in a room and listened to him tell stories and anecdotes and letting fly his hilarious, pall malled rasping laugh. What a man, what a day.

05:37 / 12.04.07

Damn. Was flicking through his latest/last book the other day thinking about how great it was that he was still working (after his retirement!).

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

06:07 / 12.04.07

Goddam, I thought for sure this guy was gonna live forever. And I never got to meet the guy! Fuck. Cat's Cradle was the first Vonnegut I read, and it's still my favorite. Except maybe Timequake, which gets better everytime I read it.

Funny how it wasn't the Pall Malls that got him, but freakin' brain injuries. This has officially depressed me.

06:41 / 12.04.07

Tuna, same here. I'd been of the impression that Vonnegut simply couldn't die - it's just bad form on the universes behalf.

Vonnegut made me laugh, and he showed me that it is possible to love the world in all it's beautiful, horrific, mad glory.

lord henry strikes back

07:20 / 12.04.07

Sad news. He will very much be missed.

Still, 84 years old and it took a fall to take him out. Tough cookie, great writer.

07:28 / 12.04.07

How sad. He was a fantastic writer.

Here's an extract from his memoirs discussing contemporary American politics. Sad he had to go out witnessing such a hideous mess.

07:43 / 12.04.07

Aw, shit. Bad news to start the day.

07:51 / 12.04.07

Sad to see him go. I enjoyed his books a huge amount. So much humanity and caring in them mixed with utter bafflement at how crazy and twisted the world can get. To paraphrase Mr Rosewater, 'I refuse to believe that people are not basically good'. Shame he never got round to suing Pall Malls as he threatened. As he said in his last book, 'I've been smoking Pall Malls nearly all my life and i keep reading on the packets that they are going to kill me. I'm 82 now and still going strong. I may have to sue'

Less searchable M0rd4nt

08:09 / 12.04.07

Mehness.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:24 / 12.04.07

Oh bugger.

08:37 / 12.04.07

Genius. He'll be missed.

09:31 / 12.04.07

It's very sad- i was looking for Timequake yesterday lunchtime as a birthday present for a friend who wanted people to buy her their favoutite books.
i'm quite gutted about this actually.

10:16 / 12.04.07

a remarkable feat to combine disgust with so much compassion for people.

by coincidence started re-reading slaughterhouse 5 for the first time in 20 years at the weekend and was startled by it all over again, so much humanity and genuine deep feeling for the human condition.

kilgore trout, you will be missed by me.

12:15 / 12.04.07

Crap.

One of my favorite part of my college "Humour in Lit." class was reading Beakfast of Champions.

My day is made sadened.

12:35 / 12.04.07

That just sucks. I adore Vonnegut, still. Aw, crap.
He made my teenage years bearable, when I read his books.
I eyed Cat's Cradle on the book rack in the school library until I had enough reading skills to finally read the treasure inside. I wish I had met him.

He died on the tail end of a grand trine in all the fire signs. What an exit, old man. Bless.

Born: November 11, 1922
Indianapolis, Indiana, USA

Died: April 11, 2007
New York, New York, USA

12:39 / 12.04.07

Dammit. The radio on my alarm went off this morning and the first audio to come out was "Vonnegut, remembered for..." Not a way to wake up.

RIP, you old bastard.

17:20 / 12.04.07

I saw him on the same speaking tour furioso mentions up there. He wound up taking me and 15 other students for breakfast. It was early and bleary and we really did our best to hold our end of the conversation up. All 16 of us. He was more than three times our match.

A charmingly bleak and optimistic man.

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

18:02 / 12.04.07

I remember reading his memoirs, and the first time I've ever been truly ashamed of my country or the world was when he wrote that he lost his sense of humor due to recent events (the reaction to 9/11, war in Iraq, etc. It's not like I supported any of that, but I was still all like "aw geez guys, look at what we've done"). I would like to think it was a temporary thing, that eventually it came back to the old humanist bastard.

On NPR they opened his story with "There are no numbers for things like this, so let us just say that he was many, many people's favorite author". I thought it was pretty appropriate.

18:05 / 12.04.07

He once said Music to me is proof of the existence of God.

Mysterious Transfer Student

18:28 / 12.04.07

I still have the copy of Cat's Cradle which I stole from my school library at 16 (all right, stealing from libraries is officially bad karma, but come on - it's Vonnegut). I'll always be very grateful that my youthful eyes managed to imbibe such a wonderful writer so early. God knows where it is but I have a picture postcard of himself and William Burroughs sitting together in armchairs looking like they belong in the background of the retirement home in The Simpsons - a great image of two maverick literary titans just being old geezers.

Sympathies to his family.

20:55 / 12.04.07

Watch this, esp. the end

21:23 / 12.04.07

Also, his tv show "Welcome to the Monkey House" was preety damn good.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

22:59 / 12.04.07

So it goes.

23:39 / 12.04.07

I've thought about it all day. I loved his books, they were some of those that made me think differently when I was younger. They were fun to read, funny and sad and clever. I remember reading Breakfast of Champions, and thinking this was so funny:

Which it still is, really.
It makes me think of the misanthopy thread, like, he was someone who thought people were stupid, crazy, and brilliant; they did wonderful and horrible things, the constant contradictions in humanity and individuals. He sure had a wonderful way of illustrating it.

23:41 / 12.04.07

I'm really sad about this; it's daft, he was an old guy I'd not really thought about much over the last five or more years but really influential to me from about 15 to 20 or so - 'hocus pocus', with all the fragments, that's actually my favourite, but I don't even remember it so well.

I just thought he'd go on and on forever, really. Lovely, kind man.

23:42 / 12.04.07

Ah, his drawing of a bumhole has perked me up somewhat.

23:49 / 12.04.07

hehe Anyone who signs his books with a sketch of his sphincter is ok by me.

There was a passage in one of his books that was supposed to be (if I recall correctly) some graphiti that Kilgore read on a bathroom stall.

What is the purpose of life

To be the eyes and ears, nose and mouth of god, the creator of the universe, you idiot!"

I've always liked those lines

and so it goes

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

01:22 / 13.04.07

Picked up a copy of Sirens of Titan today while meditating upon his rules of writing. It's a sad old world.

09:36 / 14.04.07

One of the few writers who also seems to have been a very nice bloke. And very grounded in the real world. Oddly, at one point he seems to have worked as a car salesman in a Saab dealership, I read somewhere, as he needed the money, even though he was quite a well published writer.

But I find him someone to think about when you need to be inspired to just try and say exactly what you think. I liked this bit from his wikipedia entry:

In 2005 Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for The Australian. During the course of the interview Vonnegut was asked his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he replied "I regard them as very brave people." When pressed further Vonnegut also said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble - sweet and honourable I guess it is - to die for what you believe in." (This last statement is a reference to the line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" ["it is sweet and appropriate to die for your country"] from Horace's Odes, or possibly from Wilfred Owen's ironic use of the line in his Dulce Et Decorum Est.)

10:45 / 14.04.07

he was someone who thought people were stupid, crazy, and brilliant;

A real life Dr Who.

11:24 / 14.04.07

So it goes.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

17:51 / 14.04.07

Oddly, at one point he seems to have worked as a car salesman in a Saab dealership, I read somewhere, as he needed the money, even though he was quite a well published writer.

In one of his more recent short story collections, he wrote in the introduction about the various jobs in his life, and how back in the day one could decently suppliment income by selling short stories, and how that was no longer true, and talking about about the "good old days" when people like Steinbeck wrote stories for the Ladies Home Companion. It was an intensely sad introduction in some ways, but more like serene - the world has changed, he seemed to say in a very low voice. I liked it simply because it didn't betray any fascination with the pretensions of the writing life, something I've struggled with for a while.

I started writing a story the night I found out he'd died, and it's definitely inspired by him a little.

Sirens of Titans is really wonderful, and makes me wonder why I haven't read any Vonnegutbooks in a while - it's like he was trying to rewrite the Bible at the same time as he was trying to rewrite Alice in Wonderland.