So it goes... Vonnegut dead at 84.

[Speed Tracer]

Kurt Vonnegut is dead at the age of 84.

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."

This is the first death outside of a close friend's or a member of my own family - essentially, the first death of someone I have never met - that has brought me to tears.

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."

For years, as long as I can remember, he has been my favorite writer. The only writer I consider to be above and beyond any other. I love many writers. He is the only that is my favorite.

"If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy."

The first book I ever read of his was "Breakfast of Champions", which I read when I was nine. A strange age to read such a... well, a book intended for someone older than me. But that didn't matter. All the dirty words and concepts in the book flew over my head. What I read was a story about getting old, something I have never and will never want to do.

"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college."

It wasn't until two years later that I read any more Vonnegut. I forget what book it was, but I do know that shortly after that, I read every other novel he had written. Each and every one of them has affected me in some way. There are millions who loved his work, but he didn't write for them. He wrote for me. At least, that's how it felt.

"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."

He was, without a doubt, the greatest writer to ever live in my lifetime. His writing was as much about the language as the stories and the characters, which is why no Vonnegut work has ever been successfully adapted to film.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

The less said about his overall body of work, the better. He was a man whose writing defies analyzation or discussion. I will say that if you are not yet familiar with him, you owe it to yourself to read one of, any of, all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels or short stories. I would personally reccommend reading "Breakfast of Champions", as it is my personal favorite, but every one has something to offer. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is fantastic. So is "Cat's Cradle". His non-fiction work, like the most recent "A Man Without a Country", is marvelous. Just go to your bookstore and tell them you want some Vonnegut, and they'll take you to some Vonnegut.

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

His work will continue to live on as long as there are questions in the world, and even longer as those questions continue to be unanswered.

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

I can't imagine a world where Kurt Vonnegut doesn't exist. I won't.

"You realize, of course, that everything I say is horses**t."

Rest in peace, Kilgore Trout.

 

[Winslow Leach]

In my 8th grade English class, for a final project, our teacher had us write a biography of a popular American author. Not only did we have to research his or her life, we also had to read several of the author's books.

The teacher wrote about 21 names on scraps of paper (there were about 21 kids in the class), put them in a bucket, shuffled them, and had us come up, one by one and pick a scrap out of the bucket. The name we chose would be the one we would do our report on. Naturally, everyone wanted Stephen King. When it was my turn, I picked the slip out of the bucket, opened it and saw the name Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I had heard the name before, but had no idea what kind of author he was. I was soon to find out...

In those pre-internet days, I did research the old-fashioned way: browsing through clunky encyclopedias and finding biographies written about Vonnegut.

He was an advance scout with the U.S. 106th Infantry Division in WWII during the Battle of the Bulge, was cut off from his troops, and wandered behind enemy lines for days before he was captured by the Germans and made a prisoner of war. He witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden, and was one of seven American prisoners of war to survive in the underground meat-packing cellar known as "slaughterhouse five." The Germans had Vonnegut gather the corpses for burial, but there were so many, most of the bodies were incinerated with flamethrowers. In May, 1945, Vonnegut was rescued by Soviet troops and was awarded the Purple Heart.

Vonnegut's WWII experiences would haunt his writings, most notably in Slaughterhouse-Five, in which his hero Billy Pilgrim suffers much as Vonnegut did in WWII. Pilgrim finds himself "unstuck in time" and has very little control over his own life that one minute he's a prisoner of war, the next he's living a rather successful life in the suburbs. "So it goes" (Vonnegut's reference to death) originated in this novel.

Vonnegut was also a noted graphic artist, and many of the drawings in his books came from his own hand.

Some of Vonnegut's other novels include Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, Slapstick, Breakfast of Champions, Bluebeard, Jailbird and Timequake, in which his protagonist and alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, dies at the age of 84.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died at the age of 84 from brain damage sustained by a fall in his Manhattan home several weeks ago.

"By saying our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas." -- Kurt Vonnegut

 

[anytimepally]

Anyone else read Kilgore Trout's book Venus on the Half-Shell? It's actually written by Philip José Farmer, based on a paragraph from one of Vonnegut's books (I forget which one).. but when it came out, it was released as a Kilgore Trout book, so everyone thought Vonnegut wrote it himself, and he was tired of people thinking that, so he wouldn't let Farmer do the planned sequel, The Son of Jimmy Valentine.. it wasn't until a 1988 printing of the book that Farmer's authorship was revealed... anyway, if you can find a copy, give it a read.. it's a quick read and perhaps (intentionally) the worst book ever written .. I quite enjoyed it..

As for Vonnegut's work itself, my favorite was Galápagos.. although, admittedly, his later work was nowhere near as good as the early stuff.. Galápagos, at least for me, was a return to form

 

[Winslow Leach]

As far as film adaptations of Vonnegut's work goes, I quite enjoyed Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), directed by George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy, The Sting). Vonnegut himself claimed to have liked the film.

The worst film adaptation has to be Slapstick, with a tired Jerry Lewis mugging his way through an incomprehensible script.

In Back to School, the Rodney Dangerfield character hires Vonnegut to write a paper on himself. The teacher gives him an F.

Teacher: Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!

Dangerfield angrily calls Vonnegut, and tells him "next time I'll call Robert Ludlum!"