Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut had something to say. We have it on tape
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Kurt Vonnegut was such a clear thinker and communicator, we were fortunate to have him for so long.
If "Breakfast of Champions" is a little too nutty though, I think I might like his "Mother Night" best. (But maybe we like nutty Kurt?)
I read this during the same time I was copyediting a good friend's Vietnam memoir. As a staff sargeant [E6], my buddy saw/did some things — including lobbing a girl's head off as she stepped in front of his rocket trajectory — but we both crossed eyes when I explained what the calculation on the last page of HP resulted in: survivor's remorse of rape & pillaging.
How many little half-Sargeants must being running around 'Nam...
Every time someone is an "Ironic Nazi" online I think of that book, and how 4chan evolved into the modern political juggernaut it is today.
But what vonnegut missed or questioned is what is we aren’t much more either. (Core thesis of the show is that skinner proved we are mostly the same as a player piano anyways)
One of my brothers asked (out of legitimate concern) if I needed to visit a mental institution... because there just is no way you are talking with machines about books — about such fantasies.
Granted, my life has been a series of abuses; but Vonnegut helped me realize the impossible isn't so.
And now it's so.
>...so it goes.
Today, the people who most should read it and other things are not the people in our field. Just like the people who most should've been reading about the effects and dangers of Wall Street scamming, were not the coked-up bros doing the scamming.
>1) I am here
>2) So glad you are
The existance of the harminoniums. That most beautiful of passages, simplicity and grace...
I recently discovered this 1958 interview of Huxley[1]:
> This is the force which in general terms can be called overpopulation, the mounting pressure of population pressing upon existing resources. …This, of course, is an extraordinary thing; something is happening which has never happened in the world's history before. I mean, let's just take a simple fact that between the time of birth of Christ and the landing of the Mayflower, the population of the earth doubled. It rose from two hundred and fifty million to probably five hundred million. Today, the population of the earth is rising at such a rate that it will double in half a century.
Vonnegut was an artist.
They both make you think.
They both make you question human-ness.
There seemed to be an era where clickbait headlines in major media were seen as passé… but they’ve seemingly made a comeback over the past couple years.