HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE!!! (a tribute)
It's the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1922).
His father forced him to go to college to study biochemistry, though he wanted to be a journalist. Vonnegut said, "[College] was a boozy dream, partly because of booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for." He was failing almost all of his classes when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he jumped at the chance to join the army and get out of school.
In December of 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, and forced to work in a factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. On the night of February 13, 1945, British and American bombers attacked Dresden, igniting a firestorm that burned up the oxygen in the city and killed almost all the city's inhabitants in two hours.
It was more than twenty years later when he published Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about a man named Billy Pilgrim who experiences the bombing of Dresden and loses his mind, believing he has traveled to an alien planet where time does not exist. Vonnegut said it was an anti-war book. But he also said, "Anti-war books are as likely to stop war as anti-glacier books are to stop glaciers." He has since become one of the most popular guest lecturers at universities across the country.
BOOKS BY V-DIDDY: "CHECK!" Means I've read it. "CHECK!CHECK!" Means I've written an essay on it.
A Man Without a Country (2005)
Player Piano (1952)
aka Utopia 14
The Sirens of Titan (1957) CHECK!
Cat's Cradle (1960) CHECK!CHECK!
Canary in a Cat House (1961)
Mother Night (1961) CHECK!
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) CHECK!
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) CHECK!
Breakfast of Champions (1973) CHECK!CHECK!
Venus on the Half-Shell (1975) (writing as Kilgore Trout) CHECK!
Slapstick: or Lonesome No More! (1976) CHECK!
Deadeye Dick (1982) CHECK!
Jailbird (1983) CHECK!
Galapagos (1985) CHECK!
Bluebeard (1987) CHECK!
Hocus Pocus (1990) CHECK!
Between Time and Timbuktu: Or Prometheus-5 a Space Fantasy (1990)
Timequake (1997) CHECK!CHECK!
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) CHECK!CHECK!
Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (1976) CHECK!
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Collection (1995)
Sun Moon Star (1980)
Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970) CHECK!CHECK!
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974)
Opinions (1975)
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981) CHECK!
Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (1983)
Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing (1999)
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999) CHECK!
Short STORIES:
Unready to Wear (1953) CHECK!
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1954) CHECK!
Harrison Bergeron (1961) CHECK!CHECK!
2 B R 0 2 B (1962)
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) CHECK!CHECK!
The Big Space Fuck (1972)
Adam CHECK!
All the King's Horses CHECK!
D.P. CHECK!
Deer in the Works CHECK!
Epicac CHECK!
The Euphio Question CHECK!
The Foster Portfolio CHECK!
Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son CHECK!
The Hyannis Port Story CHECK!CHECK!
The Kid Nobody Could Handle CHECK!
The Lie CHECK!
Long Walk to Forever CHECK!
The Manned Missiles CHECK!
Miss Temptation CHECK!
More Stately Mansions CHECK!
New Dictionary CHECK!
Next Door CHECK!
Report on the Barnhouse Effect CHECK!
Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog CHECK!
Where I Live CHECK!
Who Am I This Time? CHECK!
QUOTES BY MY MAN DENTON, A GIFT TO YOU!:
"I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool."
"This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes."
"What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'."
"Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not."
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santayana)
"I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive."
"Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away."
"Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP. Only he didn't say 'doggone.'"
"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand."
"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
"If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts."
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
"History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again."
"Pretend to be good always,
and even God will be fooled."
"We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love."
"Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease."
"Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic."
"Son--they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose."
"There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."
"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours."
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."
"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
"People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God."
"The Hand that stocks the drugstore rules the world."
"Life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?"
"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."
"Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."
"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
"To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon."
"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."
"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
"If somebody says, ''I love you,'' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? ''I love you, too. ''"
"How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
"We are what we imagine ourselves to be."
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt"
"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquesting faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying."
"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone."
"The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide."
"I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please-a little less love, and a little more common decency.'"
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
"Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected."
His father forced him to go to college to study biochemistry, though he wanted to be a journalist. Vonnegut said, "[College] was a boozy dream, partly because of booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for." He was failing almost all of his classes when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he jumped at the chance to join the army and get out of school.
In December of 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, and forced to work in a factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. On the night of February 13, 1945, British and American bombers attacked Dresden, igniting a firestorm that burned up the oxygen in the city and killed almost all the city's inhabitants in two hours.
It was more than twenty years later when he published Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about a man named Billy Pilgrim who experiences the bombing of Dresden and loses his mind, believing he has traveled to an alien planet where time does not exist. Vonnegut said it was an anti-war book. But he also said, "Anti-war books are as likely to stop war as anti-glacier books are to stop glaciers." He has since become one of the most popular guest lecturers at universities across the country.
BOOKS BY V-DIDDY: "CHECK!" Means I've read it. "CHECK!CHECK!" Means I've written an essay on it.
A Man Without a Country (2005)
Player Piano (1952)
aka Utopia 14
The Sirens of Titan (1957) CHECK!
Cat's Cradle (1960) CHECK!CHECK!
Canary in a Cat House (1961)
Mother Night (1961) CHECK!
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) CHECK!
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) CHECK!
Breakfast of Champions (1973) CHECK!CHECK!
Venus on the Half-Shell (1975) (writing as Kilgore Trout) CHECK!
Slapstick: or Lonesome No More! (1976) CHECK!
Deadeye Dick (1982) CHECK!
Jailbird (1983) CHECK!
Galapagos (1985) CHECK!
Bluebeard (1987) CHECK!
Hocus Pocus (1990) CHECK!
Between Time and Timbuktu: Or Prometheus-5 a Space Fantasy (1990)
Timequake (1997) CHECK!CHECK!
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) CHECK!CHECK!
Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (1976) CHECK!
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Collection (1995)
Sun Moon Star (1980)
Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970) CHECK!CHECK!
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974)
Opinions (1975)
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981) CHECK!
Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (1983)
Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing (1999)
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999) CHECK!
Short STORIES:
Unready to Wear (1953) CHECK!
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1954) CHECK!
Harrison Bergeron (1961) CHECK!CHECK!
2 B R 0 2 B (1962)
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) CHECK!CHECK!
The Big Space Fuck (1972)
Adam CHECK!
All the King's Horses CHECK!
D.P. CHECK!
Deer in the Works CHECK!
Epicac CHECK!
The Euphio Question CHECK!
The Foster Portfolio CHECK!
Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son CHECK!
The Hyannis Port Story CHECK!CHECK!
The Kid Nobody Could Handle CHECK!
The Lie CHECK!
Long Walk to Forever CHECK!
The Manned Missiles CHECK!
Miss Temptation CHECK!
More Stately Mansions CHECK!
New Dictionary CHECK!
Next Door CHECK!
Report on the Barnhouse Effect CHECK!
Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog CHECK!
Where I Live CHECK!
Who Am I This Time? CHECK!
QUOTES BY MY MAN DENTON, A GIFT TO YOU!:
"I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool."
"This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes."
"What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'."
"Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not."
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santayana)
"I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive."
"Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away."
"Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP. Only he didn't say 'doggone.'"
"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand."
"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
"If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts."
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
"History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again."
"Pretend to be good always,
and even God will be fooled."
"We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love."
"Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease."
"Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic."
"Son--they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose."
"There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."
"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours."
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."
"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
"People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God."
"The Hand that stocks the drugstore rules the world."
"Life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?"
"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."
"Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."
"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
"To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon."
"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."
"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
"If somebody says, ''I love you,'' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? ''I love you, too. ''"
"How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
"We are what we imagine ourselves to be."
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt"
"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquesting faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying."
"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone."
"The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide."
"I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please-a little less love, and a little more common decency.'"
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
"Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected."