RIP Kurt Vonnegut

I love the part in Slaugherhouse Five where Billy Pilgrim becomes slightly unstuck in time and watches a WWII bomber movie backwards -- the Germans have tubs that repair planes and suck shrapnel from wounded soldiers, the German fighters repair the planes even more and them the bombers open their doors and suck the fire from the town and put it into tubes and load it back onto the plane.

An off-kilter way of looking at things that really resonates.

 

I never knew Vonnegut worked at SI

Great story

http://thewade.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/04/honoring_a_cham.html

 

Billy Pilgrim went through a lot of crap.

 

"Slaughterhouse Five", "Catch 22" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" may be the three greatest anti-war novels of the 20th century.

RIP, Kurt.

 

Good thread. Good writer.

My personal favorite is Cat's Cradle, for simple existence of ice-nine, an extremely provocative idea and doomsday scenario.

Vonnegut's eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

 

Video of Vonnegut with Jon Stewart, 09/14/05:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/04/12/kurt-vonnegut-on-the-daily-show/

 

Three of my favorite novels. You could certainly add Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo to that list, as well.

 

RIP, Kurt.

 

All great books. Two of them use comedy overtly or lightly mocking war.

None of them are shrill about being anti-war.

 

Outstanding.