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Vonnegut's place in your personal heirarchy

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Buck, Apr 13, 2007.

  1. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    Buck, WCW said one of my favorite things when he was interviewed once, I think, by a woman. She asked him if, given the chance, would he sleep with every woman in the world. He said, to the effect, "yes, yes I would." I remember laughing at that.
     
  2. Buck

    Buck Well-Known Member

    'If they give you lined paper, write the other way.'
    — William Carlos Williams
     
  3. Herbert Anchovy

    Herbert Anchovy Active Member

    Mencken was on the team, but was cut for conduct detrimental.
     
  4. Mencken was too sour an apple for the academy to swallow.

    And the remaining American Nobel in Literature?

    Isaac Bashevis Singer
     
  5. writing irish

    writing irish Active Member

    Kurt,

    Thanks for convincing Nelson Algren not to read his batshit crazy acceptance sppech that he's written for the Academy of Arts and letters. It was kind of a PR disaster that he didn't show to pick up his rosette, but he'd have done worse by showing up and acting goofy. Thanks for being a friend to Algren after he'd pissed off just about everyone else.

    WI
     
  6. Algren deserved better from history - as do we all. For your younger members, here's some background and bibliography:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Algren

    William Saroyan is another forgotten master.

    "The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy - the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Saroyan

    Give 'em both a tumble.
     
  7. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    Zeke

    Why do you consider "The Wasteland" shit?

    Good Lord, it has one of the greatest opening stanzas of any poem in the English language.

    April is the cruelest month, breeding
    Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
    Memory and desire, stirring
    Dull roots with spring rain.
    Winter kept us warm, covering
    Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
    A little life with dried tubers.
     
  8. Angola!

    Angola! Guest

    I'm rereading Slaughterhouse Five presently and forgot how amazing that book is.
     
  9. zeke12

    zeke12 Guest

    JR --

    There are scraps of good things there, but it is the most overrated poem in the history of the English language.

    Also, I'm philosophically opposed to its decoder-ring pretension.

    I'm hunting for the book I read on this a while back for Buck, and if I find it anywhere I'll let you know, too, but, essentially, the poem was promised to magazines by Ezra Pound -- who was trying to make the broke Eliot a buck -- and it was fantastically late and finally Eliot sent Pound some 1100 lines, most of them quotations and allusions and other garbled nonsense.

    Pound trimmed the piece down to 400 lines and gave it its structure, which is why Eliot credited him as "the better craftsman" in the original editions.

    It captures the modernist themes, and for that it is useful in serious study of that era, but assigning it to high school students and holding it up as some masterpiece is one of the biggest educational frauds the world has ever known.

    And I like Eliot's other stuff.
     
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