Vonnegut, Rest in Peace, you need it
by Kaiser EdamameKurt Vonnegut died yesterday.
So it goes.
It will be a while before we get another author like him. You need a f*cked up life to be as darkly and ingeniously satirical as he was. His mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day when he was 21. That same year he dropped out of college and enlisted in the army during World War II. He fought on the front lines of the Battle of the Bulge (one of the bloodiest in American history), ended up stranded alone behind enemy lines and wandered for days before being taken as a POW. He then arrived in Dresden shortly after the Dresden fire bombing, where somewhere between 35-100k people died in grotesque fashion. He spent three days dragging bodies into mass graves. After it became clear that there were too many bodies to bury he watched Nazi’s incinerate the dead with flame-throwers.
One would think all that would ruin your sense of humor but it instead created Vonnegut’s.
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.“
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yeah, we’re not gonna get much better than KV for a while…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut
I think he got there before the firebombing, actually.
Glad to see the obit here, though; good to see LoS paying respects to a guy who so richly deserved it.
So it goes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atABhlMLYvU
Regardless, comedy and sarcasm are a coping mechanism. But few are able to turn their bitterness, and depression into such influential works. I greatly admire the experimental style of writing he used at the time and often wonder if the writers of the Family Guy see him as the progenitor of extremely loooong non-sequiturs.
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.” – Kurt Vonnegut