Vonnegut DIES! Suddenly, "the future feels safer"

Jurched

Ask&YoullBeSorry
May 10, 2005
1,315
3
38
Calais, Maine (not France)
I've always hated Vonnegut. He's been the poster boy of elitist hippy scum and successfully spread his errors throughout the world without much opposition.

Therefore, I've never had such a wonderful morning as this one, when I read that

VONNEGUT IS DEAD!

Ha ha!


NEW YORK (AP) - Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.

He lived too long.

Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

Oh. In that case, I kinda wished he'd live a few more months in terrible agony.

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. Indianapolis, his hometown, declared 2007 as "The Year of Vonnegut"—an announcement he said left him "thunderstruck."

Remind me never to go to Indianapolis.

He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

I've always felt his supra-elitism was dehumanising.

"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

Me too. Especially as I'm singing "Happy Trails are Here" while spitting into his coffin.

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot.

Then what's the point of being forced in college to read his shit?

In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain. Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

Aww! Poor wittle baby! But he got the attention he was looking for, just like all those fake-ass suicidals.

"I think he was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.

Moral compass? More like Moral cesspool.

His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people.

Mama blows herself away, and an author is born!

"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts. But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

How about using his imagination instead of plagiarizing meat lockers? I never realized what a slimy little fuck this dirt bag was...

The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time- traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

Sounds like a wee bit of drug use, there.

"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.

Gore Vidal is another whacko who needs to be put into cold storage.

"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."

Maybe not, but he was a colossal asshole.

When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Saabs on Cape Cod. Already his detatched elitism is fully developed.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.

Whoa! Just like in THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW starring Algore's paranoia, and Jeff what's-his-name...

Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union. The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.

ACLU! Should've known!

His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with little control over their fate. Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.

Miserable anti-heroes? I suppose he was writing about himself. Still, I can't stand extremely affluent and wealthy elitists complaining about how hard life can be...

"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap," he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.

Its too late for his flying saucer buddies to save him now!

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction work, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.

Vonneshit writes about flying saucers but has the audacity to bitch about other peoples' education...

He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."

It reads like a bucket of pig slops.

In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor and columnist at In These Times. Bleifuss said he had been trying to get Vonnegut to write something more for the magazine, but was unsuccessful. "He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more to say. He realized, I think, he was at the end of his life," Bleifuss said.

Good. In his depression and "misery," the rest of us were spared more of his bullshit.

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died.

Oh my! Manhattan and the Hamptons! "Ah say, whea's the caviah and chahmpagne, Lovey?"

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

I'd thought he'd want to go out in a more miserable anti-hero way, such as being stabbed and robbed in an alley during a bad heroine fix...

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005.

That's retarded.

"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."

Don't worry, Krap Vonnegarbage has set enough bad examples throughout his life with his goddamned bleeding heart, bleeding pen, and bleeding gums. Finally, he's DEAD. And the bleeding is over!!!

Jurched
 
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. Indianapolis, his hometown, declared 2007 as "The Year of Vonnegut"—an announcement he said left him "thunderstruck."

Remind me never to go to Indianapolis.


Jurched

I like the colts but Indy is a big shithole
 
i have very little sympathy for fat cats who whine about how hard life is. more kudos to you, Jurched, for more spot-on commentary. :worship:
 
i have very little sympathy for fat cats who whine about how hard life is. more kudos to you, Jurched, for more spot-on commentary. :worship:

Thank you, Sue! (And congrats to you for standing up to the weak-kneed limp-wristed Osama-lovers who slither through this forum!)

Frankly, once someone gets a beach house in the Hamptons, they lose all rights to complain about depression:

"Feeling down?" Get yer ass on the Southern State Parkway, and in no time, your maid Consuela will be serving Pina Coladas on your deck overlooking the Atlantic. You'll be feelin right as rain in no time.

"Feeling like throwin a sob story to the rest've us?" Shut the hell up! I've got no surf-side swinging bench to snuggle into when I'm feelin down...

...Not like Kurt Vonnegut used to.

Jurched