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Hobbies đŸȘ™ The Kurt Vonnegut Appreciation thread

Maister

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So who else has enjoyed reading Kurt Vonnegut? What are some of your favorite themes in his writings?
Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, and Breakfast of Champions were all in my bookcase at one point. Do you think he had a keen eye for human observation?

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God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls before Swine is a pure distillation of humanity's equal abilities for ego-centric avarice and pure altruistic empathy.

Plus the author makes the wise observation that being Christ-like in our modern world (1965 and still in 2021) is considered mentally ill or very close, which is a damning indictment.

This is my favorite of his novels.

Additionally, I love his 1945 letter home from Europe as he was leaving the front during WWII as a solider. It's clearly him being himself as you can see in 1945 the natural style and tone that he eventually accepts and revels in by the time he writes Sirens of Titan and beyond. By this point he stopped writing how he thinks others think he should write.

Lastly, Mother Night is endlessly quotable and useful for politics and political thinking.
 
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Well, I never read any of his books, but I always was intrigued by the movie Slaughterhouse Five. I saw it on late night TV and it was obviously cut. It's wavering between contemporary and WW2 scenes didn't make much sense to me as a child, but nevertheless many of those scenes have stuck with me over the decades. I consider it to be one of those "lost American Dream" films that seemed so common in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
 
mendelman said:
God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls before Swine is a pure distillation of humanity's equal abilities for ego-centric avarice and pure altruistic empathy.

Plus the author makes the wise observation that being Christ-like in our modern world (1965 and still in 2021) is considered mentally ill or very close, which is a damning indictment.

This is my favorite of his novels.

Additionally, I love his 1945 letter home from Europe as he was leaving the front during WWII as a solider. It's clearly him being himself as you can see in 1945 the natural style and tone that he eventually accepts and revels in by the time he writes Sirens of Titan and beyond. By this point he stopped writing how he thinks others thinks he should write.

Lastly, Mother Night is endlessly quotable and useful for politics and political thinking.
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I've read most of his works except for some of the newer compilations of stories. I started with reading Harrison Bergeron in school. The two you mention, along with Bluebeard are the ones I've gone back to read a few times. Mother Night especially seems so relevant these days.

I like Bluebeard's look at finding a degree of happiness in your own situation and your own talents.

Vonnegut has so many good quotes both in his literature and in general commentary. I've always thought this quote was good for planners to aspire to:
“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.”― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
 
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian is a late career collection of fictional interviews with famous people that basically, in parts, ruminates on the idea that people aren't bad, some just make really bad choices and decisions.

Premised on the concept of absolute forgiveness for all.
 
"...they were actually distant relatives, though they were not aware of it..."---Breakfast of Champions.

Also Venus on the Half shell by Kilgore Trout.

"...Go traveler, go. The universe is a big place, maybe the biggest!..."
 
mendelman said:
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian is a late career collection of fictional interviews with famous people that basically, in parts, ruminates on the idea that people aren't bad, some just make really bad choices and decisions.

Premised on the concept of absolute forgiveness for all.
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I think it's the theme that that runs through almost all of his books that people can do really horrible things to each other, the world often sucks, but often the greatest things we can do is be nice to each other and try to find the simple joys and small acts of kindness in life.
 
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind'.
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
 
mendelman said:
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind'.
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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I almost checked that out at the library yesterday but this seals it.
 
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
 
mendelman said:
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
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I listened to Mother Night again a few weeks ago. It's somewhat scary that how well Vonnegut understood certain human instincts and emotion. Mother Night was published in 1961 and he died in 2007, but I wonder what his commentary on the world today would be.

His comments on patriotism and jingoism seem so relevant these days. Three of my other favorite quotes from the book.

“I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”



“There are plenty of good reason for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war.”



“Any nation allowing its people the right of freedom of speech is powerless to defend itself against enemies masquerading as patriotic; and seeking to obstruct, impede, break down, and destroy the proper functioning of its republican form of government under the guide of honest criticism”
 
@bureaucrat#3

It's not too amazing since we know Vonnegut was a nautrally intelligent, sensitive and insightful person that lived through the last period of Peak World Authoritationism and pegged it correctly.

He was a devout humanist and understood the reality of human nature especially within highly industrialized, captialist cultures/nations.

This is analoguous to why The Prince by Machiavelli is still relevant despite being publishd in 1532 CE.
 
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