Vonnegut dead at 84

This is sad. Kurt Vonnegut has died. Pessimist, existentialist and damn great writer. As he said in God Bless You Mr Rosewater:

"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.' "

I've taught his Galapagos many times over the years and Slaughterhouse-Five is a classic that reflects his experiences in Dresden during the fire-bombing of 1945.

From Slaughterhouse-Five:

"And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."

So it goes, indeed.

Update: Wow. No sooner did I hit post than I noticed that some of my SciBlings have already paid their respects (that's what I get for spending the evening preparing lectures). Check out what Mike, Bora, Tara, John, Monkey
Boy
, Josh, and Steinn have to say.

Tags

More like this

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007. I was saddened this morning to learn that another one of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, died. He died last night in Manhattan after suffering a head injury several weeks ago. Like another one of my favorite authors who recently died, William Styron, Vonnegut…
"And yet many people today believe that weather modification is a hoax: the early overselling of rainmaking somehow caused it, down the line, to be grouped in the public mind with conspiracy theories about mind-altering 'chemtrails,' shock-jock speculation that the government manufactures tornadoes…
Kurt Vonnegut, long-time smoker author of "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Cats Cradle," died last night of brain injuries he suffered weeks ago during a fall. He was 84. "I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair…
As I've mentioned on here previously, I recently moved. Now that I've painted every room in the house, I've been s-l-o-w-l-y unpacking things, and today I started on my non-essential books (aka, the ones I don't need on a day-to-day basis for classes). One of the boxes I dragged in from the…