"George was truley a "Modern Man
"
Yes that was another, of so many, excellent power deliveries!
Modern Man. No pretense of being a post-modern man. Solidly, honorably, humanly Modern.
Which phrase leads nicely, such that I'll start another thread after a provocation here, into a cousin in spirit and in revelatory mind-gut bend, and another Modern Man, who died a little over a year ago. Kurt Vonnegut.
I'm picking my way, like a finicky young eater at the distracting dinner table, through a 2024 release of a "collection of twelve writings on two of his most important subjects: war and peace. Written over the course of a lifetime, yet never before published, these pieces represent Vonnegut's unerring opposition to violence, and his rueful assessment of humanity's endless attraction to it." (says the front flap of
Armageddon in Retrospect)
I wonder what George and Kurt thought of each other and if they knew each other - my fantasy is that they met, with mutual respect.
I'll place a few provocative pieces here from Wikipedia. Then I'll start a new thread, which I may have to fill out at a later time.
He wrote a lot for my generation, modern times. I think he could be the carrier of a couple of fiercely vulnerable yet supple resilient shoulders on which we have stood towards certain post modern liberations. I think that he has done some serious gnawing away at the psychic boundaries that have afforded us possibilities of breaking through the cultural and the temporo-spacial barriers of convention against which we are still easily swooned into acquiescence. Schitzo-like he was the wraith-spirits of both Lewis and Clark, poking holes in complacent comfort.
Here:
"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself."I know," I said."You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said."I know," I said.Near the end of his life Vonnegut said that his epitaph ought to read:
"The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music."
Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a Private with the 106th Infantry Division,
Vonnegut was cut off from his battalion along with 5 other battalion
scouts and wandered behind enemy lines for several days until captured
by Wehrmacht troops on December 14, 1944.[9] Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945,
which destroyed most of the city. Vonnegut was one of a few American
prisoners of war in Dresden to survive, in their cell in an underground
meat locker of a slaughterhouse that had been converted to a prison camp. The administration building had the postal address Schlachthof Fünf
(Slaughterhouse Five) which the prisoners took to using as the name for
the whole camp. Vonnegut recalled the facility as "Utter destruction",
"carnage unfathomable." The Germans put him to work gathering bodies
for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead
the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."[10] This experience formed the core of one of his most famous works, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a theme in at least six other books.[10]
Vonnegut was freed by Red Army troops in May 1945. Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound,"[11] later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".[12]
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a sadist.
No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful
things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are
made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as
possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete
understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could
finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.
Ambo Suno