Sunday, April 15, 2007



If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say "Kurt is up in Heaven now." That's my favourite joke…

Black Friday - THE MAKING OF A CHAMPION Kurt Vonnegut … Kurt Vonnegut: So it goes - 'Slaughterhouse-Five'
His popular novels blended social criticism, dark humor

I was having a great time Thursday morning listening to an old interview with Kurt Vonnegut on public radio.

The writer was talking about his landmark novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was about a survivor of the World War II firebombing of Dresden, Germany, who had become “unstuck” in time and traveled to the future and the past and back again.

I was having so much fun listening to the interview, that I didn’t realize it was an obituary until the very end, when the announcer said Vonnegut had died at 84 of injuries sustained in a fall at his home in New York.

“So it goes,” Vonnegut might have said. In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” he uses that expression every time someone dies. It’s a way of marking the passing.

I didn’t know about the firebombing of Dresden until I read “Slaughterhouse-Five,” sometime in the late ’60s or early ’70s when I was in college.


Writer on THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS absurdity ; [Verge of happiness; Imagination]
• · Wayne McLennan is that rare thing, a person who has lived life to the full and can write. One of the great contradictions about writers is that they must devote so much time to the creation of their works that they inevitably live an existence alienated from the vast majority of humanity. Many see this as a challenge that can be overcome by research and imagination. It is true this approach can produce convincing re-creations of a particular historical period, geographical locale or unusual profession, but it is seldom enough to capture the emotional truth of the subject Myths and Hits; Years ago, Ron Shapiro wrote a book called The Power of Nice Power of nice
This year we have for sure the feeling that drama is life with the boring pieces cut out – so be nice … LAW OF THE JUNGLE: BE NICE