Word: vonnegut
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...Conflict may make some entertainment superfluous, but it also helps make some great art possible, from Bob Marley?s anthemic song ?War? to Kurt Vonnegut?s novel ?Slaughterhouse Five? to Picasso?s masterpiece ?Guernica.? Many mere entertainers - the teen pop idols, the nihilistic gangsta rappers, the amoral hard rockers - will no doubt have to (at least temporarily) rethink their relevance in the light of recent events. Do we need to hear DMX?s violent boasts when there?s so much violence on TV? Is there any point in enduring Slipknot?s horror metal assault when real life is already dealing...
...thought the story was funny, but also obscurely dislocating, ominous. I wondered: Is this an individual quirk? Or is it possible that, without our noticing, the previously literate American middle class, which used to be required to slog at least through a little Dickens or Thoreau or even Vonnegut or Morrison in order to get through high school, has deserted books altogether? Or leap-frogged electronically beyond them? We wake up every few months and find ourselves in a weird new world. Do the educated and successful and privileged classes of the information-saturated post-industrial West now consider...
World War II gave some American writers images that burned deep to the core of their work and became, sometimes, its chief theme: the bombing of Dresden for Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five), the contradictory lunacies of command for Joseph Heller (Catch-22). This scarcely ever happened to American painters or sculptors. But to one in particular it did. It was war, as much as anything else, that made an artist out of H.C. (Horace Clifford) Westermann Jr., that imbued him with raucous suspicion of the "normal" life he was supposed to be defending and filled him with horrible sights...
...Guin is also one of the few science fiction writers to achieve widespread literary recognition outside the sometimes insular sci-fi and fantasy community. Kurt Vonnegut described the problem while looking back at the publication of his first novel, _The Sirens of Titan_. "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since," he wrote, "and I would like out, particularly because so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal...
...ladies be the actual soft drink.") But more depressing were the Tempters/tresses, who were marched in like breeding cattle and barely introduced before going off to the resort compounds where they would waft their pheromones toward the Temptees. A sexy reality show is not working if it brings Kurt Vonnegut to mind; all I could think of were the humans locked in an alien breeding cage in "Slaughterhouse-Five...