Kurt Vonnegut - Blog Posts

It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby.

Kurt Vonnegut -- Slaughterhouse Five

🌀ABOUT ME🌀

Im putting all of my favorite things here to pin so I can introduce myself to people and maybe make some online friends!

Name: Haley

Age: 17

Pronouns: She/Her

🌾Things I like🌾

John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts (main interest)

DC Comics

WATCHMEN!!! 

The Question and Mister Miracle

Gravity Falls

Kurt Vonnegut

Nerdfighteria

The Mountain Goats, The Talking Heads, The Beatles, Elvis Costello

To Kill a Mockingbird

Owls

M*A*S*H

literally all of my favorite things have been connected to mash im oh so happy. Vonnegut? The Mountain Goats? You name it, someone in the mash fandom has made it!

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

i will love kurt vonnegut till the day I die, you will never catch me lacking.

kurt vonnegut in a letter to knox burger

"...AND NOTHING HURT..." installation | 8' x 55" | paper, acetate, acrylic, oil, fabric, candle, sage & sound accompaniment 

“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

i finished Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut and this was my favorite passage, which I can't find online anywhere with the important context:

Back when we were neighbors, I asked the Warden why he never left the valley, why he didn’t get away from the prison and me and all the other ignorant young guards, and the bells across the lake and all the rest of it. He had years of leave time he had never used. He said “I would only meet more people” “You don’t like any sort of people?” I said. We were talking in a sort of joshing mode, so I could ask him that. “I wish I had been born a bird instead." he said "I wish we all had been born birds instead.”

it makes me cry

Kurt Vonnegut is amazing, call me a fan.

Kurt Vonnegut:

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”

Eight rules for writing fiction: 1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. 4) Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action. 5) Start as close to the end as possible. 6) Be a sadist. Now 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. 7) 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. 8) Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck 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.

– Kurt Vonnegut

Incredible

#Miniature Monday

Pandora's Box by  Peter & Donna Thomas

This is part of a series focusing on a small fraction of the lovely artists books by Peter and Donna Thomas!

Today's item is a scroll on a wooden frame that the makers compare to Pandora's Box-easy to open, but harder to put back! (Don't worry- I got it rolled back up again safely.)

When unrolled, it features a quotation from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five, which begins: "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres." The text is on a backdrop of green and blue linoleum cuts by Donna Thomas.

Peter and Donna Thomas are "book artists from Santa Cruz, CA. They work both collaboratively and individually; letterpress printing, hand-lettering and illustrating texts, making paper, and hand binding both fine press and artists’ books." They have made over 100 limited edition books, often with Peter making the paper, and Donna doing the illustrations.

Check out more of Donna and Peter's books at Uiowa here.

--Diane R., Special Collections Graduate Student

Kurt Vonnegut “Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death“