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R.Wreck
SFN Regular
USA
1191 Posts |
 Posted - 04/12/2007 : 15:21:11 [Permalink]
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Kurt Vonnegut will be missed, from here to Trafalmadore.
But as Mother Nature sometimes seems to try to even things out, she took Johnny Hart too.
quote:
Johnny's B.C. characters live in a world where dinosaurs rush to get ready for Noah's Ark, where 'primitive' people give thanks to God before their meals, and where cave–men philosophers discuss creation and evolution.
Johnny can't remember when he first introduced creation/evolution themes into his comic strips. But as a Bible–believer he doesn't accept evolution.
'I believe the Bible is the Word of God,' he said, 'and I see all the foolishness in evolution theory. The main thing of course is that evolutionists have never come up with one indisputable piece of evidence. The top one is the “missing link”. Something is always missing. The absurdity of it all is beyond reason.'
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The foundation of morality is to . . . give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibliities of knowledge.
T. H. Huxley
The Cattle Prod of Enlightened Compassion
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Randy
SFN Regular
USA
1990 Posts |
Posted - 04/12/2007 : 17:28:05 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by R.Wreck
Kurt Vonnegut will be missed, from here to Trafalmadore.
True, true. Vonnegut has now become stuck in time. |
"We are all connected; to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomically."
"So you're made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?"
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson |
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Ghost_Skeptic
SFN Regular
Canada
510 Posts |
Posted - 04/13/2007 : 23:46:47 [Permalink]
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Slaughterhouse Five was my introduction to Kurt Vonnegut.
Here is an interview of Kurt from February of last yeer (Real Audio Format) |
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. / You can send a kid to college but you can't make him think." - B.B. King
History is made by stupid people - The Arrogant Worms
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism." - William Osler
"Religion is the natural home of the psychopath" - Pat Condell
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" - Thomas Jefferson |
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RonPrice
New Member
Australia
2 Posts |
Posted - 04/14/2007 : 22:52:11 [Permalink]
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A Quasi-Eulogy in Memory of Kurt Vonnegut:
_____________________
In 1959, the year I joined the Baha'i Faith, the year I turned 15, Kurt Vonnegut published his second novel The Sirens of Titan. By the late 1960s this novel had become a cult-book of the counter-culture. The genre is novel, sci-fi, space-opera, black humour, satire and fabulation. The story-line, the narrative is based on a world where machines have taken over. The story is told by a future historian. Faith in science, technology and progress is undermined as is humankind's ability to shape its future. Vonnegut questions the very nature of reality and argues that individuals have the ineluctable responsibility to make meaning out of their lives by looking within not without at organized religions. Looking back after more than forty years, I would place Vonnegut among the first of a "New Wave" of science fiction writers who appeared in the 1960s and who have inhabited one of the many backdrops of my life.-Ron Price with thanks to Herbert G. Klein, "Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan and the Question of Genre," EESE 5/98.
I had heard those enchanting sirens1
back in the fifties; little did I know
about their sharp rocks, the perils
of chronic and committed rapture,
growing dedication, deeper belief--
that would be later.
I've seen many draw near
to those voices and, yes,
I've seen them shipwrecked.
For these sirens were daughters
(so the myth goes)2 of the sea
and river gods, Nymphs partly
bird and partly human.
Yes, their voices enchant,
but be warned: this journey
to their island home is not
for the timid & overwrought,
not for the vainly pious,
the pusillanimous of spirit,
not for those who think this
is some kind of vacation,
who seem somehow to have
missed the point that:
this ardent, often tiring, voyage
on this unvariable storm-lashed brig
with the unseasonable rains,
the sweet song of the dove,
the bird, the clear beauty
of the siren's notes is mostly distant,
on some far-off island, faintly heard,
but they sweep me out to sea
and in full consent I drown,
though I do not like all the journey.3
I wish you well, Kurt, in your journey
which, as Shelley called it, now goes
to that undiscovered country.
____________________________
1 I first heard the Baha'i Writings in the years 1953 to 1959. These are the sirens, for me.
2 This poem also draws on the Greek myth of the Sirens, part bird and part human.
3 I thank Roger White and his poems "Parable for the Wrong People" and "Sightseeing"(Pebbles, pp.69-75) for some of his phraseology.
Ron Price
December 20th 2004
Updated: 13/4/07.
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married, teacher, living in Australia and a Baha'i--all for more than 30 years. |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 04/15/2007 : 03:33:17 [Permalink]
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Welcome to SFN, Ron! Great to see someone even older than my 61 years here. I think you may even have Filthy beat.
Thank you for the poem.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 04/15/2007 03:33:37 |
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Kurt Vonnegut dead at age 84
