By now we've all heard that Kurt Vonnegut is dead. I'm sure I'm not the only person at WFMU who has been profoundly influenced by his writing. Like many other teenagers, my formative years were spent reading just about everything he ever wrote. When my twin brother and I moved away from home and divided up our belongings, we fought bitterly over just two things: our jazz CDs and our Vonnegut books. This morning, Salon.com posted an excerpt from the first audiobook release of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Listen (2.6 MB MP3)
And here are two MP3s from Dave Soldier's Ice-9 Ballads album, with voiceover by Mr. Vonnegut:
"Duo For Clarinet And Meade Lux" (3MB MP3)
"Annihilation Life" (1MB MP3)
check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DCE9B94B97882DC9
Posted by: Pacal | April 12, 2007 at 01:48 PM
KV was a novelist without parallel, and thankfully we (and future generations of young questioners) will always have his books to be enlightened and educated by.
What I feel we'll miss the most about him however, is his unflinching and unapologetic secular humanism and support for what is *right*. His intellect gave me courage to think hard, and to believe in life on this planet -- and in this world. There are too few public intellectuals today as it is, and fewer still with his courage.
"We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community." -KV
Posted by: kr | April 12, 2007 at 02:03 PM
The above linked videos are well worth the view, even if it's just of 1981 New York. And so it goes.
Posted by: Mac | April 12, 2007 at 11:04 PM
Same Dave Soldier, I believe, as of the Thai Elephant Orchestra and People's Choice Music projects. Then there's the SoCal prog-rock pop band, Ambrosia, who's 1975 song "Nice, Nice, Very Nice" put Kurt's couplet from Cat's Cradle to music.
Posted by: Barrett Golding | April 13, 2007 at 09:13 PM