Comments on: Vonnegut's letter to a book-burner

By: 666beast1

666beast1 — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:55:00 +0000

Don’t have children, do you? You will see them enact the story of Cain & Abel and the seven deadly sins with no examples and no book to learn it from.

By: tracemcjoy

tracemcjoy — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:51:00 +0000

That’s a misattribution of a quote from Freud. The original: “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”

By: ALEISBlogger

ALEISBlogger — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:05:00 +0000

Heaven help me, I work at that newspaper company. I /knew/ this was going to bite us in the ass the moment I saw it…

By: Lodewijk Gonggrijp

Lodewijk Gonggrijp — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:26:00 +0000

This world is so much poorer without Kurt in it.

By: doktorzoom

doktorzoom — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 04:59:00 +0000

Vonnegut published it in his 1981 collection Palm Sunday.

By: Stephen Rice

Stephen Rice — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 01:40:00 +0000

Yeah, it’s nothing to do with being sneaky. It’s the pre-email version of keeping a copy of emails you write in the Sent box.

It’s particularly important for postal mail because you might get a reply 6 months later and you’ll need a copy of your letter to understand what’s going on.

By: Stephen Rice

Stephen Rice — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 01:33:00 +0000

Yeah, there actually *is* a set of American values. They’re pretty good ones too.

By: Nagurski

Nagurski — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:21:00 +0000

A set of values, invented by the author or someone else, such as the ones embodied in the U.S. constitution, with it’s protections for speech, free expression, and other freedoms, perhaps?

By: Nagurski

Nagurski — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:16:00 +0000

I don’t imagine McCarthy was much of a reader, or had read the book. He most likely was just responding to parental freakout over dirty words in a wrongheaded, cowardly fashion.

By: allium

allium — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:10:00 +0000

So you’re saying Kurt Vonnegut didn’t invent the dingbat?

By: noah django

noah django — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:56:00 +0000

(*・_・)ノ⌒*

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:29:00 +0000

Thanks, it helps that i recently read about a rat study showing that increased use of antibioitics resulted in increased allergic response.

By: chgoliz

chgoliz — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Feline or female?

By: jimh

jimh — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 22:16:00 +0000

Sarcasm, I hope. But it’s your first comment, so I’m not so sure.

By: Patrick Tolle

Patrick Tolle — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:50:00 +0000

“Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. ”

What fucking bullshit! Vonnegut was no hero! What a typical American liberal pussy.

By: edgarhjelte

edgarhjelte — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:59:00 +0000

Using the term “un-American” implies that there is a set of values, invented by the author or someone else, that are “American values”, and it encourages the reader or listener to rush to the defense of these values, simply by invoking the magic word “American”. The true (American) patriot blindly follows, supposedly. The rest of us kindly asks the author to rely on proper arguments and stop waving flags around.

By: hypersomniac

hypersomniac — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:07:00 +0000

Rick Santorum will burn the internet down! For our children! For women’s reproductive non-rights!

By: noah django

noah django — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:02:00 +0000

I had assumed Vonnegut made the ol’ paper and carbon sandwich for his typewriter, which was pretty standard for many folk’s correspondence back then. It wasn’t considered sneaky if it was just for your personal file, I don’t think.
Off-topic, but if you go the Monticello (and all happy mutants should,) Jefferson built an awesome device to copy his pen-written correspondence in real-time. pic related. http://scitechantiques.com/resume/Jim_Jefferson_copier.jpg

By: noah django

noah django — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:52:00 +0000

awesome analogy! i’ll probably steal it at the first opportunity, consider this post proof that you get credit.

By: noah django

noah django — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:46:00 +0000

(*´ο`*)=3 はふぅん

By: Christopher

Christopher — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:12:00 +0000

I really appreciate all the above replies. If I’d stopped to think about it I would have realized that both the letter and the remark in the bar both seem very much like things Vonnegut would say.

The only difference is that the letter is from Vonnegut, whereas the bar remark may or may not be true. But I’ll continue telling the bar story as I always have, prefacing it with, “I like to think this is true…”

By: AlexG55

AlexG55 — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:46:00 +0000

I wonder how the text of that letter got into the anthology given that McCarthy apparently received “the only copy”. McCarthy must have kept it- did he give it to the publishers of the anthology? Did one of his descendants (by the time the book was published a quarter of a century after the book burning McCarthy might well have died)? Or did Vonnegut also keep a copy for his own records?

Actually, this applies to a lot of the letters in Letters of Note…

By: Jorpho

Jorpho — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:36:00 +0000

But Slaughterhouse Five has that giant drawing of boobies in it! (You can’t even pretend it’s something else, like that illustration in Breakfast of Champions!)

By: Ryan Lenethen

Ryan Lenethen — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:31:00 +0000

The first use of the term “un-American” I have seen in sometime that doesn’t seem a joke and seems to have a largely positive connotation, contrary to the use which is largely pretty negative and usually exclusionary based on some right wing ideology.

By: edgarhjelte

edgarhjelte — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:10:00 +0000

He was doing so well until the “un-American manner” phrase. It’s definitely on my top 10 list of stupid things to say.

By: bluest_one

bluest_one — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:53:00 +0000

It’s entirely consistent: Vonnegut is just looking on the bright side – “Could be worse! At least things are moving in the right direction.”

By: SamSam

SamSam — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:36:00 +0000

Here are the original Times articles about the event (links to previews, pdfs only if you're an online member, I think): NOVEL IS BURNED BY SCHOOL BOARD; Panel in Dakota Says Book by Vonnegut Is Obscene Dakota Town Dumfounded at Criticism of Book Burning by Order of the School Board; 'Mindless. Primitive Act' A Perennial Question Philosophy on Teaching Petition for Return

Drake at large is dumfounded and vaguely upset by the noteriety. "What did we do?" the town seems to be asking. "People are still sort of shaking their heads, like 'what happened?'" Galen Strand, pastor of the Drake Lutheran Church, said yesterday.

Amazing.

By: DeargDoom

DeargDoom — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:52:00 +0000

I can only assume that quote predates the existance of The Da Vinci Code.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:50:00 +0000

I a sense, keeping kids away from various experiences have much the same effect as overly cleanliness has on the development of allergies.

By: raki

raki — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:47:00 +0000

I don’t think the letter and his comment about how civilized we’ve become are contradictory. Burning books instead of people, step in the right direction. Not burning books, the next step.