Word: men
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Backward Film. Vonnegut's view of man is not new. Indeed he sometimes sounds eerily like the 16th century mystic Sebastian Franck. Appalled by the cruelties men worked upon one another in the name of religion during the Reformation, Franck wrote: "Whoever looks at mankind seriously may break his heart with weeping." Then he added: "We are all laughingstocks, fables and carnival farces before God." Formal belief in God seems to have no part in Vonnegut's philosophy, though in Slaughterhouse-Five he does suggest that the story of the Crucifixion would be more appealing if Jesus...
Vonnegut's eloquent concern transforms something as pedestrian as a war movie, seen back to front, into a vision, which in its weird way is as effective as any short passage ever written against war: "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. . . .The bombers opened their bomb-bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted...
...Many critics profess to do so as a man will say he "loves children," but the truth of such claims can be tested by the question: how often is he seen playing with children? Like Joyce, Burgess loves to play with words, the greatest of toys allowed to grown men. English is not enough; he can play in Russian, German, Spanish and Malay, and this gives him the insight of a craft-brother to a hundred writers who have little in common but the gift and the love...
During the raid, a number of the surburban police wore no badges. A Somerville police officer said that his men had been instructed to remove their badges during the period of the raid...
...that the administration called the police, they gave us the chance to have a taste of what outside society (might we call it the "real world"?) is like; we had a slight exposure to the suffering that black men, or coal miners, or striking factory workers, or draftees face every day. Rather than condemn the University administration, I think we should actually be grateful to them for giving us perhaps the most valid educational experience we could have had during all our years here. Barbara Brandt Research assistant, Graduate School of Design