Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Contraire to James Earl Jones, writer Kurt Vonnegut told the seniors at Syracuse University to slow down. "I had a good uncle named Alex, who said, when life was most agreeable--and it could be just a pitcher of lemonade in the shade--he would say, 'If this isn't nice, what is?'...Now, if he hadn't said that so regularly, maybe five or six times a month, we might not have paused to notice how rewarding life can be sometimes...
...although Hart, in the booklet, writes that Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man cannot be excluded from any 20th century American literature class, he adds later that it would not be enough to graduate from college having read Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut and Ann Beattie...
...KURT VONNEGUT...
Society will pay a price for that. As the mass audience disperses, there will be fewer cultural reference points, less common ground. "We have nothing to share now," laments Vonnegut. "There are thousands of things that a person sitting at home can see that nobody else is seeing. We have become lonelier because we no longer have a few central works of art to discuss...
Television is almost always unsettling and amazing when one thinks about it. It imposes upon America a strange simultaneity, if not a unity. It makes for a coast-to-coast viewers' version of what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. called a granfalloon, a wholly artificial brotherhood. TV characters themselves, whatever good lines their writers give them, almost inevitably have the flat soulless quality of people dropped on earth and hatched from a pod. Maybe it's the electron dust on the screen...