American literary idol Kurt Vonnegut, best known for such classic novels as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle,” died on Tuesday night in Manhattan at age 84, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Longtime family friend, Morgan Entrekin, who reported Vonnegut’s death, said the writer had suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, the newspaper reported.
Month: April 2007
John Marco, who I interviewed for the second issue of Kaleidotrope, is holding a contest for three free copies of his upcoming fantasy anthology, Army of the Fantastic. The book features thirteen stories about fantastical armies from writers like Tanya Huff, Alan Dean Foster, and Tim Waggoner, and it looks like a lot of fun. Drop John a line for your chance to win a copy!
I’ve been going through my “to read later” links (now somewhere in the low triple digits) and actually reading some of them. With that in mind, some quotes from some of the interviews I’ve apparently been stockpiling…
Do rock and pop mean different things to you know than they did at the time of the last Who album 24 years ago? If so, what has changed?
It is still the same, amazingly. It is music with a clear function. But so was the music that came before the late 50s. My father’s swing music was meant to soothe and encourage optimism and the possibility of postwar romance. My music is meant to confront trouble and pain, and through union and sharing (congregation) allow us to “dance” to a solution. I feel my music would be less valuable if there was a real world war. We would need different music then, maybe more like the music my father used to play.
You know, there was a time when they said painting was dead. Painting ain’t never gonna be dead. No medium is gonna be dead! Infinite possibilities, always surprises coming along. There are not that many surprises in a formula, an arc. Some solid entertainment, nothing wrong with it. But there’s room for much, much more. And let’s not miss out on the much more.
I was very uncomfortable with the way that some people, particularly journalists who like very, very simple stories, were starting to view my move from comics to films to best-selling novels… it was resembling those little evolutionary maps too much, where you see the fish, and then it can walk, and then it’s an ape and then it gets up on its hind legs and finally it is a man. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the fact that there was something rather amphibious about me—at least in their heads—back when I was writing comics. So I like continuing to write comics, if only because it points out that I haven’t just started to walk upright or left the water. Actually I don’t think it’s any kind of progression. It’s just a different kind of story told in a different kind of way.
There will, I’m quite sure, be more at some point. I’m really make a concentrated effort to prune away some of the excess and old links from my saved newsfeeds, but there’s always, always more.
From an interview with Matt Damon, in which he discusses briefly the The Brothers Grimm and the arguments between director Terry Gilliam and producer Harvey Weinstein over the prosthetic nose that Gilliam insited Damon be allowed to wear:
“I think this is a good story,” [Damon] says with a laugh. “In the course of their arguments Harvey said, ‘I’m not going to have the star of my movie unrecognisable, because you can’t put him on the poster — nobody will know who it is.’ Terry Gilliam and (Ocean’s series director) Steven Soderbergh are friendly and for Ocean’s Thirteen Steven wrote in a whole thing where Linus, my character, wears a fake nose.
I’ve yet to see The Brothers Grimm but, from what I understand, a fake nose alone wouldn’t have fixed what’s wrong with it.
You know, this has occurred to me before while watching Lost, but it came up again with last week’s episode (which I just watched last night), and I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the show, necessarily, but I think it’s definitely an issue. The thing is this: for us, the viewers, the events of the show have taken place over the course of three years, so we’re understandably impatient for answers, resolutions. Yet, for the characters, these events have taken place over the course of weeks, at most a few short months. While I’m not convinced the show repeats very well — I really haven’t felt compelled to explore my first-season DVD set beyond its extras, for instance — I wonder if it might not fare better, pacing-wise, when seen as one big block — when, that is, experienced in something closer to the timeframe in which the characters experience them.
Then again, there are plenty of other issues and potential problems at work with Lost. Still, I can’t help but feel that part of our frustration, sometimes, as viewers is that we feel like we’ve been on the island longer than we actually have.
Does that even make sense?