In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
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You are of course right - my error entirely.
I've now amended the post.
It is now 11.20pm in Norfolk and we've just returned from a concert. The sky is completely clear of cloud, and we have probably the best view we've ever had of a lunar eclipse.
And an awful lot of people are arriving On An Overgrown Path via Google searches for 'lunar eclipse'. I hope they enjoy the theremin story, and return for more.
Theremin and variations on the moon
There's no lunar eclipse in this entry.
Oops. I guess now there is.
By the way, I'm still not sure that the guy sitting with Varese is James Seawright. Jim is known now more for his kinetic sculpture.
It was 50 years ago, but it doesn't look like him, so it could have been some smartly dressed Phillips engineer. I've seen that photo so many times, but I always assumed it was Jim, whom I met in the mid 60's when I lived in NYC and made some visits to the Columbia-Princeton studio. I'll probably research it further until I've satisfied my curiosity.