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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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/3152886/WITH-LEGAL---53-million-Securitas-Robbery-orchestrated-by-two-cage-fighters.html
The full headline explains why the story has been selected -
£53 million Securitas Robbery orchestrated by two cage fighters
Thanks for noticing our humble class blog. The writing on the blog is by students at Thomas More College (in Crestview Hills, Kentucky, USA) who are enrolled in a first year seminar class called "Listening to the Silence: John Cage and Experimental Music." On an Overgrown Path is, of course, on our required reading list. Indeed, the many thoughtful posts on Cage I found on this blog were a major source of inspiration for the course syllabus.
Best,
Jerome Langguth