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
Comments
It's not as if the whole farrago had already been seen and dismissed in the UK two or three years ago, in - oh, I don't know, some provincial backwater like, erm, Cardiff. Presumably none of our world-class London commentators managed to make the trip that time. Or maybe they just don't read reviews of events at no-mark hicksville venues like the Wales Millennium Centre.
We provincials have our uses. We could have saved them the expense of buying four expensive tickets, for starters...
I did a guest spot on a BBC Radio 5 Live chat show about the Proms the other night. I was sat alone in the BBC studios in Norwich, everyone else was in the London.
When I mentioned the excellent Les Orientales festival in France the BBC presenter sneered at me, saying not many people can afford to go to French music festivals.
Actually they can. If, like me, you live more than a hundred miles from London (or in Cardiff even), going to a Prom involves a night in a London hotel.
I can currently get my car and two people across the Channel and back for half the price of a London hotel room which comes without breakfast, but does come with black mould in the shower and burn marks in the carpet.
The media, and the BBC in particular, think that London is the beginning and end of the classical music world. They are missing a lot as a result.