Tag Archives: World War II

Ilium, Iowa City: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five

October 23, 2013 For someone interested in the twentieth-century epic, Slaughterhouse Five is a no-brainer.  How else would one call a story set in Ilium, talking about war, about death and the counterfactual? But did I ever stop to think about … Continue reading

Posted in Boostores, Cities, Climate change, Contemporary novel, Environmentalism, epic, public universities, Science fiction, Twentieth century literature | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

On Carl Sandburg’s “Buttons”

“Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?” wonders Elizabeth Bishop in her whimsical poem “The Map” (1946). It’s an odd sort of utopian fantasy, where the land and sea, once depicted by the map-maker, produce their own … Continue reading

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Guns in Connecticut: Wallace Stevens

December 19, 2012 No, he only worked for insurance companies, but Hartford does have an exceptionally high concentration of gun manufacturers.  Colt, founded in 1845, has its headquarters here.  The U.S. Firearms Manufacturing Co., the Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Co., Savage … Continue reading

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Louise Erdrich, Kurt Vonnegut: Germany’s Wars

November 21, 2012 There is a longer title to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel: “Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too … Continue reading

Posted in Atlantic, Cities, Contemporary novel, Ethnicity, French language, German language, mixed races, Native American language, Native-American literature, Race, Vernacular dialects, Wars, World history | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment