A Letter From Kurt Vonnegut to Charles McCarthy, read by RM.

In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school’s furnace as a result of its “obscene language.” Other books soon met with the same fate.

On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn’t receive a reply.

Give it a listen.

(http://viciousminuteshour.com)

A Letter From Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, read by RM. 

Franz Kafka sent many love letters to Felice Bauer (1887-1960), with whom he was engaged to be married several times (he met her in 1912, and he sometimes sent her several letters a day—all to her place of employment, Carl Lindstrom Parlograph Company). The relationship finally ended when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917.

Here is one of those letters.

(http://viciousminuteshour.com) 

A Letter From Nikola Tesla To The American Red Cross, read by RM. 

In the summer of 1899, while alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he described as “counting codes.” Having just detected cosmic radio signals for the first time, Tesla immediately believed them to be attempted communications from an intelligent life-form on either Venus or Mars, and later said of the experience, “The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.”

The next year, Tesla was asked by the Red Cross to predict man’s greatest possible achievement over the next century. This was his reply.

Give it a listen.

(http://viciousminuteshour.com)

A Letter From Iggy Pop To A Fan Named Laurence, read by RM. 

It took nine months for Iggy Pop to reply to then-21-year-old Laurence’s fan letter, but really the timing couldn’t have been more perfect as on the morning his thoughtful note did arrive at her home in Paris, Laurence’s family were being evicted by bailiffs. Laurence recalls that moment back in 1995:

“By the time I finished I was in tears. Not only had Iggy Pop received the letter I had sent him nine months before, and I could have missed his if he’d sent it a day later, but he had read the whole ‘fucking’ 20 pages, including the bit about my Adidas dress (a semi-innocent allusion on my part), and all the rest, my description of being the child of an acrimonious divorce with the string of social workers, lawyers, greedy estate agents and bailiffs at the door, the fear, the anger, the frustration, the love.”

Although understandably brief, Iggy’s empathetic, handwritten letter addressed Laurence’s problems with both grace and eloquence, and really can’t be praised enough. 

Give it a listen.

(http://viciousminuteshour.com) 

‘Mind & Heart,’ a poem by Charles Bukowski, read by RM.

‘May I Feel Said He,’ a poem by E.E. Cummings, read by RM.

‘Every Day You Play,’ a poem by Pablo Neruda, read by RM.

‘Like This,’ a poem by Rumi, read by RM.

An Excerpt from ‘Infinite Jest,’ written by David Foster Wallace, read by RM.

An Excerpt from ‘Prozac Nation,’ written by Elizabeth Wurtzel, read by RM.