I like Kurt Vonnegut not only for his humorous and imaginative novels and short stories but also for his politics, his values. Not only has he added his name to many a worthy petition and appeared on many a plstform, but when The Nation, the oldest news weekly magazine in the USA, was in financial trouble, Vonnegut, Doctorow, Vidal and other writers bailed them out without demanding editorial control. This collection represents something of where Vonnegut came from and what he believed in, much of it, in my opinion, simple common sense informed by humane sympathy.

Turns out I like Vonnegut’s fiction a lot more than his nonfiction. That’s not completely true. The first few entries, the last, and an occasional short one in the middle were all worthwhile. So much of the middle was Vonnegut with all of his cynicism and none of his humor. But it is his humor that makes him thought-provoking. Without it, it comes off as whining and unoriginal.

This is the first collection of non-fiction I have read by Vonnegut. It will not be the last.

На Вонегът вярвах безрезервно в наивната си младост, някъде в началото на 90-те на миналия век.

Днес неговите есета и интервюто му за "Плейбой" леко ме смутиха. Никога няма да отрека, че Вонегът има пълно и безусловно право да мисли и провокира идеите, които споделя - той си го е заслужил поради дългите години усилия на четенето с разбиране и аналитичност.
Ала у него открих онази наченка, с която сега - днес, се вихри безскрупулна информационна мъгла, провокираща конспиративни теории и настройваща хора срещу хора!

"Tutti gli artisti sono cellule specializzate all'interno di un unico, enorme organismo, il genere umano. [...] Il nostro intento è rendere il genere umano consapevole di se stesso, in tutta la sua complessità, e fargli sognare i suoi sogni." (Discorso alla conferenza del PEN, 1973, p. 152)

This collection of nonfiction demonstrates amply why so many people fall headlong in love with Vonnegut—all aspects of his cranky humanity, his unimpeachable morality, his hard-won cynicism are on show over these twenty-five pieces. The title isn’t particularly catchy: readers of Cat’s Cradle will recognise the terms which Vonnegut says represent his dabblings in nonfiction. Not so. Among the brilliance here includes his take on SF as a literary art, his ornery take on the moon landing and a loving portrayal of mystic Madame Blavatsky. The subtitle here is ‘opinions,’ and fierier pieces include ‘In a Manner That Must Shame God Himself’ which napalms the Nixon presidency, a provocative piece on Nigeria ‘Biafra: A People Betrayed,’ and a brief homage to Hunter S. Thompson ‘A Political Disease,’ where Vonnegut invents Thompson’s Disease for those betrayed by their leaders to the point of mental collapse (Thompson cured himself of his disease with a shotgun in 2005. So it goes). The inclusion of several public speeches and throwaway shavings detract from the urgency somewhat, but the Playboy interview ends the collection on a marvellously lucid note. Ah, the days Playboy was a respected literary organ! I hope Nicole Ritchie’s favourite book is Slaughterhouse-Five, I really do. A must-read for ALL Vonnegut fans. That’s you!

"And it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is an implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can always be solved. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry - or laugh."

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1964 - 1974) is - as Kurt Vonnegut describes it himself - "a collection of some of the reviews and essays I have written, a few speeches I have made." This very uneven collection, in which the "meh" pieces overshadow the interesting ones, is a rather disappointing mix of deep insights, well-aimed bitter sarcasm, trademark Vonnegut's pessimism, aimless ramblings, and even outright failed pieces of writing.

One of the best essays, Excelsior! We're Going to the Moon! Excelsior!, is about the space program, its tremendous costs and meager benefits. More importantly, though, it is about profanation of great human ideas and iconic symbols of progress by commercialism through "schlock merchandising schemes" of advertising. I also like the Address to Graduating Class at Bennington College, 1970. It is a well argued, grim manifesto of pessimism that contains statements like "Everything is going to become unimaginably worse, and never get better again", where the objects of author's sarcasm are well deserving of scorn. The piece about the war in Biafra is, in turn, extremely serious, dramatic, and as moving as the unforgettable n  Slaughterhouse Fiven

The story Teaching the Unteachable satirizes summer writing schools; Mr. Vonnegut, who was an instructor at one of these schools, states the obvious "You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do." On the other hand, I am completely unable to "get" the short play Fortitude that features, among others, a Dr. Frankenstein. As much as I have been trying to give the benefit of doubt to one of my favorite writers, I don't think the text makes much sense. One of the pieces in the collection is Mr. Vonnegut's interview for the Playboy magazine. Playboy used to have some top-notch conversations with famous people, alas the one here, rambling, unfocused, and superficial, is certainly not one of them. The Mysterious Madame Blavatsky is another aimless piece.

So while I agree with Mr. Vonnegut's deeply pessimistic opinion about many aspects of our society, primarily about the commercialism that soils every lofty idea it encounters, I am unable to recommend the collection. Let's at least end with another neat quote:

"Earth is such a pretty blue and pink and white pearl in the pictures NASA sent me. It looks so *clean*. You can't see all the hungry, angry Earthlings down there - and the smoke and the sewage and trash and sophisticated weaponry."

Two stars.

Okay, indrømmet min faible for at læse essaysamlinger og non-fiktion af mine yndlingsforfattere var ved at give bagslag her.

Der er simpelthen løbet for meget vand i åen, siden det er skrevet. Det er for specifikt i tid og sted. Det hele handler om en verden, jeg aldrig har været en del af og aldrig vil blive en del af. Mit relevanskriterie var stærkt presset hele vejen igennem.

Så er der den anden og straks værre opdagelse. Vonnegut er ikke en synderligt god taler. Han er ufokuseret, bagvendt og sludrevorn. Jeg forestiller mig at publikum har været underholdt, men rundforvirrede ovenpå hans opvisning i brudstykker og halvbagte finurligheder.

Men den sidste tekst frelste heldigvis læseoplevelsen. Et fyrre sider langt interview med Playboy. Det er et umanerligt godt interview med en tydeligt velforberedt spørger, der formår at fastholde Vonneguts popcornhjerne og udfordrer ham til at sige noget sammenhængende. Hvis du falder over det interview, så læs det, men undgå resten af teksterne fra Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons.

I liked it. It's hard to rate an essay collection. Some of it was interesting and some of it was boring. In general I just love Kurt Vonnegut. God bless him.

I can gobble up any Vonnegut; killer little lines throughout, although certain parts are fully skippable. probably closer to 4 than 3 but idk

Favorite Quotes:
“I am reminded now, as I think about news and fiction, of a demonstration of the difference between noise and melody which I saw and heard in a freshman physics lecture at Cornell University so long ago. (Freshman physics is invariably the most satisfying course offered by any American university.) The professor threw a narrow board, which was about the length of a bayonet, at the wall of the room, which was cinder block. “That’s noise,” he said.

Then he picked up seven more boards, and he threw them against the wall in rapid succession, as though he were a knife-thrower. The boards in sequence sang the opening notes of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” I was enchanted.

“That’s melody,” he said.

And fiction is melody, and journalism, new or old, is noise.”

“This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. they also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.”

“At a minimum, those damaged children, at the exact middle of the Universe, will be more honorable than Richard M. Nixon and more observant than God. Mr. Nixon himself is a minor character in this book. He is the first President to hate the American people and all they stand for.”

“My longer-range schemes have to do with providing all Americans with artificial extended families of a thousand members or more. Only when we have overcome loneliness can we begin to share wealth and work more fairly. I honestly believe that we will have those families by-and-by, and I hope they will become international.”

“There was nothing at all sinful in Dr. Fieser’s creation of napalm. Scientists will never be so innocent again. Any young scientist, by contrast, when asked by the military to create a terror weapon on the order of napalm, is bound to suspect that he may be committing modern sin. God bless him for that.”

“Kids don’t learn nice manners in high school anymore. If they met a person who was in favor of building a device which would cripple and finally kill all children everywhere, they wouldn’t smile. They would bristle with hatred, which is rude.”

“A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly the lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness.”

“When it really is time for you to save the world, when you have some power and know your way around, when people can’t mock you for looking so young, I suggest that you work for a socialist form of government. Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on people nobody likes. They just can’t cut the mustard under Free Enterprise. They lack that certain something that Nelson Rockefeller, for instance, so abundantly has.

So let’s divide up the wealth more fairly than we have divided it up so far. Let’s make sure that everybody has enough to eat, and a decent place to live, and medical help when he needs it. Let’s stop spending money on weapons, which don’t work anyway, thank God, and spend money on each other. It isn’t moonbeams to talk of modest plenty for all. They have it in Sweden. We can have it here.”

“When I think about my own death, I don’t console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by. I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again. This moment and every moment lasts forever.”

“The Vietnamese are impoverished farmers, far, far away. The Winners in America have had them bombed and shot day in and day out, for years on end. This is not madness or foolishness, as some people have suggested. It is a way for the Winners to learn how to be pitiless. They understand that the material resources of the planet are almost exhausted, and that pity will soon be a form of suicide.

The Winners are rehearsing for Things to Come.”

“Almost every war ends, properly, with its veterans feeling deceived and pointless and gullible, with their being persuaded that all participants were equally vile. It wasn’t so with American veterans in World War Two—and British veterans and Canadian veterans and Australian veterans and Frenchmen who had fought on our side—and so on. We would have said the Nazis were evil in any event, since we had decided to fight them. That has always been the style in war, until very recently, anyhow: to declare the enemy evil—in order that we can be frenzied on the battlefield. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that our German enemies really were satanic this time. They had been accused of making soap and candles out of human beings in the First World War. They really did it in the second one. We had fought something which was totally obscene.

This was very bad for us. We were empty-headed children in that war, as all ground soldiers are. Anything could be put in our heads and we would believe it. And one idea that was put into our heads was that our enemies were so awful, so evil, that we, by contrast, must be remarkably pure. That illusion of purity, to which we were entitled in a way, has become our curse today. And I celebrate your having a library because it is the memory of mankind. It reminds us that all human beings are to a certain extent impure.

To put it another way: All human beings are to some extent greedy and cruel—and angry without cause. Here I am, due to become fifty years old two days from now. I have imagined during most of that half century that I was responding to life around me as a just and sensitive man, blowing my cork with good reason from time to time. Only recently, with the help of a physician, have I realized that I have blown my cork every twenty days, no matter what is really going on. I become cruel—and I become angry without cause. This is the evil in me. Lest I make some of you nervous, let me assure you that Vesuvius is not due to erupt for another six days.

I am not pure. We are not pure. Our nation is not pure. And I insist that at the core of the American tragedy, best exemplified by the massacre of civilians at My Lai, is the illusion engendered by World War Two: that in the war between good and evil we are always, perfectly naturally, on the side of good. This is what makes us so unrestrained in the uses of weaponry.”

“Fiction is harmless. Fiction is so much hot air.

The Vietnam war has proved this. Virtually every American fiction writer was against our participation in that civil war. We all raised hell about the war for years and years—with novels and poems and plays and short stories. We dropped on our complacent society the literary equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.

I will now report to you the power of such a bomb. It has the explosive force of a very large banana-cream pie—a pie two meters in diameter, twenty centimeters thick, and dropped from a height of ten meters or more. My own feeling is that we should turn this awesome weapon over to the United Nations, or to some other international peacekeeping organization, such as the C.I.A.”

“While it is true that we American fiction writers failed to modify the course of the war, we have reason to suspect that we have poisoned the minds of thousands or perhaps millions of American young people. Our hope is that the poison will make them worse than useless in unjust wars.

We shall see.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don’t read or think much—who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.”

“Until recent times, you know, human beings usually had a permanent community of relatives. They had dozens of homes to go to. So when a married couple had a fight, one or the other could go to a house three doors down and stay with a close relative until he was feeling tender again. Or if a kid got so fed up with his parents that he couldn’t stand it, he could march over to his uncle’s for a while. And this is no longer possible. Each family is locked into its little box. The neighbors aren’t relatives. There aren’t other houses where people can go and be cared for. When Nixon is pondering what’s happening to America—“Where have the old values gone?” and all that—the answer is perfectly simple. We’re lonesome. We don’t have enough friends or relatives anymore. And we would if we lived in real communities.”

“VONNEGUT: … For a community really to work, you shouldn’t have to wonder what the person next to you is thinking. That is a primitive society. In the communities of strangers that are being hammered together now, as young people take over farms and try to live communally, the founders are sure to have hellish differences. But their children, if the communes hold together long enough to raise children, will be more comfortable together, will have more attitudes and experiences in common, will be more like genuine relatives.

PLAYBOY: Have you done any research on this?

VONNEGUT: No. I’m afraid to. I might find out it wasn’t true. It’s a sunny little dream I have of a happier mankind. I couldn’t survive my own pessimism if I didn’t have some kind of sunny little dream. That’s mine, and don’t tell me I’m wrong: Human beings will be happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia. That’s what I want for me.”

“Our generation did believe what its Government said—because we weren’t lied to very much. One reason we weren’t lied to was that there wasn’t a war going on in our childhood, and so essentially we were told the truth. There was no reason for our Government to lie very elaborately to us. But a government at war does become a lying government for many reasons.”

“The American audience doesn’t care about an actor’s private life, doesn’t want his show continued simply because he’s honorable and truthful and has the best interests of the nation at heart in private life. Only one thing matters: Can he jazz us up on camera? This is a national tragedy, of course—that we’ve changed from a society to an audience. And poor McGovern did what any actor would have done with a failing show. He blamed the scripts, junked a lot of his old material, which was actually beautiful, called for new material, which was actually old material that other performers had had some luck with. He probably couldn’t have won, though, even if he had been Clark Gable. His opponent had too powerful an issue: the terror and guilt and hatred white people feel for the descendants of victims of an unbelievable crime we committed not long ago—human slavery. How’s that for science fiction? There was this modern country with a wonderful Constitution, and it kidnaped human beings and used them as machines. It stopped it after a while, but by then it had millions of descendants of those kidnaped people all over the country. What if they turned out to be so human that they wanted revenge of some kind? McGovern’s opinion was that they should be treated like anybody else. It was the opinion of the white electorate that this was a dangerous thing to do.”

“I was invited to submit ideas to the McGovern campaign. Nothing was done with my suggestions. I wanted Sarge Shriver to say, “You’re not happy, are you? Nobody in this country is happy but the rich people. Something is wrong. I’ll tell you what’s wrong: We’re lonesome! We’re being kept apart from our neighbors. Why? Because the rich people can go on taking our money away if we don’t hang together. They can go on taking our power away. They want us lonesome; they want us huddled in our houses with just our wives and kids, watching television, because they can manipulate us then. They can make us buy anything, they can make us vote any way they want. How did Americans beat the Great Depression? We banded together. In those days, members of unions called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’ and they meant it. We’re going to bring that spirit back. Brother and sister! We’re going to vote in George McGovern, and then we’re going to get this country on the road again. We are going to band together with our neighbors to clean up our neighborhoods, to get the crooks out of the unions, to get the prices down in the meat markets. Here’s a war cry for the American people: ‘Lonesome no more!’ ” That’s the kind of demagoguery I approve of”

Very weak collection of barrel-scrapings. All but one are non-fiction, which I prefer to short stories and made me fancy this, but the Playboy interview and piece on Biafra aside there's nothing of consequence or interest here. Very disappointing.

This was a pleasant surprise of a book. After reading Palm Sunday and other of Vonnegut's essays and lectures, I found this volume to be much more poignant, more readable, more full of Vonnegut's core as a philosopher and commentator on war, civilization, and the arts. If a person wanted to venture beyond his fiction, this and Man Without a Country would be solid starting points.