Vonnegut sure is a “quotable” guy, with a profound sense of sobriety and humor that transforms him, in essay form, into an omniscient trickster, all knowing and blasé with his wisdoms, refusing to even define then as such. “I just thought it was funny lol” is itself the standard defense for this type of prophet, a holy fool, who is ultimately trying to fight back against an unerring parade of preposterous internal melodrama to try to craft it into something meaningful, or at the very least entertaining.

As put in the 1970 graduation address at Bennington College, “Only in superstition there is hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.”

Despite or even because of this, he’s startling in his earnestness, especially as he ages. He knows intimately that there is something fundamentally wrong, and rather than devolve overtly into freakish paranoia, he sublimates that paranoia to extract dappled chunks of rhythm from universal cues. It’s a sharp and jagged rhythm, fluid and perfect, incompatible with all things dense and stubborn.

I’m particularly obsessed with his clarity on time — from Reflections On My Own Death: “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.”

And from that deranged, fantastic Playboy interview at the very end of the book:
“VONNEGUT: Well, we do live our lives simultaneously. That's a fact. You are here as a child and as an old man. recently visited a woman who has Hodgkin's disease. She has somewhere between a few months and a couple of years to live, and she told me that she was living her life simultaneously now, living all the moments of it.
PLAYBOY: It still seems paradoxical.
VONNEGUT: That's because what I've just said to you is horseshit.”

Truer words never spoken! And that’s not even touching his more specific anthropological observations of a psychotic mid-century America. Anyway, this interview in and of itself is worth reading if nothing else, but I do recommend you read the rest, and in order. Gotta agree with this NY Times on this one, god bless you Mr. Vonnegut!

....ooooo....opinions.....

give it a shot. you get some idea of vonnegut, the man, where he came from, what his obsessions include, what he ignores and so you wonder why...he had a sheepdog named sandy. sandy sounds like an interesting dog. he took a trip down the inter-coastal waterway aboard a yacht owned by joe kennedy...the trip consumed 1,522 gallons of gasoline and elsewhere vonnegut worries about the planet, all we're consuming. and so on.

interesting tale about biafra...he went there w/vance bourjaily and some woman i forget her name, miriam reik, or something like that, daughter of someone famous. people were busy killing one another and the rest of the world was helping one side or another but by and by it was one side doing the majority...course, at the time, the u.s.a. was in vietnam so we are the great satan, nevermind events in biafra. ho hum.

a bunch of interesting (or not) trivia...louis-ferdinand celine, this french guy...heh heh...died on the same day as ernest hemingway, jul 1st '61.

quote from the playboy interview: vietnam made it clear that the ordinary citizen had no way to approach his government, not even by civil disobedience or by mass demonstration.

things haven't changed...

I’ve been picking this book up every so often and reading a touch of dated wit that left me with a chuckle and little else. This isn’t entirely the book’s fault- my memory is sieve when teaching! So this is a worthwhile read as a historical doc and a good thought tool; I was marked by the prophetic nature of the final interview. This man was more important than history is allowing I think.

I think it should be obvious from a brief survey of my 'read' shelf that I'm a bit of a Vonnegut fan. Nonetheless, I wasn't initially all THAT enthusiastic about this when I picked it out for my summer reading this year: I've scraped the bottom of the barrel of Vonnegut's fiction and wasn't looking forward to a whole book of nonfiction. And then I actually read it.

As was the case with While Mortals Sleep, I felt like Vonnegut is still Vonnegut outside of his and his accustomed fans' literary comfort zone and it's interesting to see what he does with it. 'Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway,' for instance, was a really fun piece of narrative nonfiction.

Most of the book, though, is not like that. Most of it consists in either journalistic reviews and commentary on current events: in other words, opinion pieces of one kind or another. And whenever you read a big selection of other people's opinions, there are going to be some clunkers.

The opening selection of the book, 'Science Fiction,' is an example. While I appreciate Vonnegut's giving literary snobs who look down on science fiction a dressing-down, I feel like he has more than a little bit of that snobbery himself, especially in the way he denies any of his own work is science fiction. Look, Vonnegut was not himself a science fiction author per se, because too much of his work isn't science fiction: Bluebeard, Mother Night, and a huge chunk of his short stories, for instance; Breakfast of Champions might be fantasy, if you consider magical realism to be a kind of fantasy and want to make the argument that it's that, but otherwise... However, Vonnegut wrote a great deal of fiction that is indisputably science fiction, and that includes most of his major stuff. Player Piano, Slaughterhouse-Five, Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle: all, by any reasonable standard, science fiction. Vonnegut's argument that they're not? Well, they're not science fiction because he's not a science fiction author and science fiction is written by science fiction authors and science fiction authors are people who are recognized as science fiction authors by other science fiction authors... it's very tortured.

Another piece I found rather annoying was 'Excelsior! We're Going to the Moon! Excelsior!' because I've always found that sort of misanthropic, anti-intellectual attitude to space exploration extremely ignorant, sanctimonious, and all-around obnoxious, especially now that our renewed interest in the space program's bringing it back into fashion.

But then, immediately after, we get the 'Address to the American Physical Society,' which gives us this paragraph: 'I am charmed that you should call me in your program notes here a humanist. I have always thought of myself as a paranoid, as an overreactor, and a person who makes a questionable living with his mental diseases. Fiction writers are not customarily persons in the best of mental health.' Ah, Kurt... I could never stay mad at you!

And there's more. The 'Address' also goes into detail about Vonnegut's ideas about modern scientific responsibilities, one of many of his insightful ideas about the world he was living in, and increasingly that becomes what most of the rest of the book is made up of. Which brings me to what I liked best about it.

My favorite Vonnegut book has always been Slapstick, and I enjoyed seeing the ideas he was exploring with it (alienation and the need for human connection, most obviously) clearly taking up more and more of his interest as he draws on into the seventies. The height of this is the Playboy interview that closes the book, where he actually discusses the early form of Slapstick that he was at that time writing (apparently, it started out as another Kilgore Trout book; who knew?).

And, all in all, I'm immensely glad I read this this summer, especially after fourteen years of forays into Vonnegut.

3.95

Интересен и противоречив сборник с есета на Кърт Вонегът. Някои от тях никак не ми допадат, но все пак има и добри попадения... Неговите романи, които съм прочел до момента, ми харесват много повече!

Малко наивен милият Кърт.

A short ride with Vonnegut's thoughts on everything from science fiction writing, to genocide and civil war, to loneliness, to the Republican party, hippies, to life, to growing up and not growing up, the Universe and everything in between. The sort of ride where you are lulled to a soft comfort only to suddenly jump up and realise you're sitting on a shap object and you're seeing things differently and are awakened from the bittersweet reverie Vonnegut put you in the first place. This collection of short essays, addresses and finally a longer interview with Playboy make a great little glimpse into Vonnegut's soul halfway through his own more special than most journey through life in the mid 1970s.

"I honestly believe I am tripping through time. Tomorow I will be three years old again. The day after that I will be sixty-three."

"This book is full of belly laughs, but I am suspicious of belly laughs as entirely happy experiences. The only way to get a belly laugh, I've found, is to undermine a surface joke with more unhappiness that most mortals can bear."

Vonnegut is the master of doing just that.

I loved this book because I love Kurt Vonnegut and reading his opinions made me feel closer to him as a person, which may sound weird, but I really admire him. I also really enjoyed this book because, even though it was a book of his opinions, he wrote them in a fictional way. I really liked the story "Fortitude" because it was a story about the evils of technology (at least, that's how I read it) and how people succumb to it without realizing that it's happening. I also really liked his interview with playboy at the very end of the novel... it really taught me a lot about him as not only an author, but as a person as well. Everything I learned about him made me love him even more and I would totally recommend this novel to all Vonnegut lovers.

Hard to read but not for the reason you may think. Hard because once again Kurt is so right. I grew up during the Vietnam War. His take on our government then and since is simply chilling. Even then he was sounding the alarm on the environment and the out of control war machine. Read, read, read and read again. It goes by quickly. It takes me back to the Uni. of SC where I heard him speak in 1978. I got an autographed blank check too. We met on the street afterwards. I was coming from a toga party and therefore had nothing for him to autograph. I still have the check and my original copy of Cat's Cradle. It changed everything for me.

Лутах се да определям формата на всяко отделно произведение в сборника. Препоръката беше да не ги умувам много, ами всички да се класифицират като есета.
А паралелът с „Жетварят“ на Йовков ме връща към нещо отдавна наизустено, което поне в превода на Владимир Германов не се набива толкова: „Така е то.“
При Йовков е: „Това е то!“
Разкритието, което читателят прави, когато прочете нещо същностно и общовалидно в идеите на автора, независимо от сюжета, обикновено завършва по-често с извода на Йовков, но и краткостта на Вонегът в „неговото“ изречение е запомняща се.
В музикално отношение, попълних празнина с дуета Джийнит Макдоналд и Нелсън Еди „Сладката тайна на живота“.
Не знаех нищо за страната Биафра, която е просъществувала три коледи.
Интервюто с „Плейбой“ е пространно и прямо.
И се оказа липсващо едно политическо заглавие в българския превод на книгата.

You can hear Vonnegut's voice in these essays, and that I think is the charm of his writing. My enjoyment really depended on my interest in his subject matter, some I loved, others were a bit dull and didn't get my full attention, I must admit.