By Craig Silver
Richard Brautigan committed suicide. Joseph Heller has become cliche. Thomas Pynchon no longer wrote. But Vonnegut continues. hi ho.
More precisely: hello HoBecause Vonnegut remains a major standard-bearer for the insanely insane, surrealist, absurdist, and ultimately super-sane literary style that thrived in the 1960s. Remember the 60’s? The 60s — a metaphor for timeless sensibility. Unstuck in time – words coined by Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five, a 1960s blockbuster novel that was partly allegorical about Vietnam. Vietnam – Spiritual decline caused by American corporate greed masquerading as misguided American philanthropy. Kurt Vonnegut: Spirit death expert.
“This country drives me crazy,” Vonnegut said recently at the New York University Writers’ Conference, to many in the audience who thought he was drunk, a little shocked but fascinated. disgust … wife disgust me … you can be sick by a culture outside your own.”
Vonnegut is basically so angry with humanity that he kills all but a handful in his new novel. Galapagos, and what he saves is that he becomes a harmless, armless, porpoise-like creature that farts, fucks, and just goes fishing. He also stripped and furred their so-called “big brains”. It was the big brains that made people miserable, Vonnegut concluded. GalapagosLike the dodo bird’s flightless wings, the large human brain size will prove to be an evolutionary dead end.
“Today, it’s hard to believe that people could ever [be] The book’s narrator states that it is a million-year-old ghost named Leon Trout, son of Vonnegut’s famous science fiction writer character Kilgore. Weighs about 3kg! There was no end to the evil plans that the oversized thinking machine could not conceive or carry out…”
No, there is no end to people confusing their world with Vonnegut’s work, and the world confusing them. “I think society is evil,” he told the writer.
This candid assessment of modern reality has made Vonnegut the hero of generations of college social rebels, from the ’60s to the present day. They respond sympathetically to his basic premise that life has become unnecessarily precarious.Ideas are brought up in novels such as Galapagos, Slaughterhouse-Five, cat cradle and deadeye dick, it is based on an undeniably plausible vision of a sudden and unnecessary apocalypse.of Galapagos Epidemics destroy human fertility.of cradle A nonsensical scientific invention freezes all the water in the world.of Slaughterhouse Good people cause hell on a large scale civilian population.of dead eye The US government destroys a city in Ohio to test a neutron bomb. and so on.
Vonnegut rages at mad society, mad technology, and people who are morally soft-headed and hard-hearted. “How sick was the soul revealed by the flash in Hiroshima?” he asks in his autobiography palm sunday“I deny that it was the soul of the American people in particular. It was the soul of every highly industrialized nation on earth…I was so sick I didn’t want to live anymore. Based on a nightmare.” Can you create a new physics with a snippet and put it in the hands of mere politicians to have a planet that is, in the CIA’s words, “destabilized”?
But while many college students may love Vonnegut, he doesn’t necessarily love college students. , dismissed most as being “conservative like their parents.” “When I went to Cornell, the students were conservative. The class system in this country has been stable since 1900…this is a society that protects the wealthy.” I am not in danger.”
Vonnegut slammed students during a lecture tour that gave Reagan so many votes. “I spend a lot of time, money and effort trying to acquire knowledge,” he exclaims. “And here is a man who has never read a book!”
Overall, Vonnegut’s politics tend to be more existential than dogmatic class-conscious, but he definitely enjoys slapping around the rich and eccentric in his stories. And a more boisterous array of strictly Looney tunes cannot be found in all literature.
I have Elliott Rosewater God bless you, Mr. Rosewater, concocts a religion of personal philanthropy based on fire trucks.Wealthy Pontiac Dealer Wayne Hoover breakfast of champions Someone who suddenly believes the world has turned to rubber.Mutant hairy twins gibberish to each other slapsticka bag lady who rules over a powerful and evil conglomerate Jailbirda charlatan artist whose passion for collecting guns destroys his family deadeye dick.
But what does Vonnegut really think of the rich? Simply put, he thinks they are destroying our literature.
“Rich people dominate writing more and more because they can afford to write,” he told NYU.
He considers this especially shameful because he thinks it’s our literature to tell the world that Americans aren’t just gangsters and cowboys. We are human…our literature makes us respectable. “
Vonnegut’s candor on so many subjects has made his books a favorite target of conservative groups wishing to dictate the reading habits of the nation’s youth. Slaughterhouse-Five It was actually pulled from the school library in Drake, North Dakota, and burned in a furnace by the school janitor, following the direction of the Book Oversight Board there.
Vonnegut’s work, along with works by prominent literary figures such as Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud and Mark Twain, were attacked in various censorship campaigns, resulting in a 1000% increase in book bans or attempted bans between 1971 and 1981 Did. According to the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
Vonnegut doesn’t like to make a fuss about book banning frenzy. As a result, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is now more interested in First Amendment litigation, gaining a lot of other people interested in the issue. “
Asked about recent lawsuits, such as that of film director Costa Gabras over a fictional film (do not have) Depicting US-sanctioned atrocities in Latin America, Vonnegut commented: There is actually an amazing amount of freedom here. Censorship is a universal human urge everywhere.those people [who would censor] I don’t know how the American game is supposed to be played. They are very bad Americans. “
Vonnegut sees something else as a threat to writers and writers. It’s probably drenched in TV and movies as a result of living in an apocalypse-obsessed culture. Expand your attention.
“It showed that audiences can’t stand explanations. will no longer be heard speaking.”
This is a sarcastic comment from a writer who has made a stylistic expert (except for those who repeat mantras) cut out all superfluous wording from his prose. Absurd Ernest Hemingway.
“I write from a child’s perspective,” he said. “Like Henry David Thoreau,” he tells his students. I grew up in Indianapolis. There, you hear generic speech that sounds like you’ve seen a band cut galvanized tin, and uses vocabulary as plain as a monkey wrench. “
For Vonnegut, keeping it simple has serious religious implications. It begins with a sentence that fits within: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.'”
Some critics have had a hard time accepting Vonnegut’s immense popularity, deriding his controlled comic style as merely sleazy. But a true student of writing will appreciate the enormous, painstaking skill put into Vonnegut’s prose, the way he deliberately recharges with life’s withered tropes, the way his jokes give the reader pop-up figures. Pop out like never miss. greeting card. It requires a lot of hard work and incredible skill.
Vonnegut now says he doesn’t edit unless he asks for it. He enjoys writing “looking back after writing” and also reads his own reviews. “But reviews are often the sadistic part of magazines.”
“Some of the reviews are like the Dreyfus court-martial,” he told the British documentary team. I’ve written so far – and they take a man’s saber – it’s probably the only really good book I’ve written. Slaughterhouse-Five— the cop squashes it in his lap and returns it!
and Galapagos, Vonnegut remains the darkest and darkest of his visions, miraculously proving to be one of the most fun to rock. He doesn’t just think your brain and mine are too big to function rationally. flag and pants I’m trying to empty my head like I was born on this wounded planet…”
Perhaps he is trying to reach a Zen state of consciousness in which emptiness is form. With the simplicity of his style, his sense of tranquility and pain, his mantra and his absurdity, and his hope for civilization from death, he may have achieved just that.
What about Vonnegut’s laughter?
hi ho.
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