verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора American Civil Liberties Union

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

What if Billy Pilgrim had never become unstuck in time?
Or Malachi Constant had remained just a glimmer in your eye,
Never seeing the relics of Titan, or being called by their siren call?
Had you never birthed Elliot Rosewater in all his misplaced charm,
Would I still be the same man who writes these words in affection?

If Kilgore Trout hadn’t endured, would I?
If Dwayne Hoover hadn’t lost touch, could I?
I’d never been the penniless writer,
The insane suburbanite,
The jaded expressionist painter,
Until you came into my life.

On behalf of the generation that never saw
World War II first hand,
Those that could never grasp the ugliness
At Dresden, I would like to thank you.
You, who showed us that earth
Was smaller when viewed from space.
You, who showed us how vacuous
and fruitful we could be.
God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut

by OpposedToSleep

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Graduates Hear Vonnegut on When It’s Honorable to Be a ‘Wise Guy’

By Kurt Vonnegut, June 7, 1981.
Found at The New York Times

This speech conforms to the methods recommended by the United States Army Manual on how to teach. You tell people what you're going to tell them. Then you tell them, then you tell them what you told them.

Now we'll first discuss honorable behavior, especially in peacetime, and we'll then comment on the information revolution - the astonishing fact that human beings can actually know what they're talking about in case they want to try it. From there, I will go on to recommend to those graduating from colleges everywhere in the world this spring that their hero be Ignaz Semmelweis.

You may laugh at such a name for a hero, but you will become most respectful, I promise you, when I tell you how and why he died.

After I describe Ignaz Semmelweis a little, I will ask if he might not represent the next stage of human evolution. I will conclude that he had better be. If he doesn't represent what we're going to become next, then life is all over for us and for the cockroaches and the dandelions too.

I will give you a hint about him. He saved the lives of many women and children. If we continue on our present course there will be less and less of that going on. O.K.

Now we come to the main body of the speech, which is an amplification of the first part. See how memorable it all becomes. No wonder we have the greatest Army in the world. Honor. I have always wanted to be honorable. All of you want to be honorable too, I'm sure.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Heinlein Gets the Last Word

By Kurt Vonnegut, December 9, 1990.
Found at The New York Times

IN London in October, at a dinner party in the home of the publisher Tom Maschler, head of Jonathan Cape, our host asked a question that was primitive but deep. "What is the best novel ever written?" I nominated "Madame Bovary." A majority went for "Anna Karenina." Anna had glamour, Emma didn't. That was that. We hastened on to gossip about Salman Rushdie and so forth.

Afterward, though, as I sat alone in my room at Brown's Hotel, I marveled that none of us had celebrated a story that took place in the world at large rather than in a stratified and codified little society. And Tom Wolfe a few months earlier had told the rest of us in the fiction trade to either do deep-dish reportage on members of little groups, right down to the name of the manufacturers of the shoes they wore, or take up macrame.

Yes, and now Putnam has published for the first time the full text of "Stranger in a Strange Land," by Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88), an abridged version of which has sold 100,000 copies in hard cover and nearly five million in paper since its debut in 1961. An enormous number of readers have found this book a brilliant mind-bender, and yet I doubt that Heinlein's name was ever uttered at a meeting of PEN or in the halls of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Despite his having written this book and about 40 others ("The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," "I Will Fear No Evil," "Methuselah's Children," "The Puppet Masters" and on and on), this remarkable man, whom I never met, was included only in "Who's Who in Science Fiction," and died without having been considered worthy of an entry in the more inclusive annual "Who's Who." The president of the American Poultry Association is sure as heck in the big 'Who's Who" somewhere.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора

'cause thus spoke vonnegut

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора 1979

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Identity crisis: a state of the union address by Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut

By Lawrence R. Broer, The Mailer Review. Fall, 2008.
Found at Find Articles

NO TWO CONTEMPORARY WRITERS HAVE LOOKED HARDER or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness--dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change. It is this almost mystical vision of the writer as spiritual medium and healer that Vonnegut intends by calling himself a "canary bird in the coal mine"--one who provides spiritual illumination, offering us warnings about the dehumanized future not as it must necessarily be, but as it surely would become if based on the materialism, government corruption, and promiscuous technology of the present (Wampeters, Foma, and GranfalloonS 238). In books Mailer might call existential errands, like Why Are We in Vietnam?, The Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer's particular genius has been to penetrate the facade of contemporary events to show us who we are, where we are, and where we are likely to go, pointing up the significant in the most trivial of events, and conversely placing in perspective the truly momentous acts of our time.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора SR/Gonzo

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
by Tom Wolfe

By Kurt Vonnegut, June 27, 1965.
Found at The New York Times

Note to the people of Medicine Hat, Alberta, who may not know it: Tom Wolfe is the most exciting--or, at least, the most jangling--journalist to appear in some time. He writes mainly for Esquire and The Herald Tribune. Everybody talks about him. He is no shrinking violet, neither is he a gentleman. He is a superb reporter who hates the East and the looks of old people. He is a dandy and a reverse snob.

The temptation when reviewing his works, of course, is to imitate him cunningly. Holy animals! Sebaceous sleepers! Oxymorons and serpentae carminael! Tabescent! Infarcted! Stretchpants netherworld! Schlock! A parodist might get the words right, but never the bitchy melody. Interestingly: the most tender piece in this collection depends upon a poem by Kipling for depth, and has G. Huntington Hartford 2d., for its hero.

The frightful, public gastrectomies Wolfe performed on Norman Mailer and William Shawn so recently, without anesthetics or rubber gloves, came too late for this book, will no doubt lead off the next. What we have here are 22 of the exercises that built up to such violence: Cassius Clay, Las Vegas, Baby Jane Holzer, automobile collisions as entertainment, automobile customizing, automobile racing, nannies, Howard Rushmore, weak, dumb, rich divorcÈes, fag interior decorators, and on and on. Fame has come quickly for Wolfe, and should have, for he is almost certainly the fastest brilliant writer around. Will he blow up? Some people must hope so. Who is a complete stranger to envy and Schadenfreud?

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора

by fishing-with-hearts

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора A Tralfamadorian



by animatedpunk

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Игры по-американски
Г. Злобин, предисловие к роману "Малый не промах" (1988).
Спасибо vonnegut.ru

Спасибо, Сэмюэл Коэн
и прочие гуманисты,
За вашу новую американскую "игрушку" -
Не ту, которой играют дети,
А ту, которая играет детьми,
Пока не останется ни одного ребенка...

Евгений Евтушенко.
Мама и нейтронная бомба

По всем книгам Курта Воннегута проходит цепная реакция персонажей и ситуаций, форм и идей. Даже скрупулезное расщепление его прозы вряд ли позволит выделить чистые частицы повторяемости – и писательской приверженности одной теме, веселого, беззаботного шутовства, и горькой озабоченности опасностями, какими грозит человеку им же созданная технотронная цивилизация. Чего только не намешано в воннегутовских романах и доведено до точки кипения, хотя не всегда автору удается получить желанный художественный синтез.

Последней новой вещью Воннегута, с которой познакомились в 1975 году русскоязычные советские читатели, был «Завтрак для чемпионов» (1972). В конце романа автор встречается со своими героями: полусвихнувшимся богатым фирмачом по продаже «понтиаков» Двейном Гувером и непризнанным провидцем, писателем-фантастом Килгором Траутом. Встреча произошла в Мидлэнд-Сити, штат Огайо, где по инициативе фирмы «Бэрритрон», занятой производством пластиковых бомб для ВВС США, намечался пышный фестиваль искусств.

Фестиваль не состоялся из-за безумных выходок Двейна. То ли под влиянием вредных веществ, накопившихся в организме, то ли от чтения сочинений Траута тот вдруг вообразил, будто в мире механических болванчиков он один наделен свободой воли. Тогда Воннегут решил распроститься с Килгором Траутом, который верой и правдой служил ему долгие годы, и отпустил его на свободу. О дальнейшей судьбе Двейна ничего не сообщалось, зато «Завтрак» кончался большой рисованной надписью: ETC. – «и так далее». Читалась она чуть иначе: «продолжение следует».

дальше...

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора

'cause thus spoke vonnegut

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Canary in a Cathouse (1961) - short stories
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) - short stories
Bagombo Snuff Box (1999) - short stories
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999) - fictional interviews

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора SR/Gonzo

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора October 1980

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора from "Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death" (1969)

Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was reading this time.
So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

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из "Бойня номер пять, или Крестовый поход детей" (перевод Р. Райт-Ковалевой)

Розуотер читал, лежа на соседней кровати, и Билли втянул его в разговор, спросив, что он читает.

Розуотер ответил сразу. Он сказал, что читает «Космическое евангелие» Килгора Траута. Это была повесть про пришельца из космоса, кстати очень похожего на тральфамадорца. Этот пришелец из космоса серьезно изучал христианство, чтобы узнать, почему христиане легко становятся жестокими. Он решил, что виной всему неточность евангельских повествований. Он предполагал, что замысел Евангелия был именно в том, чтобы, кроме всего прочего, учить людей быть милосердными даже по отношению к ничтожнейшим из ничтожных.

Но на самом деле Евангелие учило вот чему: прежде чем кого-то убить, проверь как следует, нет ли у него влиятельной родни? Такие дела.

дальше...

'cause thus spoke vonnegut

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора

'cause thus spoke vonnegut

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Fighting to understand: violence, form, and truth-claims in Lesy, Vonnegut, and Herr

By Stacey Peebles, Philological Quarterly. Fall, 2005.
Found at Find Articles

In 1973, Michael Lesy published his first book, a collection of photographs, newspaper accounts, records from an insane asylum, literary excerpts, and other materials that together provide a portrait of the town of Black River Fails, Wisconsin, from 1885 to 1900. He called the book Wisconsin Death Trip, and it has remained in print as something of a cult classic ever since. Lesy provides an introduction and conclusion, and Warren Susman a preface, but otherwise the images and text speak for themselves, with no connecting narration or explanation. Lesy would go on to publish a number of other books, and is currently a professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College. In December of 2006, he was named a United States Artist Fellow, and in a statement he prepared for the program, Lesy says that in his work he uses "historical photographs from public archives--utilitarian images made for every purpose except art--to tell a variety of difficult truths about our country and our shared pasts." (1)

This emphasis on archival photography certainly is evident when considering the body of his work as a whole--twelve books, including titles like Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life, 1860-1945, Visible Light, and, his most recent, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties. Yet even among these other inventive projects, Wisconsin Death Trip stands out. (2) This odd collage of information and imagination focuses on the historical, but reasonably could also be referred to as art, a novel of sorts, a collective psychological portrait, or even a scrapbook, as Wisconsin Death Trip has no page numbers. In another of his works, The Forbidden Zone, Lesy notes that "those who read the book couldn't decide if it was poetry or history, a fabrication or a discourse, a hoax or a revelation. The book took on a life of its own. It bred other books; it bred plays and ballets, concertos and an opera. It made me famous and notorious; honored and suspect." (3)

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора

by Zuangster