verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Bagombo Snuff Box - аудиокнига



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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Armageddon in Retrospect - аудиокнига



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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора A Man Without A Country - аудиокнига



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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора How to write with style
By Kurt Vonnegut
via

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful--? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead--or worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don't you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Быть родом со Среднего Запада
Курт Воннегут

via vonnegut.ru

«Вот человек, давно душою мертв,
нам от него не суждено услышать слов:
"Здесь Родина моя, мой дом, мой кров"…»*

Если лишить эти знаменитые патриотические строки шотландца сэра Вальтера Скотта (1771-1832) национально-романтической окраски, то получится вот что: Люди, к счастью для них самих, рождаются на свет с таким же территориальным инстинктом, который есть у лесных волков и пчел. Еще недавно считалось, что удаляться слишком далеко от места рождения и от родственников для людей равноценно самоубийству.

Этот ужас перед пересечением четко определенных географических границ до сих пор имеет право на существование во многих частях света – например, в бывшей европейской стране Югославии, или в африканской стране Руанде. Однако сегодня этот ужас стал излишним подсознательным грузом на большей части территории Северной Америки – слава Богу, слава Богу. Он все еще жив в этой стране – как живы и многие другие устаревшие инстинкты выживания, как все еще живы многие чувства и повадки, которые в основном безвредны, а иногда даже забавны.

Поэтому я, а также миллионы мне подобных, говорим незнакомцам при встрече, что мы родом со Среднего Запада, словно нам полагается за это какая-нибудь медаль. В нашу защиту я могу сказать только, что уроженцам Техаса и Бруклина присуще еще более нелепое территориальное тщеславие.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора I Love You, Madame Librarian

By Kurt Vonnegut, August 6, 2004.
Found at In These Times

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Foreword to "In the realms of the unreal: insane writings"
by Kurt Vonnegut
(pages ix--xi)

There was a time when clerical workers, if they were of a mind to, were allowed to put up funny or even impudent signs on walls near their desks, and such signs could be bought in what were then called "five and ten cent stores." One of these, I remember, was:

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS.

I may have seen that pre-fab joke for the first time at the Vonnegut Hardware Company in Indianapolis, where I used to work in the summertime in order to pay for clothes, dates, and petroleum. The store was owned by another branch of the family.

Then as now it was widely held that a person doing remarkably fresh work in the arts actually had to be crazy. What mentally healthy person could have thoughts that unusual? For a brief time, when my father was a boy, it was believed that there was a connection between tuberculosis and genius, since so many famous artists had TB. The early stages of syphilis were also rumored to be helpful. And E. B. White, the late writer and great editor of The New Yorker, said to me one time that he didn't know of any male author of quality who wasn't also a heavy drinker. And now, as though we needed any further proofs that creative persons are beneficiaries of disease, we have this volume of first-rate writings by the formerly or presently or since dead mentally ill, none of them, however, famous.

To me, though, and I have been in the writing business for a long time now, In the Realms of the Unreal proves only two things: first, that more good writing is being done than we can afford to publish and find time to read, and second, that creative people have thoughts unlike those of the general population because they have been culled or feel that they have been culled from that general population. The sequestering of some of us in mental hospitals is simply one of countless culling processes which are always going on. Tuberculosis or syphilis or a felony conviction or membership in a despised race or faction or a bad appearance or a rotten personality can get you culled as surely as a fancy nervous breakdown.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Quotes from Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
by
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

via hjkeen.net

Address to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1971

I was taught how to measure the size of the brain of a human being who had been dead a long time, who was all dried out. I bored a hole in his skull, and I filled it with grains of polished rice. Then I emptied the rice into a graduated cylinder. I found this tedious.
I switched to archaeology, and I learned something I already knew: that man had been a maker and smasher of crockery since the dawn of time. And I went to my faculty adviser, and I confessed that science did not charm me, that I longed for poetry instead. I was depressed. I knew my wife and my father would want to kill me, if I went into poetry.
My adviser smiled. “How would you like to study poetry which pretends to be scientific?” he asked me.
“Is such a thing possible?” I said.
He shook my hand. “Welcome to the field of social or cultural anthropology,” he said.

Here is what women really want: They want lives in folk societies, wherein everyone is a friendly relative, and no act or object is without holiness. Chemicals make them want that. Chemicals make us all want that.
Chemicals make us furious when we are treated as things rather than persons.

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.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Quotes from Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
by
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

via hjkeen.net

Preface

I can name several good American writers who have become wonderful public speakers, who now find it hard to concentrate while they are merely writing. They miss the applause.
I do think, though, that public speaking is almost the only way a poet or a novelist or a playwright can have any political effectiveness in his creative prime. If he tries to put his politics into a work of the imagination, he will foul up his work beyond all recognition.

Among the many queer things about the American economy is this: a writer can get more money for a bungling speech at a bankrupt college than he can get for a short-story masterpiece. What’s more, he can sell the speech over and over again, and no one complains.

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.

He is the first President to hate the American people and all they stand for. He believes so vibrantly in his own purity, although he has committed crimes which are hideous, that I am bound to conclude that someone told him when he was very young that all serious crime was sexual, that no one could be a criminal who did not commit adultery or masturbate.
He is a useful man in that he has shown us that our Constitution is a defective document, which makes a childlike assumption that we would never elect a President who disliked us so.

I had hoped to include some poetry in this volume, but discovered that I have in all these years written only one poem which deserves to live another minute.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Teaching the Unteachable

By Kurt Vonnegut, August 6, 1967.
Found at The New York Times

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. Most bright people know that, but writers' conferences continue to multiply in the good old American summertime. Sixty-eight of them are listed in last April's issue of The Writer. Next year there will be more. They are harmless. They are shmoos.

I saw one horn five years ago--The Cape Cod Writers' conference in Craigville, Mass. It was more or less prayed into existence by three sweet preachers' wives. They were in middle life. They invited some Cape writers and English teachers to a meeting one winter night, and their spokeswoman said this: "We thought it would be nice if there were a writers' conference on Cape Cod next summer."

I remember another thing she said: "We thought established writers would probably enjoy helping beginners like us to break into the field."

And it came to pass. Isaac Asimov is the star this year. Stars of the past include Richard Kim and Jacques Barzun. Twenty-six students came the first year, forty-three the next, sixty-three the next, eighty-two the next, and nearly one hundred are expected this year-- in August. Most of the students are women. Several of them are preachers' wives in middle life.

So it goes.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Torture and Blubber

By Kurt Vonnegut, June 30, 1971.
Found at The New York Times

West Barnstable, Mass.,--When I was a young reader of Robin Hood tales and "The White Company" by Arthur Conan Doyle and so on, I came across the verb "blubber" so often that I looked it up. Bad people in the stories did it when good people punished them hard. It means, of course, to weep noisily and without constraint. No good person in a story ever did that.

But it is not easy in real life to make a healthy man blubber, no matter how wicked he may be. So good men have invented appliances which make unconstrained weeping easier--the rack, the boot, the iron maiden, the pediwinkis, the electric chair, the cross, the thumbscrew. And the thumbscrew is alluded to in the published parts of the secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war. The late Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, speaks of each bombing of the North as ". . .one more turn of the screw."

Simply: we are torturers, and we once hoped to win in Indochina and anywhere because we had the most expensive torture instruments yet devised. I am reminded of the Spanish Armada, whose ships had torture chambers in their holds. Protestant Englishmen were going to be forced to blubber.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора The Latest Word

By Kurt Vonnegut, October 30, 1966.
Found at The New York Times

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand. Mr. Hotchner, was it a frazzled wreck? My own is a tossed salad of instant coffee and tobacco crumbs and India paper, and anybody seeing it might fairly conclude that I ransack it hourly for a vocabulary like Arnold J. Toynbee's. The truth is that I have broken its spine looking up the difference between principle and principal, and how to spell cashmere. It is a dear leviathan left to me by my father, "Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language," based on the "International Dictionary" of 1890 and 1900. It doesn't have radar in it, or Wernher von Braun or sulfathiazole, but I know what they are. One time I actually took sulfathiazole.

And now I have this enormous and beautiful new bomb from Random House. I don't mean "bomb" in a pejorative sense, or in any dictionary sense, for that matter. I mean that the book is heavy and pregnant, and makes you think. One of the things it makes you think is that any gang of bright people with scads of money behind them can become appalling competitors in the American-unabridged-dictionary industry. They can make certain that they have all the words the other dictionaries have, then add words which have joined the language since the others were published, and then avoid mistakes that the others have caught particular hell for.

Random House has thrown in a color atlas of the world, as well, and concise dictionaries of French, Spanish, German and Italian. And would you look at the price? And, lawsy me, Christmas is coming.

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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 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 Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (opinions) (1974) - essays, assorted works
Palm Sunday (1981) - short stories, essays, assorted works
Nothing Is Lost Save Honor (1984) - essays
Fates Worse than Death : an Autobiographical Collage (1990) - essays, assorted works
A Man Without a Country (2005) - essays, edited by Daniel Simon
Armageddon in Retrospect (2008, posthumous) with an introduction by Mark Vonnegut - writings on war and peace

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Предисловие Курта Воннегута к "The Eden Express - A Memoir of Schizophrenia" - книге его сына Марка Воннегута.



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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Cold Turkey

By Kurt Vonnegut, In These Times. Posted June 7, 2004.
Found at AlterNet

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America's becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

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