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Kurt Vonnegut

Just found another paragraph in Timequake I really like.

My novel Slaughterhouse-five was attacked back then for containing the word motherfucker. In an early episode, somebody takes a shot at four American soldiers caught behind the German lines. One American snarls at another one, who, as I say, has never fucked anyone, "get your head down, you dumb motherfucker."
Ever since those words were published, mothers of sons have had to wear chastity belts while doing housework.
 
Great quote. I love his sense of humor. I think in SH5 (or maybe it was an interview) he says something about the fact that "white guys" didn't use that word at that time. That cracked me up. You've got to admit that it's a twisted word.
 
I was reading a bit in Timequake looking for other great quotes and I started wondering, what would a book like this sound like to someone who didn't understand his sense of humor and thought he was completly serious? I think that would make him a bit scary. :)
 
I agree with your choices of fine Vonnegut, Mari - Timequake and Breakfast of Champions. I have a nice first edition of Deadeye Dick but I haven't read it yet, so must get around to that soon. (But then more or less every hour, on the hour, I think of another book that I absolutely positively must read/re-read in the next week or die of disappointment and frustration...) Isn't Deadeye Dick the one that starts, rather brilliantly (paraphrasing rather than quoting so forgive inaccuracies):

To all undifferentiated wisps of nothingness out there: Watch out for life!
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I think I linked this before, but for what it's worth here are my thoughts on various Vonnegutiana on another board.

I think the reason I have left Deadeye Dick (and Jailbird) so long is that the later work has a reputation for weakness, and certainly they all seem to comply with the formula of long first person narrative in autobiographical form. I quite liked Bluebeard but felt I was making allowances and not sure I would have finished it if it hadn't been by Vonnegut.

My top Vonneguts, not necessarily in order, would be:

The Sirens of Titan
Player Piano
Breakfast of Champions
Mother Night
Timequake
Welcome to the Monkey House (the story 'Harrison Bergeron' can be found online and is a short, brilliant, essential read)

Oddly, I've never really been able to get on with Slaughterhouse-5. For my money this makes Vonnegut one of those authors, like Waugh or Heller, who is famous for the wrong book.
 
Oh and hay: interesting you should make the point that you need to know Vonnegut to appreciate (the humour in) Timequake. He makes the same point, more generally, in Timequake:

Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don’t. You don’t have to say why afterward. You don’t have to say anything.

People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking to you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?

There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.

I dare to suggest that no one picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer’s mind.

Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness.
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Shade said:
Oh and hay: interesting you should make the point that you need to know Vonnegut to appreciate (the humour in) Timequake. He makes the same point, more generally, in Timequake:
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I wasn't really thinking about knowing Vonnegut, although that probably helps. It was more the people who don't get his kind of humor, people who read the motherfucker paragraph and just think "Mothers had to wear chastity belts? Far out."
 
I am coming to this discussion oh so late, but I just wanted to say that Cat's Cradle and Sirens of Titan are not only my two favorite Vonnegut books, they're also two of my favorites books overall.

I've read them both many times, and each time I've been completely engaged. Someone once said that reading Vonnegut is like hearing from an old friend. There's something comforting in his voice.
 
LauraHartwell said:
I am coming to this discussion oh so late, but I just wanted to say that Cat's Cradle and Sirens of Titan are not only my two favorite Vonnegut books, they're also two of my favorites books overall.

I've read them both many times, and each time I've been completely engaged. Someone once said that reading Vonnegut is like hearing from an old friend. There's something comforting in his voice.
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I like that analogy - it seems fitting.

Oh, and I agree with your two choices, they're my favourites, too.

Cheers
 
Oh yes. Cat's Cradle--good one. I forgot to mention it.

Some of the catchphrases in it have entered popular culture, even if people don't realize it. It's an important book. I suggest everyone read it.
 
I've read Vonnegut pretty well through, though I gave up on 'Timequake.'

The shorts collected in 'Bagombo Snuff Box' show, much as Pynchon's 'Slow Learner' or the pre-Sartoris Faulkner novels do, that some authors take a while to catch their stride.

'Slaughterhouse 5' gets taught to excess, it's not even his best book. 'Sirens of Titan,' 'Cat's Cradle,' 'Galapagos,' and 'Dead Eye Dick' are easily stronger works. 'Breakfast of Champions' is also excellent.

The thing that starts to kick in the later you get with Vonnegut is he starts repeating himself. This is something you see with a lot of authors, and sometimes it works. Pynchon visits the slave trade and genocide in African colonies more than once. Palahniuk uses the 'broken homes' gag in both 'Survivor' and 'Lullaby.'

He observes, through Kilgore Trout that the thing that's great about SF authors is they contemplate the real questions. Philip K. Dick has more claims to title as mid-20th Century philosopher than most PhD's in Philosophy, even ones teaching at Ivy League schools. He was taking on the workload formerly taken by Sarte, Wittgenstein, Hegel, etc. He just used outer space or alternate histories as a way of translating these debates into story, into myth.

At his best, Vonnegut does the same. 'Cat's Cradle' is his deliberation on science for its own sake, without consideration for ethics; 'Sirens of Titan' was his take on corporate thinking and goal-oriented living; 'Galapagos' was his try at the problems irreducible complexity pose for absolute evolutionists; 'Dead Eye Dick' his couch-session on unintended consequences and errant poltiical movements. 'Mr. Rosewater' is Vonnegut coming to the harsh realization that a corporation has to operate on the profit-motive, and that even if it tries to function as a benevolent force, it still has to make decisions based on rational thought and not transient circumstances.
 
I finished Mother Night a couple of days ago, but I wasn't really as impressed by this one as the others I have read by him. He doesn't seem to be nearly as sarcastic in this one or perhaps I was just unable to see it. He does have some excellent points in the book, like the one he states in the introduction, that you are who you pretend to be, so be careful who you pretend to be.
 
Love, love, love Cat's Cradle - I've read it probably 20 times and never tire of it.

"My God! Life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?"
 
Just finished The Sirens of Titan and I was very disappointed with it. I really had to struggle to get through it. I got a lot of the "jokes" but there are probably more I missed. After hearing almost every Vonnegut fan say that this is their favorite book by him, I'm wondering how much of this book I just didn't get. I was bored from page one and till the end, or almost.
Perhaps it's because it's more SF than the others I have read by him and I really don't like SF. I really hated this book, if it hadn't had Vonnegut's name on it I would never have bothered to finish it.
 
ja9 said:
Love, love, love Cat's Cradle - I've read it probably 20 times and never tire of it.

"My God! Life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?"
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Yes, fantastic book right there.
 
I amongst those who think "The Sirens Of Titan" is Vonnegut's best. Really I think it may be the among the best books I've ever read.

I'm in the midst of rereading it for the first time in 30 years, although this probably my fourth time through this book. It's also the first Vonnegut I ever read. I first read it in the mid 60s and thought I was buying a SciFi paperback at the time of purchase. When I finished the book I said to myself "What the hell was that !?!" I immediately reread it.

I think it's ALL here. Everything Vonnegut has to say. I don't mean you shouldn't read and enjoy his ensuing works - I've read all I can get my hands on - but this is really the essence of Vonnegut. If you have not read Vonnegut this is the one to start on.
 
Did anyone catch the discussion of Slaughterhouse Five on the Diane Rehm show today on NPR? I heard about five minutes worth in the car and it was good stuff.
I'm looking forward to checking it out when I get home.

Here's a link to the show from the Diane Rehm Website.
Nov. 15 Vonnegutt Discussion
Enjoy
 
Well, I don't think much of him. Hay(some no.) and I are the only non-believers then?

I read Cat's Cradle, it was just OK. Could NOT read that short story collection with bamboo in the title, and gave up on Sirens of Titan about a quarter way in.

I'd have thought it was mainly men who liked him, but my husband doesn't like him either.

Come on the rest of you who don't think he's God. Speak up.
 
I was going to say that with Cat's Cradle (not his most accessible) and Bagombo Snuff Box (a pisspoor anthology of early uncollected stories: uncollected with good reason, mostly), you haven't chosen the best places to start. But The Sirens of Titan I can't understand!

I suppose if I was forced to declare a bad quality in Vonnegut, or at least one which is least likely to find favour among some readers, it would be his occasionally overdone whimsy. However that was mostly a late problem, and is rarely evident in his earlier stuff like The Sirens of Titan. I suppose what I'm saying is that if you really can't see anything good in an extract like this (from the first page of Sirens, so I guess you must have seen it), then it's just a question of taste. (Poor taste, I would say! :D )

Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward - pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.

It flung them like stones.

These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth - a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
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By the way it's just come to my notice that the link I posted earlier to some thoughts I posted on individual Vonnegut books is now dead, so here it is afresh.
 
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