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'cause thus spoke vonnegut

from "The Sirens of Titan" (1959)

Salo was from another galaxy, from the Small Magellanic Cloud. He was four and a half feet tall.
Salo had a skin with the texture and color of the skin of an Earthling tangerine.
Salo had three light deer-like legs. His feet were of an extraordinarily interesting design, each being an inflatable sphere. By inflating these spheres to the size of German batballs, Salo could walk on water. By reducing them to the size of golf balls, Salo could bound over hard surfaces at high speeds. When he deflated the spheres entirely, his feet became suction cups. Salo could walk up walls.
Salo had no arms. Salo had three eyes, and his eyes could perceive not only the so-called visible spectrum, but infrared and ultraviolet and X-rays as well. Salo was punctual - that is, he lived one moment at a time - and he liked to tell Rumfoord that he would rather see the wonderful colors at the far ends of the spectrum than either the past or the future.
This was something of a weasel, since Salo had seen, living a moment at a time, far more of the past and far more of the Universe than Rumfoord had. He remembered more of what he had seen, too.
Salo's head was round and hung on gimbals.
His voice was an electric noise-maker that sounded like a bicycle horn. He spoke five thousand languages, fifty of them Earthling languages, thirty-one of them dead Earthling languages.
...
He was a machine, like all Tralfamadorians.
He was held together by cotter pins, hose clamps, nuts, bolts, and magnets. Salo's tangerine-colored skin, which was so expressive when he was emotionally disturbed, could be put on or taken off like an Earthling wind-breaker. A magnetic zipper held it shut.

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

Another month went by without incident, and then Billy wrote a letter to the Ilium News Leader, which the paper published. It described the creatures from Tralfamadore.
The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter.
Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:
'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes."'
And so on.

Kurt Vonnegut and his dog
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[350x500]Who Am I This Time? (1982)

Director: Jonathan Demme
Writer: Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Neal Miller

Genre: Romance

Cast:
Susan Sarandon
Christopher Walken
Robert Ridgely
Dorothy Patterson
Caitlin Hart
Les Podewell
Aaron Freeman
Jerry Vile
Paula Frances
Mike Bacarella
Ron Parady
Debbi Hopkins
Maria Todd
Edie Vonnegut

Run Time: 53 minutes

Video: XVID 624x480 29.97fps 1722Kbps
Audio: MPEG Audio Layer 3 48000Hz mono 113Kbps

(оригинальный звук)

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Kurt Vonnegut by WritersMugs

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<< Все действующие лица, места и события в этой книге – подлинные. Некоторые высказывания и мысли по необходимости сочинены автором. Ни одно из имен не изменено ради того, чтобы оградить невиновных, ибо Господь Бог хранит невинных по долгу своей небесной службы. >>

<< Как ни пытайся объяснить покороче, что такое хроносинкластический инфундибулум, обязательно вызовешь возмущение специалистов. >>

<< Говорю вам, мистер Констант, – сказал он благодушно, – неблагодарное это. дело – твердить людям, что мы живем в жестокой, суровой Вселенной. >>

<< Короче говоря, все – от простого здравого смысла до глубочайших научных знаний – говорило не в пользу исследований космоса.
Давно миновало то время, когда одна нация старалась переплюнуть другую, запуская в бездонную пустоту разные тяжелые предметы. >>

<< Открытие хроно-синкластических инфундибулумов как бы сказало всему человечеству «С чего это вы взяли, что вы куда-то доберетесь?» >>

<< Люди, которым ничего не обещали, не получив ничего, чувствовали, что их бессовестно провели. >>

<< Значит, весь этот тарарам-всего лишь научно-теологическое упражнение: живые люди хотят узнать хоть что-нибудь о цели и назначении жизни. >>

<< Порой мне кажется, что создавать думающую и чувствующую материю было большой ошибкой. Она вечно жалуется. Тем не менее я готов признать, что валуны, горы и луны можно упрекнуть в некоторой бесчувственности. >>

<< Все население Марса прибыло с Земли. Они надеялись, что на Марсе им будет легче жить. Никто не может вспомнить, чем плоха была жизнь на Земле. >>

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Leonard Mustazza - Forever Pursuing the Genesis
The Sirens of Titan and the "Paradise Within"

47
As in the case of many of Vonnegut's novels..., the movement towards Eden [the discovery of the paradise within on the Edenic Titan for Malachi and Beatrice] of sorts begins with its antithesis, the fallen world... The primary case of its trouble, Vonnegut is careful to point out, has to do with the spiritual alienation of the species, the sense that life is without inherent meaning colliding with the desperate belief that there must be some source of meaning out there somewhere.

48
Rumfoord: he exists now as a wave phenomenon that materializes on earth only at fixed intervels, the miraculous materializations that people so avidly await. More importantly, at the same time that he lost his physical substantialit, he gained certain extraordinary talents, including ability to read minds (22) and to see into future (24). He does not hesitate to use these talents in his self-appointed mission to reorder human priorities and thus save humankind from meaningless.
The Church of God the Uttery Indifferent

49
(as in piano and other novels?) Feelings are unimportant to Rumfoord, and people are expendable. The experiment is all.

51
He also sees it that they handicap themselves with weights and other devices meant to hamper natural human advantages. In effect, Rumfoord has nothing less than to remake the human species, not in his own image, for he will remain superior and (52) unhandicapped, but in an image that he considers good.

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Kurt Vonnegut by Nathan Fox
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Photo by Scott Langley

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[330x500]Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971)

(фильм по одноименной пьесе Курта Воннегута 1970 года, переписаннной из начального варианта "Penelope" 1960 года)

Director: Mark Robson
Writer: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Genre: Comedy / Drama

Cast:
Rod Steiger as Harold Ryan
Susannah York as Penelope Ryan
George Grizzard as Dr. Norbert Woodley
Don Murray as Herb Shuttle
William Hickey as Looseleaf Harper
Steven Paul as Paul Ryan
Pamelyn Ferdin as Wanda June
Pamela Saunders as Mildred Ryan
Louis Turenne as Major von Koningswald
C.C. Whitney as Mrs. Kestenbaum
Lester Goldsmith as Mr. Kestenbaum

Run Time: 105 minutes

Video: XVID 688x496 25.00fps 1144Kbps
Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz stereo 384Kbps

(русский перевод)

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Leonard Mustazza - Forever Pursuing the Genesis
The Machine Within - Player Piano

33
Vonnegut's artistic originality lies, I think, precisely ih his deliberate avoidance of easy categorisation, his refusal to write derivative formula fiction, an nowhere is his originality of vision better displayed than in his first novel, Player Piano.

34
What I would like to suggest here is that, rather than exploring the extent to which the novel is derivative or classifiable, we apply the question of genre to Vonnegut's narrative technique. When we do that, we discover something quite surprising that reveals both Vonnegut's awareness of his literary predecessors and his own unique view of such concepts as political and personal freedom and the human condition generally.
Through roughly the first half of Player Piano, Vonnegut writes--quite deliberately, I am convinced--a standard and ostensibly derivative dystopian novel... Paul Proteus's discontent with his lot and his society is very much like that of Orwell's Winstton Smith or Huxley's Bernard Marx. What is more, Paul's search for an "Edenic alternative"--presented precisely in those mythic terms--is also doomed to failurbecause it is to remote from the concerns of his society. Following that failure, however, Paul's life takes an interesting turn... [Vonnegut] now leads his protagonist down the darker paths of the human psyche: Paul's forsed conscription as a head of a rebel movement; the revelation of Paul's own deep-seated resentments agains his father and his resultant prejudice toward the society his father had helped to create; and, finally, his realisation that the rebels he has joined with are motivated to act not out of social consciousness or altruism, but out of mere vengeance and, vorse, boredom.
Though human beings in the novel are not portrayed as altogether lacking in will--an idea that grows more and more pronounced in Vonnegut's fiction over the years--they are nevertheless seen as the products of dark inner forces, inner machines, as it were, that impel them to act and to believe they do so only by choice.

35
Placed within the familiar generic context, Vonnegut's version of the future as political nightmare would seem the weakest of the well-known dystopian visions, the most ambiguous in terms of what the protagonist wants out of life and what he dislikes about the society in which he holds so high place... Paul is like a person who, after reading a historical fiction, wistfully longs to have lived at an earlier time, a more exciting and tumultuous period, anything other than the boring present. This, so to speak, "literary bias" is further suggested by Vonnegut's allusions to the conventional myths of the golden age and Judgement Day.

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strip by a softer world

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Kurt Vonnegut by Roy Knipe, 1974
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Kurt Vonnegut and Timothy Leary
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Artist, Anarchist and Social Critic
by Gaither Stewart

I somehow thought he would last forever, charming as always, joking, teasing, mocking, prickling, criticizing so wittily that the target of his pungent irony thought he was kidding, praising so ambiguously that those he loved thought he was criticizing, throwing mud pies in the faces of the powerful and calling them names, and boasting to one and all that he made lots of money being impolite.

“I most certainly am a member of the establishment,” Vonnegut told me that day over twenty years ago, I think it was the fall of 1985, in his town house on the East Side in Manhattan. An Amsterdam magazine had sent me to New York to interview the light of a “certain” American literature who so titillated, amused and charmed Europeans by ridiculing the ridiculous sides of America, by his playful lack of reverence for institutions and authority and for all the things that too many people take too seriously.

“No one is more in its center than me but I don’t maintain contacts with the other members. Though I don’t feel solidarity with it, I admit membership and I don’t like establishment people who play at the false role of rebels. Then the establishment needs people like me— however I’m a member only because I have money, otherwise they wouldn’t even talk to me.”

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Bill Kiehl, Kurt Vonnegut and his Czech translator Jaroslav Koran in Prague 1985.
(link)

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Kurt Vonnegut by Darick Robertson
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Novel-T - это серия литературных бейсбольных футболок. Авторы идеи пишут, что поддерживать своих кумиров одеждой легко, если они спортсмены, и значительно сложнее, если писатели... Почему бы не объединить эти два полюса?
Писателей и их героев разделили на две команды: в серых играют представители классики из команды American Canons, в красных - оригиналы из National Puncs. Конечно, Курт Воннегут и его герой Килгор Траут принадлежат ко второй команде. Футболки каждого игрока можно купить, но следует помнить, что фаны Воннегута уже разобрали все размеры, кроме XL (currently sold out of Small, Med. & Large); такие же крутые результаты показывают только Эдгар По и героиня Готорна Хестер Принн.

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1991
The New York Times
by Sara Krulwich

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