I like these. There are more, but I cannot type so much at once. Good things come to those who wait, but better things come to those who demand more quotes.
But the bombing of Hiroshima compelled me to see that a trust in technology, like all other great religions of the world, had to do with the human soul. I will bet you the one thousand crowns you have offered me for this piece that every one of the tales of lost innocence you receive will embody not only the startling discovery of the human soul, but of how diseased in can be.
How sick was the soul revealed by the flash at Hiroshima? And I deny that it was a specifically American soul. It was the soul of every highly industrialized nation on earth, whether at war or at peace. How sick was it? It was so sick that it did not want to live anymore. What other sort of soul would create a new physics based on nightmares, would place into the hands of mere politicians a planet so "destabilized," to borrow a CIA term, that the briefest fit of stupidiy could easily guarantee the end of the world?
It is supposed to be good to lose one's innocence. I do not read them, but I think that is what my novels say, so it must be true. I, for one, now know what is really going on, so I can plan more shrewdly and be less open to surprise. But my morale has been lowered a good deal, so I am probably not any stronger than I used to be. Since Hiroshima, I have increased my amperes but decreased my volts, and wound up with the same number of watts, so to speak.
It is quite awful, really, to realize that perhaps most of the peole around me find lives in the service of machines so tedious and exasperating that ehy would not mind much, even if they have children, if life were turned off like a alight switch at any time. How many of your readers will deny that the movie Dr. Strangelove was so popular because its ending was such a happy one?
pg 73: "On his Self-Interview" Sentences spoken by writers, unless they have been written out first, rarely say what writers wish to say. Writers are unlucky speakers, by and large, which accounts for their being in a profession which encourages them to stay at their desk for years, if necessary, pondering what to say next and how best to say it. Interviewers propose to speed up this process by trepanning writers, so to speak, and fishing around in their brains for unused ideas which otherwise might never get out of there. Not a single idea has ever been discovered y means of this brutal method-- and still the trepanning of authors goes on every day.
I now refuse all those who wish to take the top off my skull yet again. The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.
pg 98- On Pracitical Jokes from his Self Inteview
"If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.
Interviewer: Can you give an example?
Vonnegut: The Gothic novel. Dozens of the things are published every year, and they all sell. My friend Borden Deal recently wrote a gothic novel for the fun of it, and I asked him what the plot was, and he said, "A young woman takes a job in an old house and gets the pants scared off her."
Interviewer: Some more examples?
Vonnegut: The others arent' that much fun to describe: Somebody gets into trouble, and then gets out again; somebody loses something and gets it back; somebody is wronged and gets revenge; Cinderella; somebody hits the skids and just goes down, down, down; people fall in love with each other, and a lot of other people get in the way; a virtuous person is falsely accused of sin; a sinful person is believed to be virtuous; a person faces a challenge bravely, and succeeds or fails; a person lies, a person steals, a person kills, a person commits fornication.
Interviewer: If you will pardon my saying so, these are very old-fashioned plots.
Vonnegut: I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don't praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away--even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn't get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there's an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone's wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are--
interviewer: and they want that.
vonnegut: Yes. And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other. Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. "Modern life is so lonely," they say. This is laziness. It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can't or won't do that, he should withdraw from the trade.
Interviewer: Trade?
Vonnegut; Trade. Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a readers leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles... Six out of two creative writing students may be talented;. Twho of those might actually publish something by and by.
Interviewer: What distinguishes those two from the rest?
Vonnegut: They will have something other than literature itself on their minds. They will probably be hustlers , too. I mean that they won't want to wait passively for somebody to discover them. They will insist on being read...
Interviewer: You have been a public relations man and an advertising man... Was it painful? I mean-- did you feel your talent was being wasted, being crippled?
Vonnegut: No. That's romance-- that work of that sort damages a writer's soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year on the writer and the free enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren't putting mondey into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn't buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writiters are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.
pg. 116- On writing: Overwhelmingly we [novelists] are depressed, and are descended from those who, psychologcially speaking, spent more time than anyone in his or her right mind would want to spend in gloom.
I would add that novelists are not only unusually supressed, by and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
pg 130: From James T. Farrel's eulogy:
"Here is what he did for me and myany like me when I was very young: He showed me thorough his books that it was perfectly all right, perhaps even useful and beatiful, to say what life really looked like, what was really said and felt and done--what really went on. Until I read him, I wished only to be well received in polite company.
We were both University of Chicago people.
I note that there is a cross over his casket. That is a nice try by whoever put it there, but it is surely known in heaven that James T. Farrel of Chicago and New York was not among our leaders in organized tub-beating for Jesus Christ. He took his chances that way. If he is being scolded at this moment at the Pearly Gates, it may be for his overemphasis of rationality and compassion and honor at the expense of piety. I fear not for him. This is an argument he was won before.
pg 149- On Literacy: a speech he gave at a new library
Are we foolish to be so elated by books in an age of music and television? Not in the least, for our ability to read, when combined with libraries ike this one, makes us the freest of women and men--and children... Anyway--because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next--and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis--at any time of night or day.
Even more magically, perhaps, we readers can communicate with each other across space and time so cheaply. Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper-- at a cost of less than a penny, including wear and tear on my tyewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.
Think of that..
Compare that with the budgets of Cecil B. DeMille.
Film is simply one more prosthetic device for human beings who are incomplete in some way. We live not only in the Age of Film, but in the Age of False Teeth and Glass Eyes and Toupees and Silicone Breasts-- and on and on.
Film is a perfect prescription for people who will not or cannot read, and have no imagination. Since they have no imaginations, those people can now be shown actors and scenery instead-- with appropriate musci and all that.
But, again, film is a hideously expensive way to tell anybody anything--and I include televistion and all that. What is more: Healthy people exposed to too many actors and too much scenery may wake up some morning to find their own imaginations dead.
The only cure I know of is a library--and the ability to read.
Reading exercises the imagination-- tempts it to go from strenght to strength.
So much for that.
It would surely be shapely on a n occasion like this if something holy were said. Unfortunately, the speaker you have hired is a Unitatarian. I know almost nothing about holy things.
The language is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holiness.
Literature is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holiness.
Our freedom to say or write whatever we please in this country is holy to me. It is a rare priviliege not only on this planet, but throughout the universe, I suspect.And i is not something somebody gave us. It is a thing we give to ourselves.
Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads-- or in other peole's heads.
And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of mediation anyone has so far found.
By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.
This to me is a miracle.
The motto of this noble library is the motto of all meditators throughout all time: 'Quiet, please.'
Thus I end my speech.
pg 161: Graduation speech.
We are all expereinceing more or less the same lifetime now.
What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often imaginatively, underdifficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.
What is it the slightly younger people want from the slightly older people? More than anything, I think, they want acknowledgement and without further ado that they are, without question, women and men now. Slighlty older people are intolerably stingy about making any such acknowedgment...
[After learning to read] only two major subjects remain to be covered: loneliness and boremdom. No matter how old we are, we are going to be bored and lonely during what remains of our lives.
We are so lonely because we don't have enough friends and relatives. Human beings are suposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more. In Nigeria it's common for Ibos to have a thousand relatives who know them quite well. When a baby is born, it is taken on a long trip, so it can meet all its relatives. This sort of thing is still quite common in Europ today, although the number one-thousand is far too high for there. When we or our ancestors came to America, though, we were agreeing, among other things to do without such familites. It is a painful, unhuman agreement to make. Emotionally, it is hideously expensive.
Your class spokesperson mourned the collapse of the institution of marriage in this country. Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces.
So I reccommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.
As for boredom: Fredrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher who died seventy-eight years ago, had this to say: 'Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.' We are supposed to be bored. It is a part of life. Learn to put up with it, or you will not be what I have declared the members of this graduating class to be: mature women men.
pg 172: on writing
All you can do is tell what happened. You will get thrown out of this course if you are arrogant enough to imagine that you can tell me why it happened. You do not know. You cannot know.
About "the death of the novel" and so forth: it has never been terribly alive-- because the audience has to be made up of performers and such an audience is going to be very small. -Kurt Vonnegut "Like Shaking Hands With God" October 1, 1998
2 comments:
pg 63: An essay on "How I lost my Innocence"
But the bombing of Hiroshima compelled me to see that a trust in technology, like all other great religions of the world, had to do with the human soul. I will bet you the one thousand crowns you have offered me for this piece that every one of the tales of lost innocence you receive will embody not only the startling discovery of the human soul, but of how diseased in can be.
How sick was the soul revealed by the flash at Hiroshima? And I deny that it was a specifically American soul. It was the soul of every highly industrialized nation on earth, whether at war or at peace. How sick was it? It was so sick that it did not want to live anymore. What other sort of soul would create a new physics based on nightmares, would place into the hands of mere politicians a planet so "destabilized," to borrow a CIA term, that the briefest fit of stupidiy could easily guarantee the end of the world?
It is supposed to be good to lose one's innocence. I do not read them, but I think that is what my novels say, so it must be true. I, for one, now know what is really going on, so I can plan more shrewdly and be less open to surprise. But my morale has been lowered a good deal, so I am probably not any stronger than I used to be. Since Hiroshima, I have increased my amperes but decreased my volts, and wound up with the same number of watts, so to speak.
It is quite awful, really, to realize that perhaps most of the peole around me find lives in the service of machines so tedious and exasperating that ehy would not mind much, even if they have children, if life were turned off like a alight switch at any time. How many of your readers will deny that the movie Dr. Strangelove was so popular because its ending was such a happy one?
pg 73: "On his Self-Interview" Sentences spoken by writers, unless they have been written out first, rarely say what writers wish to say. Writers are unlucky speakers, by and large, which accounts for their being in a profession which encourages them to stay at their desk for years, if necessary, pondering what to say next and how best to say it. Interviewers propose to speed up this process by trepanning writers, so to speak, and fishing around in their brains for unused ideas which otherwise might never get out of there. Not a single idea has ever been discovered y means of this brutal method-- and still the trepanning of authors goes on every day.
I now refuse all those who wish to take the top off my skull yet again. The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.
pg 98- On Pracitical Jokes from his Self Inteview
"If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.
Interviewer: Can you give an example?
Vonnegut: The Gothic novel. Dozens of the things are published every year, and they all sell. My friend Borden Deal recently wrote a gothic novel for the fun of it, and I asked him what the plot was, and he said, "A young woman takes a job in an old house and gets the pants scared off her."
Interviewer: Some more examples?
Vonnegut: The others arent' that much fun to describe: Somebody gets into trouble, and then gets out again; somebody loses something and gets it back; somebody is wronged and gets revenge; Cinderella; somebody hits the skids and just goes down, down, down; people fall in love with each other, and a lot of other people get in the way; a virtuous person is falsely accused of sin; a sinful person is believed to be virtuous; a person faces a challenge bravely, and succeeds or fails; a person lies, a person steals, a person kills, a person commits fornication.
Interviewer: If you will pardon my saying so, these are very old-fashioned plots.
Vonnegut: I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don't praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away--even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn't get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there's an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone's wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are--
interviewer: and they want that.
vonnegut: Yes. And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other. Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. "Modern life is so lonely," they say. This is laziness. It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can't or won't do that, he should withdraw from the trade.
Interviewer: Trade?
Vonnegut; Trade. Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a readers leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles... Six out of two creative writing students may be talented;. Twho of those might actually publish something by and by.
Interviewer: What distinguishes those two from the rest?
Vonnegut: They will have something other than literature itself on their minds. They will probably be hustlers , too. I mean that they won't want to wait passively for somebody to discover them. They will insist on being read...
Interviewer: You have been a public relations man and an advertising man... Was it painful? I mean-- did you feel your talent was being wasted, being crippled?
Vonnegut: No. That's romance-- that work of that sort damages a writer's soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year on the writer and the free enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren't putting mondey into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn't buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writiters are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.
pg. 116- On writing: Overwhelmingly we [novelists] are depressed, and are descended from those who, psychologcially speaking, spent more time than anyone in his or her right mind would want to spend in gloom.
I would add that novelists are not only unusually supressed, by and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
pg 130: From James T. Farrel's eulogy:
"Here is what he did for me and myany like me when I was very young: He showed me thorough his books that it was perfectly all right, perhaps even useful and beatiful, to say what life really looked like, what was really said and felt and done--what really went on. Until I read him, I wished only to be well received in polite company.
We were both University of Chicago people.
I note that there is a cross over his casket. That is a nice try by whoever put it there, but it is surely known in heaven that James T. Farrel of Chicago and New York was not among our leaders in organized tub-beating for Jesus Christ. He took his chances that way. If he is being scolded at this moment at the Pearly Gates, it may be for his overemphasis of rationality and compassion and honor at the expense of piety. I fear not for him. This is an argument he was won before.
pg 149- On Literacy: a speech he gave at a new library
Are we foolish to be so elated by books in an age of music and television? Not in the least, for our ability to read, when combined with libraries ike this one, makes us the freest of women and men--and children... Anyway--because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next--and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis--at any time of night or day.
Even more magically, perhaps, we readers can communicate with each other across space and time so cheaply. Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper-- at a cost of less than a penny, including wear and tear on my tyewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.
Think of that..
Compare that with the budgets of Cecil B. DeMille.
Film is simply one more prosthetic device for human beings who are incomplete in some way. We live not only in the Age of Film, but in the Age of False Teeth and Glass Eyes and Toupees and Silicone Breasts-- and on and on.
Film is a perfect prescription for people who will not or cannot read, and have no imagination. Since they have no imaginations, those people can now be shown actors and scenery instead-- with appropriate musci and all that.
But, again, film is a hideously expensive way to tell anybody anything--and I include televistion and all that. What is more: Healthy people exposed to too many actors and too much scenery may wake up some morning to find their own imaginations dead.
The only cure I know of is a library--and the ability to read.
Reading exercises the imagination-- tempts it to go from strenght to strength.
So much for that.
It would surely be shapely on a n occasion like this if something holy were said. Unfortunately, the speaker you have hired is a Unitatarian. I know almost nothing about holy things.
The language is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holiness.
Literature is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holiness.
Our freedom to say or write whatever we please in this country is holy to me. It is a rare priviliege not only on this planet, but throughout the universe, I suspect.And i is not something somebody gave us. It is a thing we give to ourselves.
Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads-- or in other peole's heads.
And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of mediation anyone has so far found.
By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.
This to me is a miracle.
The motto of this noble library is the motto of all meditators throughout all time: 'Quiet, please.'
Thus I end my speech.
pg 161: Graduation speech.
We are all expereinceing more or less the same lifetime now.
What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often imaginatively, underdifficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.
What is it the slightly younger people want from the slightly older people? More than anything, I think, they want acknowledgement and without further ado that they are, without question, women and men now. Slighlty older people are intolerably stingy about making any such acknowedgment...
[After learning to read] only two major subjects remain to be covered: loneliness and boremdom. No matter how old we are, we are going to be bored and lonely during what remains of our lives.
We are so lonely because we don't have enough friends and relatives. Human beings are suposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more. In Nigeria it's common for Ibos to have a thousand relatives who know them quite well. When a baby is born, it is taken on a long trip, so it can meet all its relatives. This sort of thing is still quite common in Europ today, although the number one-thousand is far too high for there. When we or our ancestors came to America, though, we were agreeing, among other things to do without such familites. It is a painful, unhuman agreement to make. Emotionally, it is hideously expensive.
Your class spokesperson mourned the collapse of the institution of marriage in this country. Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces.
So I reccommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.
As for boredom: Fredrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher who died seventy-eight years ago, had this to say: 'Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.' We are supposed to be bored. It is a part of life. Learn to put up with it, or you will not be what I have declared the members of this graduating class to be: mature women men.
pg 172: on writing
All you can do is tell what happened. You will get thrown out of this course if you are arrogant enough to imagine that you can tell me why it happened. You do not know. You cannot know.
About "the death of the novel" and so forth: it has never been terribly alive-- because the audience has to be made up of performers and such an audience is going to be very small.
-Kurt Vonnegut
"Like Shaking Hands With God"
October 1, 1998
Post a Comment