Admittedly, this post is a few weeks old because I've been really busy--however, I couldn't pass this up, because this book is the final book in CS Lewis's Space Trilogy. The first is Out of the Silent Planet, and it is followed by Perelandra. This book is very, very different from the first two, and quite often I would pause while reading it and think about how amazing and strange the first two books were (especially the first!) and how... kind of boring this one is. A lot of the beginning of the books are politics between organizations, and I mostly skimmed that, so that probably ruined my interpretations of a lot of events later in the book, too. Also it takes place is 1940's England and not 1940's space. And it starts off way differently, and Merlin is involved, and... honestly, if I had picked up this book first and read the blurb on the back without having read the first two, I would have never read this.
I've also seen this on a few "top 10 dystopic future books" lists, or lists of that flavour. Um... But... Everyone is stopped. And it's boring. Even if you didn't read the first two books about how awesome space is--it's b-b-b-boring. I mean, I got this copy for free, but man, I don't want to own it. I wish I had a copy of the second book instead, even if I had to pay for it, and even if it was really predictable and a little cliche.
Also, the New Yorker calls this book an elaborate satire--uh... Some parts are satiric, but this book definitely isn't a satire. (The New Yorker is also kind of lame, so...)
So this book starts off looking over the shoulders of the newly married Studdocks, Mark and Jane. For a very long time in the book I wasn't sure if Jane was a very to-the-point, accurate, and great picture of a realistic woman, or a picture of what CS Lewis would say was a wayward or not so great woman--turns out the second is true, but damn, if he didn't make that intention clear, I'd be damn impressed with the portrayal of Jane, because she is easy to empathize with and otherwise not an insulting picture of a woman. Oops.
Anyways, Mark really wants to get in with some new organization who are trying to clean the world by killing all livings things so everything will be antiseptic and perfect (that's revealed much later, Mark thinks they're just some university elites for a long time)... They're led by one of the guys from the first book (Devine? The one that didn't get possessed), and are clearly the forces of evil. They're going to achieve all of their stuff with a reanimated head and a reanimated Merlin? I... Okay, I don't really know. I have no goddamn clue, really. But they're the bad guys. Evil Maledils? I remember the terms but not what they refer to. Well... The forces of evil.
Meanwhile, his wife starts having dream-visions, and is eventually caught and protected by the good guys. She leads them right to the real Merlin.
Confused? Sorry, I... I really can't help you. This time it isn't my fault... This book is just...
In the introduction, CS Lewis compares this final book in the trilogy to his nonfiction work The Abolition of Man. I actually bought it a week or two before this book, so maybe when I read that I'll be able to figure out the point of this book (oops).
In the introduction, CS Lewis also says that if one is curious about what happens next, they'll have to wait for JRR Tolkien's book--the book he promised CS Lewis he'd write that he never actually wrote.
So. Many of my first notes regard Jane and her reaction to suddenly being married, the fear of becoming domestic, or somehow losing a part of her in this union, which I would say are, if not legitimate fears, undoubtedly very normal. Of course, I've already explained how any positive point I could have made about that has already been proven moot, so let's just move on, shall we?
Also pretty early on they start discussing mythology and legends (Merlin and such), which is pretty boring--you wouldn't think so, but it is. Also it seems kind of erroneous. Jane's maternal friend, Mrs Dimble, starts talking about how, when King Arthur "invaded" (Lewis 29), there undoubtedly would have been a large sect of British people still wearing togas and speaking Latin and such. Now, to be honest, I don't know a lot about the King Arthur legends, or when they're supposed to be set (I read Beowulf first, so how could you expect me to even care?)--but that just doesn't seem right. The Latin carrying on and becoming changed seems plausible. But the togas? Purely Roman? I can imagine their affects still being there and on the people, but... I kind of picture King Arthur as being a year 1000 kind of thing--which may be wrong in itself. But this doesn't seem to bode for me. (Especially when they mention the high Druid population on the other side of the coin--Romans took particular pleasure in killing Druids and torturing them, and I feel like even Christian Romans would put them to death. So the two societies living simultaneously doesn't seem plausible in the slightest.)
On page 39, Feverstone--Devine (oh, I just got it, like "Divine", but he turns out to be a false prophet)--mentions Weston's murder to Mark to try to explain how evil NICE's (the evil organization is in fact named NICE) enemies are. Again, Weston was possessed by the evil entity and had to be killed, but Mark buys it hook, line, and sinker, and of course Devine wouldn't see their business as evil.
Oh--and Mark says that anything that will preserve the human race is for him. If you'll recall, this blind goal is what made Devine and Weston's twisted nature so clear in the first book: "'You do not love any one of your race... You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are'" (Out of the Silent Planet 137). As long as mankind can live on, maybe become better, but as long as sex still works, that's what counts. (Oyarsa says that, in case if you were wondering).
Also, Devine calls from the liquidation/sterilization of "unfit races" (Lewis 49)--one, buying into eugenics, and two, emulating Hitler in a book set during the very last year of WWII--which Mark doesn't seem to pick up on at all. He describes a very Aldous Huxley-like view of the future, with pre-natal education, and one which completely shapes the victim and eats at free will... Mark calls it stupendous instead of being horrified.
Oh, and killing every living thing on earth doesn't bother him either.
Anyways. The two are kind of disconnected. The major satirical element of this book which overall is not a satire is Captain Hardcastle--well, that's not her title, but if you grew up reading Roald Dahl, it's all but instinct to include Captain with Hardcastle. Anyways, she's supposed to be, as I see it, the opposite of Jane, or the worst case scenario of Jane, or something. She's a masculine woman, disgustingly so--she won't wear a corset, she chews tobacco, drinks hard alcohol (whiskey), and smokes huge cigars, talks like a man... Her nickname is "Fairy"--I'm not up on on forties slang, but today I'm sure you know, that's slang for a gay man. And, uh, smoking cigars? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but there is no way in hell CS Lewis wasn't trying to illustrate some kind of penis envy along with making Hardcastle gross and manly in the worst ways. Mark is also very grossed out by her and at one point the idea of having sex with her comes up and he starts feeling nauseous. The Fairy asks if maybe Jane is angry with her husband, or perhaps a little jealous because he spends so much time at NICE, with her, and Mark suffers "uncontrollable disgust" (Lewis 184). Oh! And she leads her own police squad made up of girls--very stereotypical teenage girls, might I add. My opinion? Feminism is great, equality is awesome, but unsexing yourself and becoming so intensely manly is not becoming in the slightest.
Okay. Well, again, Jane is supposed to be pictured as a kind of wayward and headstrong girl and maybe not a good Christian woman or whatever, but then I'm one too, because I empathize with her a lot. While Mark is meeting the Fairy, Jane is having her dreams analyzed by the forces of good--something Jane, given her nature, doesn't completely believe. "She was not indeed sure that it was nonsense; but she had already resolved to treat it as if it were. She would not get 'mixed up in it', would not get drawn in. One had to live one's own life. To avoid entanglements and interferences had long been one of her first principles. Even when she discovered that she was going to marry Mark if he asked her, she though, 'But I must still keep up my own life', had arisen at once and had never for more than a few minutes at a stretch been absent from her mind. Some resentment against love itself, and therefore against Mark, for thus invading her life, remained" (Lewis 70-71). It's a little improper, but again, I think it's easy to see where she's coming from. (And if not, at least consider what year this book is set in.)
Captain Hardcastle/the Fairy makes a point about how it's much easier to fool an educated man with opinions in the paper, whereas a working class man will just assume it's all lies. This I can see, though again, it doesn't have 100% accuracy--yeah, you're going to agree with an opinion you read, and you can be tricked into it and influenced very easily. (It happens to EVERYONE!) I wouldn't say the split between classes makes you more or less susceptible, but England has traditionally had a clearer divide in terms of classes, so maybe that fed some of what CS Lewis had to say about that... Maybe...
Skip to page 145, which is when I realized that CS Lewis wasn't making a stronger female character. She has met the "Director", that is, the leader of the good guys--his name is different, but it's just good old Ransom. His name was changed for legal reasons that are clumsily explained (so he could claim some inheritance? Changing the names was a term of it?), and that's clearly CS Lewis trying to not be obvious about who it is and leave you guessing, but honestly, I realized who it was immediately. He appears much more youthful in this book; in the other books I kind of imagined him as stodgier and older, for whatever reason.
One of the side effects of his journey is that animals recognize his touch of the divine and naturally come to him. I mention this mostly because he has a pet black bear named Mr Bultitude, which is disgustingly adorable. I also mention that many of the times you see him, he is accompanied by a few jackdaws. What's a jackdaw, you may ask? Well, in The Magician's Nephew, a Jackdaw makes (or is) the first joke (in Narnia). I've come to the conclusion that Jackdaws must represent something important to CS Lewis to have been specifically mentioned, and not once but twice. (Let's not forget that Ransom is a Christ figure himself, after "death", and obviously Aslan is Aslan.) Hope? Humour? Whatever it is, they must have meant something special to him.
Oh! And yeah, he tells Jane that she'd be happier in her marriage if she were just a little more obedient. Probably true, but it still makes him sound like something of a jerk--"'[You] have lost love because you never attempted obedience'" (Lewis 145). We can agree that that makes him sound like a jerk, right? Also he says equality is not the "deepest thing" (Lewis 145)... Keep in mind, though, CS Lewis wasn't married until very late in his life, and probably was never really involved romantically with anyone (other than JRR Tolkien, of course)--CS Lewis even (kind of) makes amends for himself a few pages later--Mrs Dimble, I believe, says something along the lines of take what he says with a grain of salt, he's never been married and is kind of old-fashioned. So at least CS Lewis kind of admits that he's not entirely sure of what he's talking about, or only sure of it in a theoretical sense. Also... This is a side note, but he calls humility an erotic necessity... I... Not sure where he's going with that one.
After Ransom explains this all to her, he calls some mice of his in to eat up the crumbs they have dropped from their teatime snack. He does this to demonstrate how very different creatures can in fact live in harmony--but I believe it could also be a reference to a section in The Book of Common Prayer--"We do not presume to come to this thy Table (O merciful Lord) trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We be not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his Blood, in these holy Mysteries, that we may continually dwell in him, and he in us, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood. Amen" (Source). This prayer exists in Anglican/Protestant religion, so CS Lewis was definitely aware of it.
Hmm... Plot, plot... At around this point, Jane is captured by Captain Hardcastle, but saved by the good guys. She will not see her husband (and vice versa) for the rest of the book. Their camps have been permanently separated now.
The next page I marked is just Jane getting used to life in her new home. The men do all the work one day, the women the next, and so on. It makes an interesting point about how men are specific--say, the sugar goes in the green bowl that is on top of x cupboard, and a women will say put that in the the thing. I only mark it because that may seem like another silly mistake by CS Lewis, but nope, my mom does this all the time, and yeah, I do too.
Mark, meanwhile, is taken to see the Head of NICE--literally a reanimated head. I just thought that was kind of silly (and really gross).
"If you must see ghosts, it is better not to disbelieve in them" (Lewis 203).
There's a cook named MacPhee with the good guys. He is a tough guy, willing to do whatever Ransom needs, but Ransom says it's useless--because he doesn't believe in the cause. He adds that he is "'...perfectly ready... in and for this emergency, to allow the existence of these eldils of yours and of a being called Maledil whom they regard as their king'" (Lewis 222). Obviously he can say he'll believe, and maybe if the times are desperate enough he will believe (put me in any horror movie and I'll get religious real quick too)--but he won't truly have faith. And the Blair Witch will kill him. Maybe he shouldn't have mocked those cairns, but nooo, had to go ahead and move them...
Ah! So, Mark isn't a bad guy. NICE frames him for murder and threatens to have him arrested when he tries to leave them and find Jane. He is often deluded by visions of grandeur, but it's not bad, he's just... Well, very pliable. But he decides immortality is silly. He obsesses over death, rather than paying attention to the fact that he'd have an afterlife. He's more worried about his body not being in working order, and he doesn't care about his soul. THIS IS A BAD SIGN IN A CS LEWIS BOOK! He is clearly being marked as an immoral, or at least painfully foolish person.
Yeah, next mark is that he believes he is right--fighting for and with Jane from behind enemy lines, a martyr... Mark is being marked, haha. He also decides to do the right thing--or what he believes is the right thing--but then becomes depressed when he realizes how hard it will be and takes a nap instead. CS Lewis is planting red flags and also throwing rocks at us all at once.
Next note: the good guys get Merlin, the bad guys awaken some guy who isn't Merlin but a fake. Who is he? What happens to him at the end of the book? Uh.... I guess he dies? I don't know who he is though. I for real have no clue. From Wikipedia, I think that Merlin trades clothes with a tramp and NICE sees the clothes and assumes it's Merlin... But could a tramp really fool them that well? I mean, late in the book he appears to hypnotize Mark, or maybe Mark is just exhausted...? Oh well. Anyways, sometimes they refer to Merlin as Merlin, and sometimes Merlinus. Why?
Oh also Ransom is a Pendragon!!! Clumsy plot devices for everyone!!!
Oh and they namedrop Middle Earth. I know it's an archaic term for Earth (being in between heaven and hell, see?), but I also know that JRR Tolkien was CS Lewis's boyfriend, soooo...
Jane complains about more marital problems, how men never listen to everything women have to say, whatever. Maggs, another woman, quotes Mrs Dimble: "'"Did it ever come into your mind to ask whether anyone could listen to all we say?"'" (Lewis 300). BAM. This is fair, I think. It made me laugh, at least. Also, Kurt Vonnegut: "Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything" (A Man Without a Country 47).
The book kind of continues in theological debates and NICE politics for a long time. I'm sure important things happen between pages 70-300, but... Well, he spends too much time on the uninteresting stuff. Theological debates are interesting, especially when CS Lewis makes them, but these are so superfluous. I don't think I'd like the book even without them (the cool thing about the first two Spacer Trilogy books was that they were in space!), but at least it would be more to the point. Anyways, in the other two, religious debate is pretty seamlessly in there--okay, yes, the second book became a little cliched and obvious, but I don't recall it ever being so painfully boring and dragged out. Why mention this now? On page 303, the book suddenly becomes interesting, when the book inexplicably starts being told from the view of Mr Bultitude, Ransom's pet bear. I'm sure he's supposed to represent a good soul or a perfect soul in its animalistic simplicity, but whatever, Mr Bultitude is adorable and I cannot handle it.
Okay. I don't have any notes at all until the end of the book. The climactic scene takes place in a dining hall. NICE, thinking they have Merlin, hold a big celebration in congratulations for... getting him...? Well, the real Merlin is there too. He summons animals to attack and kill the leading members of NICE, and a lot of the guests... Listen, I'm not saying that it was really the Animorphs, but they were attacked by a tiger, an elephant, a bear, a gorilla, a wolf, and a snake (Ax has a snake morph!). So. Just saying.
And then Merlin puts the same curse as God put on the tower of Babel on the enemies who were left--that is, that they all would speak different languages so they couldn't understand each other (though in this book they appear to actually be speaking just gibberish).
Oh, and on page 370, "poor" is spelled "pore". Gross.
Anyways, the falling action gets weird, as this quickly becomes the only CS Lewis to feature bears having sex, and elephants having sex. In celebration of the bad guys being wiped out (remember, they wanted to wipe all life from the earth and make it completely sterile), all the animals in the area suddenly get really... excited. Mr Bultitude gets laid, the jackdaw flies out the window to pursue a mate... Ransom actually tells Mr Bultitude to "'Take her, Bultitude. But not in the house'" (Lewis 375). They open the window and find the elephant from before, now making a lady elephant his lady, and when one man goes to close the curtains so no-one has to see elephants doing the nasty, one of the women says: "'No... There will be nothing unfit for anyone to see. Draw them wider'" (Lewis 377). What the hell, CS Lewis. Yeah, maybe we shouldn't view it as indecent, but no-one wants to see that! The lady goes on to say that they are dancing--yeah, the horizontal monster mash. WHY ARE THESE THINGS HAPPENING?? Why, CS Lewis, whyyyy?
Anyways, Mark survives. The book ends with both Jane and Mark thinking about how they will react to one another and what their lives will be like--Mark realizes that he does truly love Jane, the end of the book gives a feeling that Jane loves him (or at least is very affectionate towards him) and it ends before they meet. The ending actually isn't that bad. I mean, the actual end as in the last few sentences, not all the animal sex parts. That's still weird. But the last few sentences wrap up the book (at least Mark and Jane's drama) nicely.
.........So. I guess I've made my opinion on the book pretty clear many times throughout this. It's only a step above A Horse and His Boy, in terms of CS Lewis books--that is, it's nearly my least favourite. (Then again, I read A Horse and His Boy at least once, too.) It's just not great, it's bumbling, it's full of awkward attempts to save its own skin on the part of the author (hey, did you know that Ransom is a Pendragon?)... It's boring and confusing, which is a deadly combination. There's a reason why people really don't know this particular book series--it ends pretty badly and okay, yeah, it's not Chronicles of Narnia. I have a copy of Abolition of Man somewhere, and I know I should probably read it next so everything will be fresh, but I've already read two other books to write about, that are much better (well, one is anyways). So... Yeah, I guess that's it. OH! And when writing for a character in a different language, find someone who actually speaks the language to help you. There's one Italian character in this book who speaks in broken English and he always says "ecco" instead of "here"--ecco means something like, "Here it is", like if you were trying to find your hat, your friend would say "Ecco!" if he got to it first. It doesn't mean here like "I am here". I don't know why it annoyed me so much, I have no right to be annoyed by it (straight Cs/Ds for three years in high school Italian, awww yeah!), but it's really the only thing I remember from Italian class, so goddammit CS Lewis, get your act together.
(Also can we note that at the bottom of my Perelandra post, I say "I really hope I find the third book soon. Although this series isn't stellar, it's pretty good." Dammit, CS Lewis.)
MLA Citation information: Lewis, CS. Out of the Silent Planet. Scribner: New York, 2003.
Lewis, CS. That Hideous Strength. Scribner: New York, 2003.
Showing posts with label A Man Without A Country. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Man Without A Country. Show all posts
Friday, August 3, 2012
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
Look, I'm writing again! Mike inspired me to start writing my creative writing thing again, but then I looked at Timequake and was like dammit... I've got to get this done too. Worst of all, I'm ripping through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies faster than a Vonnegut book so yeah, I really need to get this done. Let's start, then?
It's actually sort of funny that I should have decided to read Timequake, of all the Vonnegut books I could have picked--this is, from what I understand, the last book he wrote before he wrote A Man Without A Country. So, it was his last fiction work (A Man Without A Country is actually a collection of a few of Vonnegut's short essays), and even then, there's more Vonnegut in there than fiction. It's about a time quake--that is, everything that occurred in the last ten years goes on repeat, and afterwards things progress as normal, with people in charge of their own destinies again. This the description on the back of the book: "At 2:27 P.M. on February 13th of the year 2001, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?" The story is a combination of what I've just explained and Kurt Vonnegut being Kurt Vonnegut. Hi ho!
Here is what Trout said when he realized that the ten-year rerun was over, that he and everybody else were suddenly obligated to think of new stuff to do, to be creative again: 'Oh, Lordy! I am much too old and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will again'" (XVI).
"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'" (1).
"Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you're sorry" (5). / "Love means never having to say you're sorry"--Love Story, a movie from the seventies.
"[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with someone that cracked? 'Anything interesting happen at work today, Honey-bunch?' 'Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?'" (5).
"Hooray for firemen! Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies. Hooray for firemen" (7).
"A reporter asked [my son] what it had been like to grow up with a famous father. Mark replied, 'When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who couldn't get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College'" (16). I love this. I love how down to earth Mark is. This is definitely the attitude my more favourite relatives have, and I love it.
"I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J.D. Salinger of John Cheever or John Collier or John O'Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O'Conner or whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few days. No more" (17) This made me sad--not for the fact that that was what I was planning on being my safety net (I wouldn't mind just having a parakeet for company)--but for the fact that... Well, it got me all excited at first. You know--I love Ray Bradbury, I like JD Salinger, I've only read 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson, but that's one of the best short stories I've ever read, no lie... But I just got it excited because of that, and the realization that this wasn't the situation anymore--forget the short stories building a rep, but that in general this was no longer the way. Everything about Vonnegut's statement is no longer the way, not really, and that's pretty damned sad, if I do say so myself.
"[Trout's] long-term relationships with women had been disasters. In the only love story he ever attempted, 'Kiss Me Again,' he had written, there is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.' The moral at the end of that story is this: 'Men are jerks. Women are psychotic'" (22).
"'God created the heaven and the earth,' the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer went on. 'And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn't say anything at first. But Satan began to worry about God when He said, "Let there be light," and there was light. She had to wonder, "What in heck does He think He's doing? How far does He intend to go...?"'" (29).
"'The Garden of Eden,' said Trout, 'might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games'" (29).
A Man Without A Country, too.
So, Trout, as we know, was a bum. He was pretty poor to begin with, but after his son died, that's when he took to being a real bum, with no home but the streets and the homeless shelter. The shelter he is in during this book is next door to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "'Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper... Wonderful! As though the planet weren't already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!'" (71).
"Are [humanists] enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought it was too much to lose" (82). Vonnegut goes on to say that he didn't have faith like Bernie did because of how he was raised, he was raised by skeptics--intelligent folks but skeptics nonetheless. He ends this bit with: "But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable. Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much" (83).
"I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife. I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games" (83).
"Yesterday... I received a well-written letter from a man who never asked to be born in the first place, and who has been a captive of our nonpareil correctional facilities... for many years. He is about to be released into a world where he has no friends or relatives. Free will is about to kick in again, after a hiatus of a good deal more than a decade. What should he do? I, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, wrote back today, 'Join a church.' I said this because what such a grown-up waif needs more than anything is something like a family" (84).
He goes on: "I couldn't recommend Humanism for such a person. I wouldn't do so for the majority of the planet's population. The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche... said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't. Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the Humanist's Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them" (84).
Kurt Vonnegut, talking about what happened to him during the time quake: "I myself was zapped back to this house near the tip of Long Island, New York, where I am writing now, halfway through the rerun. In 1991, as now, I was gazing at a list of all I'd published, and wondering, 'How the hell did I do that?' I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described, who didn't talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they could ever say" (91).
"I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can't get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz" (96).
"'Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful'" (121).
So you remember how back in the day I read Psalm 23 and was all, "This is worded so differently than the version I know, maybe it's the translation, blah blah blah..." Well, Kurt Vonnegut starts a chapter by saying Shankspeare is not the greatest writer (so far) of the English language but it was Lancelot Andrews. It includes his more poetic rewrite of Psalm 23, and there we go! That's the version I know. So... thank you, Kurt Vonnegut, for solving that mystery! Also Lancelot Andrews for making Psalm 23 even more badass.
"All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this" (133). Like James Joyce!? LIKE JAMES JOYCE!?
"Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy years at Swathmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her" (136).
"While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free"--Eugene Debs. This is the third time I have quoted this quote here, and I don't think it's any less meaningful than I did the first time, in July/August (fun fact, I definitely just wrote Augustus), or the second time in January. He goes on to add this after the quote: "In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap. Which it is not" (143).
My only addition is to mention that Debs ran for the presidency and this sentence was in every one of his speeches, according to Vonnegut. How could he have not gotten far? The problem, of course, was that he was a socialist.
"I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of those three things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters" (161). The last bit comes from the fact that that was exactly what Kilgore Trout was doing with the short stories he wrote.
The most disturbing part of the book is when he writes about two people that he knew that killed themselves. Kurt Vonnegut talks about one of his first literary agents and how one time he asked the man how to end a story. The man answered: "'Nothing could be simpler, my dear boy. The hero mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset'" (161-162). He says that many years later, the man shot himself. "Another friend and client of his said he couldn't possibly have committed suicide, it was so out of character. I replied, 'Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun'" (162).
He continues: "Many years ago, so long ago that I was a student at the University of Chicago, I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the arts in general. At that time, I had no idea that I personally would go into any sort of art. He said, 'You know what artists are?' I didn't. 'Artists,' he said, 'are people who say, "I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"' About five years after that, he did what Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and his wife and their kids did at the end of World War Two. He swallowed potassium cyanide" (162).
That scares me. These are the sort of people you'd expect to be happy, you know? I mean--their attitudes, okay, that scares me too, because that's how I am like, at least the artist guy is like. I mean you know, be happy about what you can and all. But the first guy--I can imagine the suicide happened because he realized that that wasn't how it went--the hero rarely wins and doesn't ride off into the sunset... And he didn't have the heart to fool himself anymore. And the advisor fellow? Sure, he realized he had control of that little thing, but he realized how minuscule that thing was against everything else he named, state, city, marriage, et cetera--and that realization killed him. It made him realize how unimportant he was tenfold than it was at the beginning.
Vonnegut also cares to mention that homeless and HIV-positive patients of his friend are insulted if someone asks if they ever want to kill themselves.
"Happy days! We thought we'd live forever" (173).
"Old beer in new bottles. Old jokes in new people" (173).
"And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution: Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcome and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage" (176).
Kurt Vonnegut imagines at one point in the book--the part that's more a story--that he has lived to 2010. He died in 2007. It's sort of eerie to read that bit then, at least to me.
"'You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do'" (196). I just want to say that Kilgore Trout says this. It doesn't seem right to attribute this to Vonnegut.
"Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone" (202).
"If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it. My mother and Ernest Hemingway and my former literary agent and Jerzy Kosiniski and my reluctant thesis advisor at the University of Chicago and Eva Braun all come to mind. But not Kilgore Trout. His indestructible self-respect is what I loved most about Kilgiore trout" (211).
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone'" (221).
So the last scene of the original draft of Timequake sans Vonnegutian interludes was a clambake at Xanadu. In Breakfast of Champions, it's made pretty clear that Trout resembles Vonnegut's late father and is meant to represent him in some way. Earlier in the book Vonnegut says that he, if he could, would not bring his dead relatives and friends back. However, at this party, there are people who resemble his friends and relatives that have passed. Monica Pepper looked like his sister, a bakemaster looked like the man who had originally published Slaughterhouse-Five--and as always, "Kilgore Trout looked like my father" (227).
"Not merely the club and the household staff at Xanadu, and the chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous, which met in the ballroom there, and the battered women and children and grandparents who had found shelter there, were grateful for his healing and encouraging mantra, which made bad times a coma: You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. The whole world was" (228).
"Nobody was a near double for Uncle Alex. He did not like my writing. I dedicated The Sirens of Titan to him, and Uncle Alex said, 'I suppose the young people will like it'" (232). This makes me so sad. Uncle Alex appears to be Vonnegut's hero; that must have been so sad to hear his uncle say that.
Vonnegut also urges the reader to read Catch-22. I agree!
"I told Borden what [Joseph] Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he feared death. Heller said he had never experienced a root-canal job. Many people he knew had. From what they told him about it, Heller said, he guessed he, too, could stand one, if he had to. That was how he felt about death, he said" (238). Okay, I quoted this out of liking it, but also, what the hell is going on with those commas?
So then Vonnegut describes a play by George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah is its name. The scene described is God visiting Adam and Eve: "Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know it was going to end sometime" (238).
"You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were" (239). / "Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals"--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country.
"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place" (249).
"I was the baby of the family. Now I don't have anybody to show off for anymore" (249).
So... This book was more Kurt Vonnegut being awesome in general than anything else. So it was definitely different in that respect from Player Piano, but to be honest, Vonnegut was a fairly static writer. His voice doesn't change in leaps and bounds--Player Piano and Timequake certainly read differently, but it's not to the point where you couldn't recognize the fact that the parentage is the same. It's more like he just comes through more and more--his voice was always there, I mean the style he writes of course, but then he just gets past that and appears himself. It just becomes more real... If you see what I'm trying to say...
Look, I like Vonnegut. This isn't maybe what people would usually expect of him, and maybe it'll feel cheapened to them (I didn't like this book a bit the first time I read it), but I say, go ahead and read it. Vonnegut is really great.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Timequake. Penguin Group: New York, 1997.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Machinehead by Bush
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Let's do the time warp again!
It's actually sort of funny that I should have decided to read Timequake, of all the Vonnegut books I could have picked--this is, from what I understand, the last book he wrote before he wrote A Man Without A Country. So, it was his last fiction work (A Man Without A Country is actually a collection of a few of Vonnegut's short essays), and even then, there's more Vonnegut in there than fiction. It's about a time quake--that is, everything that occurred in the last ten years goes on repeat, and afterwards things progress as normal, with people in charge of their own destinies again. This the description on the back of the book: "At 2:27 P.M. on February 13th of the year 2001, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?" The story is a combination of what I've just explained and Kurt Vonnegut being Kurt Vonnegut. Hi ho!
Here is what Trout said when he realized that the ten-year rerun was over, that he and everybody else were suddenly obligated to think of new stuff to do, to be creative again: 'Oh, Lordy! I am much too old and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will again'" (XVI).
"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'" (1).
"Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you're sorry" (5). / "Love means never having to say you're sorry"--Love Story, a movie from the seventies.
"[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with someone that cracked? 'Anything interesting happen at work today, Honey-bunch?' 'Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?'" (5).
"Hooray for firemen! Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies. Hooray for firemen" (7).
"A reporter asked [my son] what it had been like to grow up with a famous father. Mark replied, 'When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who couldn't get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College'" (16). I love this. I love how down to earth Mark is. This is definitely the attitude my more favourite relatives have, and I love it.
"I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J.D. Salinger of John Cheever or John Collier or John O'Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O'Conner or whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few days. No more" (17) This made me sad--not for the fact that that was what I was planning on being my safety net (I wouldn't mind just having a parakeet for company)--but for the fact that... Well, it got me all excited at first. You know--I love Ray Bradbury, I like JD Salinger, I've only read 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson, but that's one of the best short stories I've ever read, no lie... But I just got it excited because of that, and the realization that this wasn't the situation anymore--forget the short stories building a rep, but that in general this was no longer the way. Everything about Vonnegut's statement is no longer the way, not really, and that's pretty damned sad, if I do say so myself.
"[Trout's] long-term relationships with women had been disasters. In the only love story he ever attempted, 'Kiss Me Again,' he had written, there is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.' The moral at the end of that story is this: 'Men are jerks. Women are psychotic'" (22).
"'God created the heaven and the earth,' the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer went on. 'And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn't say anything at first. But Satan began to worry about God when He said, "Let there be light," and there was light. She had to wonder, "What in heck does He think He's doing? How far does He intend to go...?"'" (29).
"'The Garden of Eden,' said Trout, 'might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games'" (29).
A Man Without A Country, too.
So, Trout, as we know, was a bum. He was pretty poor to begin with, but after his son died, that's when he took to being a real bum, with no home but the streets and the homeless shelter. The shelter he is in during this book is next door to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "'Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper... Wonderful! As though the planet weren't already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!'" (71).
"Are [humanists] enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought it was too much to lose" (82). Vonnegut goes on to say that he didn't have faith like Bernie did because of how he was raised, he was raised by skeptics--intelligent folks but skeptics nonetheless. He ends this bit with: "But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable. Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much" (83).
"I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife. I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games" (83).
"Yesterday... I received a well-written letter from a man who never asked to be born in the first place, and who has been a captive of our nonpareil correctional facilities... for many years. He is about to be released into a world where he has no friends or relatives. Free will is about to kick in again, after a hiatus of a good deal more than a decade. What should he do? I, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, wrote back today, 'Join a church.' I said this because what such a grown-up waif needs more than anything is something like a family" (84).
He goes on: "I couldn't recommend Humanism for such a person. I wouldn't do so for the majority of the planet's population. The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche... said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't. Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the Humanist's Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them" (84).
Kurt Vonnegut, talking about what happened to him during the time quake: "I myself was zapped back to this house near the tip of Long Island, New York, where I am writing now, halfway through the rerun. In 1991, as now, I was gazing at a list of all I'd published, and wondering, 'How the hell did I do that?' I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described, who didn't talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they could ever say" (91).
"I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can't get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz" (96).
"'Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful'" (121).
So you remember how back in the day I read Psalm 23 and was all, "This is worded so differently than the version I know, maybe it's the translation, blah blah blah..." Well, Kurt Vonnegut starts a chapter by saying Shankspeare is not the greatest writer (so far) of the English language but it was Lancelot Andrews. It includes his more poetic rewrite of Psalm 23, and there we go! That's the version I know. So... thank you, Kurt Vonnegut, for solving that mystery! Also Lancelot Andrews for making Psalm 23 even more badass.
"All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this" (133). Like James Joyce!? LIKE JAMES JOYCE!?
"Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy years at Swathmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her" (136).
"While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free"--Eugene Debs. This is the third time I have quoted this quote here, and I don't think it's any less meaningful than I did the first time, in July/August (fun fact, I definitely just wrote Augustus), or the second time in January. He goes on to add this after the quote: "In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap. Which it is not" (143).
My only addition is to mention that Debs ran for the presidency and this sentence was in every one of his speeches, according to Vonnegut. How could he have not gotten far? The problem, of course, was that he was a socialist.
"I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of those three things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters" (161). The last bit comes from the fact that that was exactly what Kilgore Trout was doing with the short stories he wrote.
The most disturbing part of the book is when he writes about two people that he knew that killed themselves. Kurt Vonnegut talks about one of his first literary agents and how one time he asked the man how to end a story. The man answered: "'Nothing could be simpler, my dear boy. The hero mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset'" (161-162). He says that many years later, the man shot himself. "Another friend and client of his said he couldn't possibly have committed suicide, it was so out of character. I replied, 'Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun'" (162).
He continues: "Many years ago, so long ago that I was a student at the University of Chicago, I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the arts in general. At that time, I had no idea that I personally would go into any sort of art. He said, 'You know what artists are?' I didn't. 'Artists,' he said, 'are people who say, "I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"' About five years after that, he did what Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and his wife and their kids did at the end of World War Two. He swallowed potassium cyanide" (162).
That scares me. These are the sort of people you'd expect to be happy, you know? I mean--their attitudes, okay, that scares me too, because that's how I am like, at least the artist guy is like. I mean you know, be happy about what you can and all. But the first guy--I can imagine the suicide happened because he realized that that wasn't how it went--the hero rarely wins and doesn't ride off into the sunset... And he didn't have the heart to fool himself anymore. And the advisor fellow? Sure, he realized he had control of that little thing, but he realized how minuscule that thing was against everything else he named, state, city, marriage, et cetera--and that realization killed him. It made him realize how unimportant he was tenfold than it was at the beginning.
Vonnegut also cares to mention that homeless and HIV-positive patients of his friend are insulted if someone asks if they ever want to kill themselves.
"Happy days! We thought we'd live forever" (173).
"Old beer in new bottles. Old jokes in new people" (173).
"And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution: Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcome and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage" (176).
Kurt Vonnegut imagines at one point in the book--the part that's more a story--that he has lived to 2010. He died in 2007. It's sort of eerie to read that bit then, at least to me.
"'You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do'" (196). I just want to say that Kilgore Trout says this. It doesn't seem right to attribute this to Vonnegut.
"Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone" (202).
"If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it. My mother and Ernest Hemingway and my former literary agent and Jerzy Kosiniski and my reluctant thesis advisor at the University of Chicago and Eva Braun all come to mind. But not Kilgore Trout. His indestructible self-respect is what I loved most about Kilgiore trout" (211).
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone'" (221).
So the last scene of the original draft of Timequake sans Vonnegutian interludes was a clambake at Xanadu. In Breakfast of Champions, it's made pretty clear that Trout resembles Vonnegut's late father and is meant to represent him in some way. Earlier in the book Vonnegut says that he, if he could, would not bring his dead relatives and friends back. However, at this party, there are people who resemble his friends and relatives that have passed. Monica Pepper looked like his sister, a bakemaster looked like the man who had originally published Slaughterhouse-Five--and as always, "Kilgore Trout looked like my father" (227).
"Not merely the club and the household staff at Xanadu, and the chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous, which met in the ballroom there, and the battered women and children and grandparents who had found shelter there, were grateful for his healing and encouraging mantra, which made bad times a coma: You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. The whole world was" (228).
"Nobody was a near double for Uncle Alex. He did not like my writing. I dedicated The Sirens of Titan to him, and Uncle Alex said, 'I suppose the young people will like it'" (232). This makes me so sad. Uncle Alex appears to be Vonnegut's hero; that must have been so sad to hear his uncle say that.
Vonnegut also urges the reader to read Catch-22. I agree!
"I told Borden what [Joseph] Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he feared death. Heller said he had never experienced a root-canal job. Many people he knew had. From what they told him about it, Heller said, he guessed he, too, could stand one, if he had to. That was how he felt about death, he said" (238). Okay, I quoted this out of liking it, but also, what the hell is going on with those commas?
So then Vonnegut describes a play by George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah is its name. The scene described is God visiting Adam and Eve: "Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know it was going to end sometime" (238).
"You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were" (239). / "Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals"--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country.
"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place" (249).
"I was the baby of the family. Now I don't have anybody to show off for anymore" (249).
So... This book was more Kurt Vonnegut being awesome in general than anything else. So it was definitely different in that respect from Player Piano, but to be honest, Vonnegut was a fairly static writer. His voice doesn't change in leaps and bounds--Player Piano and Timequake certainly read differently, but it's not to the point where you couldn't recognize the fact that the parentage is the same. It's more like he just comes through more and more--his voice was always there, I mean the style he writes of course, but then he just gets past that and appears himself. It just becomes more real... If you see what I'm trying to say...
Look, I like Vonnegut. This isn't maybe what people would usually expect of him, and maybe it'll feel cheapened to them (I didn't like this book a bit the first time I read it), but I say, go ahead and read it. Vonnegut is really great.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Timequake. Penguin Group: New York, 1997.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Machinehead by Bush
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Let's do the time warp again!
Thursday, December 30, 2010
The Bible: Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes
What's up, I'm back, and with the reading of these three books, I'm officially more than halfway done with the Bible! Impressed yet? Well, you should be. Psalms and Proverbs are not fun books to read in one (per book) fell swoop. Fortunately for you, nothing entered my ocular tissue by my own hand, so you get to read about them. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing grossly boring or terrible about them, but after a while you want to hear stories again. On the plus side, I really really liked Ecclesiastes and might have been even more receptive to it thanks to the fact that it was not written in verse. (It doesn't hurt that Ecclesiastes is next to Leviticus on the 'fun to say' scale.) So, I can assure you that these won't be the most in-depth responses, critiques or reactions I've ever written, but like I said, wanting to drive a pencil in your eye and refraining from doing so has this way of diverting attention.
Psalms! If you've ever been to a church you know at least Psalm 23, and even if you've never stepped into a church you probably still know Psalm 23 (at least one stanza of it). I guess it's not really correct to say the psalms are in verse, but they're not prose. Well, they're little sections that are prayers to God, praises to God, complaints to God, and some advice for fellow mortals.
"When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent. Offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord" Psalms 4:4-5. That is, don't act rashly, ruminate on it and how to fix it and how you can learn from the issue!
"For there is no truth in [my enemies'] mouths; their hearts are destruction; their throats are open graves; they flatter with their tongues" Psalms 5:9. The imagery here (specifically that of the throat being an open grave) is awesome.
"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have... crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet" Psalms 8:3-6.
"Put them in fear, O Lord; let the nations know that they are only human" Psalms 9:20.
"Fools say in their hearts, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good" Psalms 14:1. This one has a bit of ambiguity (or maybe none at all) that I do not like one bit. It says there is no-one who does good--but does it mean no-one of the fools do good, or no-one in general, even those who are righteous, do not do good? I certainly hope it was just poor wording and it is the former, because if even the good actions come to naught (or worse than naught!)... Well, the thought of it certainly disheartens me.
Okay, so Psalm 22 is the "Plea for Deliverance from Suffering and Hostility". Back in the day I blogged about the Collected Poems of Oscar Wilde--one of the poems I wrote about was 'On the Sale by Auction of Keats' Love Letters'. He talks about how the letters were being auctioned by a man who didn't understand the greatness of the letters and compares it to Roman soldiers throwing dice for Jesus's clothing after he was crucified or while he was being whipped. Well, I bring it up because believe it or not, I think I may have been incorrect in that take on it. Psalm 22 is written from the point of view from a starved and tortured man, and in one stanza he implies that he has been jumped. Being so frail thanks to starvation, he cannot fight back and can only watch as "They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots" Psalms 22:17-18. I'd say it works pretty well. I'm still tempted to stick with it being more about Jesus just because of how much Wilde loved Keats, but it's likely that this is it too. Or both! It can be both.
Ah, Psalm 23! It begins with this: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul" Psalms 23:1-3. (Or, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside still waters..." et cetera.) No? Doesn't sound familiar quite yet? Well, let's move on to stanza two: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff--they comfort me". Ahaaaa. (By the way, this isn't the version used within this copy of the Bible, it's the King James version. But the King James version is the way I've always heard it, so I'm going to be terribly biased for a moment, okay?)
"Let lying lips be stilled that speak insolently against the righteous with pride and contempt" Psalms 31:18. Though it isn't about exactly the same thing, I believe the connection drawn is still pretty obvious: "'Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that'"--Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest).
"Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it" Psalms 34:14.
A Man Without A Country, he writes about how that quote makes Marx look like he was putting religion in a negative light. Opiates are bad, they make you lazy, shiftless whatever--so people assume that that's what Marx is saying about religion. But at the same time, opiates make you feel calm, peaceful, relaxed, comforted--that's what Vonnegut believes Marx meant about religion. And you know what? After reading that, I agree. It's often a source of hope for those in less than hopeful situations. I like that. I like the people who can still find hope in that if nothing else. I can respect that. As for the second bit with the afflictions and God rescuing the righteous from them, obviously it doesn't mean literally, it means... Well, after, I suppose. Though heaven hasn't been expressly mentioned as an alternative to Sheol, I think we're getting there...
"Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like grass, and whither like the green herb" Psalms 37:1-2.
"Mortals cannot abide in their pomp; they are like the animals that perish. Such is the fate of the foolhardy, the end of those who are pleased with their lot. Like sheep they are appointed for Sheol; Death shall be their shepherd; straight to the grave they descend, and their form shall waste away, Sheol shall be their home. But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me" Psalms 49:13-15. This section when I first read it made me start thinking, and what I wrote about above (that of Vonnegut and Marx) made me think some more. Maybe those who don't believe in God just aren't good at deferring pleasure... Does that sound strange? I'm not quite sure how to word this. They want it now instead of later, they don't rely on optimism and constant improvement, they're willing to... to settle? To be "pleased with their lot". They choose to ignore possible improvement because they haven't the faith to...? Auuuugh. I don't know if I'm speaking well. Let it be known that I did try, however...
"You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart" Psalms 51:6.
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever" Psalms 111:10. Okay, so I bring this up because of the fear thing. I really like the fact that this does not beat around the bush--in every other version of the Bible I've perused and even in Sunday school and church itself, mostly everybody does things out of love. I think fear is a way more appropriate (and real!) driving factor for doing most anything in the Bible. So, thank you for not beating around the bush, New Revised Standard version of the Bible!
"The desire of the wicked comes to nothing" Psalms 112:10.
And we've made it to Proverbs! Proverbs contains exactly what you think it does. Therefore, I haven't got a lot to put down, but hey, stuff does exist...
There's a lot of warning against prostitutes in this book, I have to say. And women are always the villains; they're always doing the seducing and convincing... Which I bring up because of Lysistrata. It's clear that perception of women is still pretty much the same between when Proverbs was written and when that play was written... (They were probably written very proximally in time, now that I think about it...) Buuuut, my point was that women were thought to be completely ruled by 'natural' impulses--and by 'natural', of course, I mean the sexual ones. So... Yeah, just thought I'd bring that up.
"Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses" Proverbs 10:12. / "Love means never having to say you're sorry"--Love Story (A movie from the seventies, though Kurt Vonnegut puts his own spin on this in I believe Galapagos).
"Do not desire a ruler's delicacies, for they are deceptive food" Proverbs 23:3.
"Do not speak in the hearing of the fool, who will only despise the wisdom of your words" Proverbs 23:9. Being a nasty stubborn fool myself, I can say for sure that yes they will.
"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring" Proverbs 27:1. This is one I need to keep in mind constantly from now on.
Like I said, I didn't mark many of the Proverbs. It'd be like taking my book of Aesop's fables and giving you every moral twice (at least the bread wasn't mentioned!). So here we are in Ecclesiastes. This one is about, well, essentially, whistling while you work. Your life may be spent working, but you have to work to live and because your life is so short, you may as well enjoy your work. That's tough to swallow, but it's a good point, there. Realistically, though, I'm not sure how many can follow it adequately, much less completely subscribe themselves to it.
"All human toil is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not satisfied. For what advantage have the wise over fools?" Ecclesiastes 6:7. The main purpose of work is, at its core, for sustenance, but everybody is equally bound by the pains of hunger and thus the need for work. Brain power doesn't mean a thing if you can't get food and survive... And, sort of in the same vein, "...the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice" Ecclesiastes 9:2. (Might I add that this section is entitled 'Take Life as it Comes'.)
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad" Ecclesiastes 2:3. / "Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward"--Kurt Vonnegut
"The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun" Ecclesiastes 9:5-6.
"You do not know the work of God" Ecclesiastes 11:5.
Alright, here we are. Next post will be Song of Solomon-Jeremiah, so... Try not to fall off the edge of your seats...? Of these three, I kind of dug Ecclesiastes, though you probably cannot tell... Hm. Well, not much of a general reaction this time, I guess. All I will say is that from now the old testament appears to be 90% in verse, which means my posts will either get meatier by tenfold, or will start to look a little small.
MLA citation information: Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition. American Bible Society: New York, 1989.
Yeah, nothing really new in my life other than that Book Worm is making my blood pressure go places where it has never gone before.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: First it Giveth by Queens of the Stone Age
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Life it rents us, and yeah I hope it put plenty on you--Well, I hope mine did too
Psalms! If you've ever been to a church you know at least Psalm 23, and even if you've never stepped into a church you probably still know Psalm 23 (at least one stanza of it). I guess it's not really correct to say the psalms are in verse, but they're not prose. Well, they're little sections that are prayers to God, praises to God, complaints to God, and some advice for fellow mortals.
"When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent. Offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord" Psalms 4:4-5. That is, don't act rashly, ruminate on it and how to fix it and how you can learn from the issue!
"For there is no truth in [my enemies'] mouths; their hearts are destruction; their throats are open graves; they flatter with their tongues" Psalms 5:9. The imagery here (specifically that of the throat being an open grave) is awesome.
"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have... crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet" Psalms 8:3-6.
"Put them in fear, O Lord; let the nations know that they are only human" Psalms 9:20.
"Fools say in their hearts, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good" Psalms 14:1. This one has a bit of ambiguity (or maybe none at all) that I do not like one bit. It says there is no-one who does good--but does it mean no-one of the fools do good, or no-one in general, even those who are righteous, do not do good? I certainly hope it was just poor wording and it is the former, because if even the good actions come to naught (or worse than naught!)... Well, the thought of it certainly disheartens me.
Okay, so Psalm 22 is the "Plea for Deliverance from Suffering and Hostility". Back in the day I blogged about the Collected Poems of Oscar Wilde--one of the poems I wrote about was 'On the Sale by Auction of Keats' Love Letters'. He talks about how the letters were being auctioned by a man who didn't understand the greatness of the letters and compares it to Roman soldiers throwing dice for Jesus's clothing after he was crucified or while he was being whipped. Well, I bring it up because believe it or not, I think I may have been incorrect in that take on it. Psalm 22 is written from the point of view from a starved and tortured man, and in one stanza he implies that he has been jumped. Being so frail thanks to starvation, he cannot fight back and can only watch as "They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots" Psalms 22:17-18. I'd say it works pretty well. I'm still tempted to stick with it being more about Jesus just because of how much Wilde loved Keats, but it's likely that this is it too. Or both! It can be both.
Ah, Psalm 23! It begins with this: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul" Psalms 23:1-3. (Or, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside still waters..." et cetera.) No? Doesn't sound familiar quite yet? Well, let's move on to stanza two: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff--they comfort me". Ahaaaa. (By the way, this isn't the version used within this copy of the Bible, it's the King James version. But the King James version is the way I've always heard it, so I'm going to be terribly biased for a moment, okay?)
"Let lying lips be stilled that speak insolently against the righteous with pride and contempt" Psalms 31:18. Though it isn't about exactly the same thing, I believe the connection drawn is still pretty obvious: "'Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that'"--Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest).
"Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it" Psalms 34:14.
A Man Without A Country, he writes about how that quote makes Marx look like he was putting religion in a negative light. Opiates are bad, they make you lazy, shiftless whatever--so people assume that that's what Marx is saying about religion. But at the same time, opiates make you feel calm, peaceful, relaxed, comforted--that's what Vonnegut believes Marx meant about religion. And you know what? After reading that, I agree. It's often a source of hope for those in less than hopeful situations. I like that. I like the people who can still find hope in that if nothing else. I can respect that. As for the second bit with the afflictions and God rescuing the righteous from them, obviously it doesn't mean literally, it means... Well, after, I suppose. Though heaven hasn't been expressly mentioned as an alternative to Sheol, I think we're getting there...
"Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like grass, and whither like the green herb" Psalms 37:1-2.
"Mortals cannot abide in their pomp; they are like the animals that perish. Such is the fate of the foolhardy, the end of those who are pleased with their lot. Like sheep they are appointed for Sheol; Death shall be their shepherd; straight to the grave they descend, and their form shall waste away, Sheol shall be their home. But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me" Psalms 49:13-15. This section when I first read it made me start thinking, and what I wrote about above (that of Vonnegut and Marx) made me think some more. Maybe those who don't believe in God just aren't good at deferring pleasure... Does that sound strange? I'm not quite sure how to word this. They want it now instead of later, they don't rely on optimism and constant improvement, they're willing to... to settle? To be "pleased with their lot". They choose to ignore possible improvement because they haven't the faith to...? Auuuugh. I don't know if I'm speaking well. Let it be known that I did try, however...
"You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart" Psalms 51:6.
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever" Psalms 111:10. Okay, so I bring this up because of the fear thing. I really like the fact that this does not beat around the bush--in every other version of the Bible I've perused and even in Sunday school and church itself, mostly everybody does things out of love. I think fear is a way more appropriate (and real!) driving factor for doing most anything in the Bible. So, thank you for not beating around the bush, New Revised Standard version of the Bible!
"The desire of the wicked comes to nothing" Psalms 112:10.
And we've made it to Proverbs! Proverbs contains exactly what you think it does. Therefore, I haven't got a lot to put down, but hey, stuff does exist...
There's a lot of warning against prostitutes in this book, I have to say. And women are always the villains; they're always doing the seducing and convincing... Which I bring up because of Lysistrata. It's clear that perception of women is still pretty much the same between when Proverbs was written and when that play was written... (They were probably written very proximally in time, now that I think about it...) Buuuut, my point was that women were thought to be completely ruled by 'natural' impulses--and by 'natural', of course, I mean the sexual ones. So... Yeah, just thought I'd bring that up.
"Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses" Proverbs 10:12. / "Love means never having to say you're sorry"--Love Story (A movie from the seventies, though Kurt Vonnegut puts his own spin on this in I believe Galapagos).
"Do not desire a ruler's delicacies, for they are deceptive food" Proverbs 23:3.
"Do not speak in the hearing of the fool, who will only despise the wisdom of your words" Proverbs 23:9. Being a nasty stubborn fool myself, I can say for sure that yes they will.
"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring" Proverbs 27:1. This is one I need to keep in mind constantly from now on.
Like I said, I didn't mark many of the Proverbs. It'd be like taking my book of Aesop's fables and giving you every moral twice (at least the bread wasn't mentioned!). So here we are in Ecclesiastes. This one is about, well, essentially, whistling while you work. Your life may be spent working, but you have to work to live and because your life is so short, you may as well enjoy your work. That's tough to swallow, but it's a good point, there. Realistically, though, I'm not sure how many can follow it adequately, much less completely subscribe themselves to it.
"All human toil is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not satisfied. For what advantage have the wise over fools?" Ecclesiastes 6:7. The main purpose of work is, at its core, for sustenance, but everybody is equally bound by the pains of hunger and thus the need for work. Brain power doesn't mean a thing if you can't get food and survive... And, sort of in the same vein, "...the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice" Ecclesiastes 9:2. (Might I add that this section is entitled 'Take Life as it Comes'.)
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad" Ecclesiastes 2:3. / "Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward"--Kurt Vonnegut
"The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun" Ecclesiastes 9:5-6.
"You do not know the work of God" Ecclesiastes 11:5.
Alright, here we are. Next post will be Song of Solomon-Jeremiah, so... Try not to fall off the edge of your seats...? Of these three, I kind of dug Ecclesiastes, though you probably cannot tell... Hm. Well, not much of a general reaction this time, I guess. All I will say is that from now the old testament appears to be 90% in verse, which means my posts will either get meatier by tenfold, or will start to look a little small.
MLA citation information: Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition. American Bible Society: New York, 1989.
Yeah, nothing really new in my life other than that Book Worm is making my blood pressure go places where it has never gone before.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: First it Giveth by Queens of the Stone Age
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Life it rents us, and yeah I hope it put plenty on you--Well, I hope mine did too
Friday, August 20, 2010
A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut
This is Kurt Vonnegut's final book--well, it was intended to be, though in 2008 they published an as-yet unpublished work of his. The book is mainly an observation on life in all forms, past, current, similarities and differences. There's no real particular story other than the usual anecdotes; I guess it could be said that it's pretty much a series of short essays. It's a great book, one that led me to question why I haven't really read any Vonnegut in almost two years' time. (True, I've read Slaughterhouse Five twice in that time, but it's nowhere close to being my favorite Vonnegut book.) It also made me realize that Vonnegut is not a genius. What? No, he thinks the way everybody thinks, he's just not scared to admit it. He's braver than most is all. Not to say that's a bad thing, it's a good feeling when you discover you're not the only one thinking that way.
Each chapter opens with 'illustrations' which are actually colored prints of Vonnegut's quotes. The picture that opens the book reads: "There is no reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia."
"I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy. There is terrible tragedy in there somehow. These men are too sweet to survive in the world and are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed" (4).
"I wanted all things to seem to make some sense, so we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense. And I made up lies, so they all fit nice, and I made this sad world a paradise" (6).
Vonnegut writes, at the beginning of chapter two, that he considers anyone who hasn't read Ambrose Bierce's story "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" a twerp. I was thinking, maybe I'd read it, but the only place I could imagine having done so was in creative writing. None of my classmates recognized it though, and I thought for sure I was going mad (I also imagined ray Bradbury could have mentioned it, he was a huge fan of Bierce and mentions him a lot in his stories). After pacing a gibbering to myself for about a half hour (I was spending self-imposed solitary confinement at work) it occurred to me: that's also the name of a Twilight Zone! Actually, it looks the episode was very close to the original story. (The episode was originally the winner of a short film festival.) Anyway, I guess there's not much to it other than... Well, that I'm a huge dork obsessed with The Twilight Zone. Oh well.
"Do you realize that all great literature--Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Illiad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and 'The Charge of the Light Brigade"--are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?" (9). First of all, this goes with what I said at the beginning of this post, no? (Even he appears to be aware on some level of the idea that I described himself.) And, though I don't know all of these books intimately, from what I do know about the others, yes, I'd say that his observation is accurate. Though The Red Badge of Courage and The Scarlet Letter made me realize more what a bummer it is to be a human who has to read either of those books than how much a bummer being a human is in general.
Ah, I think he makes a good point about Marx's famous quote, "Religion is the opiate of the people". That quote tends to be seen by many, myself included, as a negative thing. It gets you high, gets you lazy, dulls your senses, but Vonnegut translates it kindly into a better thing, probably what Marx actually intended to say when he said as he did: Not a condemnation but an admittance of the fact that it is comforting and can give relief (Much like the opium painkillers Marx needed himself). Not even admittance, just Marx "simply noticing" (12) that fact. "It was a casual truism, not a dictum" (12).
"I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent lives as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex" (17).
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college" (23). ....
"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something" (24).
Kurt Vonnegut has a section where he draws the story lines of your generic short or long story, then the story lines of specific stories that have generically the same as other story lines. If you happen to be thumbing through the book, look on page 32 for his treatment of Kafka's Metamorphosis.
"But there's a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it's that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here... The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is. And if I die--God forbid--I would like to go to heaven and ask somebody in charge up there, 'Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?'" (37). This is part of the story line section, the conclusion of it. Probably one of the most intriguing sections of the book...
Ah, Vonnegut's complaint that for all his years of smoking (all but twelve) he still lives--well, at the time--in complete health: "But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick, and Colon" (40). Have I mentioned quite how much I love Kurt Vonnegut? Has it been properly conveyed?
"Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes" (46).
Vonnegut's "Big Question" is, "What is life all about?" "I put my big question about life to my son the pediatrician. Dr Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: 'Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is'" (66).
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC" (66). This, unfortunately, does not seem to be his actual epitaph. But anyway, in this bit he talks about music with his high regards--I believe it is in Breakfast of Champions that a line occurs that reads something as follows: "What else is sacred? Romeo and Juliet, for instance. Oh, and all music, too."
"How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, 'If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?' But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake" (81).
"Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?" (88).
"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free"--Eugene Debs
"While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out their titles... The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries" (103).
"And still on the subject of books: Our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on" (103). I have definitely written about this on here before. And you know what, I'm willing to say that this isn't recent and by no means an American invention. For example: Dickens' works were cited as an example for this concept by Fabrizzles when he explained it to us in... Contemporary Lit? Creative Writing? Well, it matters not what class in particular. The basic idea, though, is that reading a book in a certain era gives you a better image of that era because it explains how the book was written, why it was written, how the idea came up and so on--because the time and breeding would have a direct affect on all of that. For example, when HG Wells wrote his books--things were being discovered. Breakthroughs were being made ten times a day. Someone famously declared (wrongly) that by the 1930's (or something like that) that all that there was to be discovered in the world would be. Space was big--people would have 'comet' parties to celebrate when comets were predicted to be sighted (not kidding about this either, unless if Carl Sagan would dare lie to me). You see what I mean? Maybe?
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy" (122).
"Life is no way to treat an animal" (123).
"All I wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing. Humor can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. If a hundred years from now people are still laughing, I'll be pleased" (130).
"When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back and said, 'You're a man now.' So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it" (131). This scene is regaled in I believe Slaughterhouse-Five, only instead it ends with "I almost killed my first German." (Vonnegut was of German ancestry.)
Oooookay. So I know I've been cheaping out on summaries as of late, but this really is just Kurt Vonnegut being awesome. So so so awesome! A longtime Vonnegut fan surely won't be disappointed, and someone who has never read him before will certainly be intrigued--well, if that someone is AWESOME. Kurt Vonnegut is so awesome.... Seriously. Go read all of his books right now, except for Hocus Pocus and Cat's Cradle. Well... at least not Hocus Pocus. Bleghhhhfgffffhhhhjjhhhh.
PS. This book is fantastic.
MLA Citation Information: Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man Without A Country. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005. Print.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Cuddle Fuddle by Passion Pit
This post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Kids with guns, taking over, but it won't be long, they're mesmerized skeletons
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