Keeping up the KV kick... This was a book I read because I could download it from the Austin Public Library, so it was free and easy and I wanted to read more Vonnegut. That is all.
Bluebeard
By Kurt Vonnegut
I read this on my kindle, and these are my underlines from this book. Some of them are just bizarre, some make me laugh, some ring true - even depressingly so, and some seem like pretty good advice. I'll leave you to decide which is which.
During that war we had a word for extreme man-made disorder which was fubar, an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.” Well—the whole planet is now fubar with postwar miracles.
Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor’s Syndrome as my father, so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: “Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?” “No,” I said. “Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?” “No,” I said. “You may be entitled to the Survivor’s Syndrome, but you didn’t get it,” she said. “Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?”
“What’s the point of being alive,” she said, “if you’re not going to communicate?”
Tantalizing? Here’s a hint: it’s bigger than a bread box and smaller than the planet Jupiter.
The widow Berman agrees that Marilee was using me, but not in the way my father thought. “You were her audience,” she said. “Writers will kill for an audience.” “An audience of one?” I said. “That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs. Just look at how her handwriting improved and her vocabulary grew. Look at all the things she found to talk about, as soon as she realized you were hanging on every word."
“If the cities are still standing when you get to Europe,” he said, “and you sit in a cafe for hours, sipping coffee or wine or beer, and discussing painting and music and literature, just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again. “If I had my way,” he said, “American geography books would call those European countries by their right names: “The Syphilis Empire,” “The Republic of Suicide,” “Dementia Praecox,” which of course borders on beautiful “Paranoia.” “There!” he said. “I’ve spoiled Europe for you, and you haven’t even seen it yet. And maybe I’ve spoiled art for you, too, but I hope not. I don’t see how artists can be blamed if their beautiful and usually innocent creations for some reason just make Europeans unhappier and more bloodthirsty all the time.”
It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.” Can you imagine that?
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.
A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.” How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”
Father, by the way, refused to touch a camera, saying that all it caught was dead skin and toenails and hair which people long gone had left behind. I guess he thought photographs were a poor substitute for all the people killed in the massacre.
Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Dan Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there.
The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.
I complained to Slazinger and Mrs. Berman at supper last night that the young people of today seemed to be trying to get through life with as little information as possible. “They don’t even know anything about the Vietnam War or the Empress Josephine, or what a Gorgon is,” I said. Mrs. Berman defended them. She said that it was a little late for them to do anything about the Vietnam War, and that they had more interesting ways of learning about vanity and the power of sex than studying a woman who had lived in another country one hundred and seventy-five years ago. “All that anybody needs to know about a Gorgon,” she said, “is that there is no such thing.”
He patronized her most daintily with these words: “As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’” “Is that a fact?” she said. “Well—I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.” “Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man. And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”
There was one thing I learned during my eight years as a professional soldier which proved to be very useful in civilian life: how to fall asleep almost anywhere, no matter how bad the news may be.
“Painters—and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians,” he said. “They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!” How was that for delusions of moral grandeur! Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.
What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!
Oddly enough, nobody had ever hit me. Nobody has ever hit me.
Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!
The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?
Bluebeard
By Kurt Vonnegut
I read this on my kindle, and these are my underlines from this book. Some of them are just bizarre, some make me laugh, some ring true - even depressingly so, and some seem like pretty good advice. I'll leave you to decide which is which.
During that war we had a word for extreme man-made disorder which was fubar, an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.” Well—the whole planet is now fubar with postwar miracles.
Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor’s Syndrome as my father, so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: “Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?” “No,” I said. “Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?” “No,” I said. “You may be entitled to the Survivor’s Syndrome, but you didn’t get it,” she said. “Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?”
“What’s the point of being alive,” she said, “if you’re not going to communicate?”
Tantalizing? Here’s a hint: it’s bigger than a bread box and smaller than the planet Jupiter.
The widow Berman agrees that Marilee was using me, but not in the way my father thought. “You were her audience,” she said. “Writers will kill for an audience.” “An audience of one?” I said. “That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs. Just look at how her handwriting improved and her vocabulary grew. Look at all the things she found to talk about, as soon as she realized you were hanging on every word."
“If the cities are still standing when you get to Europe,” he said, “and you sit in a cafe for hours, sipping coffee or wine or beer, and discussing painting and music and literature, just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again. “If I had my way,” he said, “American geography books would call those European countries by their right names: “The Syphilis Empire,” “The Republic of Suicide,” “Dementia Praecox,” which of course borders on beautiful “Paranoia.” “There!” he said. “I’ve spoiled Europe for you, and you haven’t even seen it yet. And maybe I’ve spoiled art for you, too, but I hope not. I don’t see how artists can be blamed if their beautiful and usually innocent creations for some reason just make Europeans unhappier and more bloodthirsty all the time.”
It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.” Can you imagine that?
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.
A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.” How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”
Father, by the way, refused to touch a camera, saying that all it caught was dead skin and toenails and hair which people long gone had left behind. I guess he thought photographs were a poor substitute for all the people killed in the massacre.
Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Dan Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there.
The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.
I complained to Slazinger and Mrs. Berman at supper last night that the young people of today seemed to be trying to get through life with as little information as possible. “They don’t even know anything about the Vietnam War or the Empress Josephine, or what a Gorgon is,” I said. Mrs. Berman defended them. She said that it was a little late for them to do anything about the Vietnam War, and that they had more interesting ways of learning about vanity and the power of sex than studying a woman who had lived in another country one hundred and seventy-five years ago. “All that anybody needs to know about a Gorgon,” she said, “is that there is no such thing.”
He patronized her most daintily with these words: “As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’” “Is that a fact?” she said. “Well—I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.” “Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man. And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”
There was one thing I learned during my eight years as a professional soldier which proved to be very useful in civilian life: how to fall asleep almost anywhere, no matter how bad the news may be.
“Painters—and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians,” he said. “They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!” How was that for delusions of moral grandeur! Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.
What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!
Oddly enough, nobody had ever hit me. Nobody has ever hit me.
Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!
The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?
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