Calling All Kurt Vonnegut Fans!

[mister_noel_y2k]

There's an interview with the great man on Thursday 10th February on BBC2 on a show called "The Culture Show" at 7pm and then repeated at 11.20pm.

Enjoy!

[Jack_Aubrey]

I dont have BBC2!!! NOOOOOOOOO

[Sitaram]

I feel the need to discuss style of language.

I was in a bookstore, randomly browsing through different novels.

I opened Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five." The vocabulary and

style was pale in comparison to Hardy. That was what first came to my

mind.


I visited Kurt Vonnegut's web site:


http://www.vonnegut.com/artist.asp


I had not realized that he is an artist as well as an author.

I found a large site at geocities devoted to his work, with a page of

quotes.

I like what I read.



http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_quotes.html



Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think
and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that
boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little
too phlegmatic."

- Sirens of Titan



There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The
triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such
things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the
Mafia."

- Sirens of Titan



"There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to
the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it
can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

- Breakfast of Champions



We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we
pretend to be."

- Mother Night




Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand."

- Cat's Cradle



Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should
be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the
flying-saucer people to find, was this:


WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP

Only he didn't say 'doggone.'"

- Hocus Pocus




"Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as
hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence
could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment
and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in
one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money
could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line
the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be
created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the
next--and on and on."

- Galapagos




"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or
one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"

- Bluebeard p.168




"What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to
molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few
molecules who have the disease called 'thought'."

- Bluebeard p.188

===============

Here is an interesting collection of students essays on Vonnegut:

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_essays.html


Cat's Cradle and Postmodernism


http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_cat_postmodernism.html


The first sentence of "Cat's Cradle" is itself a nuclear device packed with power : "Call me Jonah." This name could be
easily connected with the biblical Jonah, who was swallowed
by a giant whale on the way to Ninive. The name Jonah does
not have only biblical connotations though; it refers also
to the Melville's Moby Dick. Peter Reed in his book about
Vonnegut writes about this point: "It is characteristic
that Vonnegut's speaker should be a Jonah, who… gets
swallowed by the whale, rather than a whale-hunting
Ishmael." This opinion is understandable, when we take into
consideration, that Jonah from Cat's Cradle was not hunting
any whale, which could be represented by Bokononism. On the
contrary, he readily accepted this religion and in the end
was completely swallowed by these "harmful lies", just like
Jonah by the whale in the biblical story.

=============

I became curious about the word "metonymical," which is used several times in the above essay on Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" and Postmodernism. I like to learn new things.

The following, courtesy of Google, is quite instructive:

a figure of speech in which the poet substitutes a word normally associated with something for the term usually naming that thing (for example, "big-sky country" for western Canada). The association can be cause-and-effect, attribute-of, instrument-for, etc.
www.creativestudios.com/lit/glossary2.html


a figure of speech in which an attribute is substituted for the whole
www.mantex.co.uk/samples/eng.htm


A figure of speech in which one word is substituted for another with which it is closely associated. For example, in the expression The pen is mightier than the sword, the word pen is used for “the written word,” and sword is used for “military power.”
www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0903237.html


A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.
sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/archive/00000023/01/HTML_Version/text/node83.html


substitution of a word or phrase with another which it suggests. "The pen is mightier than the sword," in which both "pen" and "sword" are substituted for "written prose" and "military." See also: synecdoche.
rinkworks.com/words/linguistics.shtml


a kind of connotation where in one sign is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.
www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiotics_and_ads/terminology.html


the use of the name of one thing for something else with which it is associated. Example: Neil reads Shakespeare while driving a Ford.
www.humanities.eku.edu/Glossary.htm


Metonymy from the Greek words [meta] meaning 'change,' and [onoma] meaning 'name.' Thus it is a name or figure of speech which represents something else which is associated with it in some fashion. For example, if we're drinking water, and we ask if we can 'have another glass,' the word glass is a metonymy for more water.
mountainretreat.org/glossary.html


/ substitution of one word for another which it suggests. *He is a man of the cloth. *The pen is mightier than the sword. *By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread. (A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples, Ross Scaife)
www.iprr.org/defs/DEFINMNO.html


Figurative language where one term is used in place of something else that it is related to or often associated with; like saying the White House for the president, or Hollywood for the American film industry.
www.viterbo.edu/personalpages/faculty/jwood/vocabulary%20page.htm


A figure of speech involving the designation of something by means of a related notion, e.g. "wheels" meaning "automobile" (see also synecdoche).
fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/glossary.htm


Referring to a concept by an attribute of it. For example, the crown referring to a monarch. See also synecdoche.
www2.parc.com/istl/groups/hdi/sensemaking/glossary.htm


- the linking of one sign with another to form a context "the cat is on the mat"; a relation based on combination and contiguity. Or something stands in for the whole: "All hands on deck".
www.merz-akademie.de/projekte/george.legrady/theory/psycho/defin.htm


– a type of metaphor in which something closely associated with a subject is substituted for it.
courses.lib.odu.edu/engl/emcavoy/glosslit.htm


a figure of speech that makes a term closely related to something serve as its substitute
www.english.udel.edu/spardee/poterms.html


figure of speech in which an object is described by its function or parts (e.g. "the kettle is boiling" -- it is the water within which boils, not the kettle itself). [top]
schools.brunnet.net/internetucation/gap/glossary.html


the signifying process by which an entity is used to refer to another that is related to it
www.oswego.edu/~thoffman/semiotics/assignments/assignment04/activity_1.html


Describing or naming one thing by something similar. Meaning is inferred. Ex: "The fat lady sings."
faculty.valencia.cc.fl.us/drogers/poetry/ptrygl.html


substituting the name of an attribute or feature for the name of the thing itself (as in `they counted heads')
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn

================

This essay and its excerpt are worthy of consideration:

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_synchronicity.html

Kurt Vonnegut's universal acclaim and appeal surely comes in no small
part from his gift for connecting, almost unnoticiably, seemingly
unrelated objects and events to give them deeper meaning,
creating a phenomenon known within Jungian circles as
synchronicity. By making his novel so multi-layered by drawing
these comparisons, such as in being transported from a train car
into a POW camp to an extraterrestrial spaceship that hums like
a melodious owl, human beings being trapped within each moment in
time like an insect in amber, and the writer's own repetition of
his current project to a jokey old song, the writer gives us
a deeper insight into the real multi-layeredness of space and
time.

[baddad]

Unfortunately I don't receive the BBC here in Canada........"...so it goes"

The above short quote is one of my favorite 'Vonnegutisms'

[Sitaram]

I assumed that "so it goes" was earlier than Vonnegut, though I may well be wrong, or you may simply mean that he employed it, but not that he originated it.

I remember the lyrics of a song my mother liked:

"The more I see you / The more I love you / The more I need you / As days go by /...."

somewhere in that song, it says ".. and so it goes."

http://www.links2love.com/love_lyrics_197.htm

The more I see you,
The more I want you
Somehow this feeling
Just grows and grows
With every sigh
I become more mad about you
More lost without you and so it goes

====

So far, I have searched without success to discover the origin and antiquity of "so it goes."

Here is an essay of Virginia Woolf where she says. "And so it goes ON."

http://www.*********.com/work-1523/Virginia-Woolf


Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection.