Word: midlands
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...Midland. Mich...
...plot is simple enough. I am invited to the Midland City Festival of the Arts through the efforts of Eliot Rosewater, an eccentric millionaire with the handwriting of a fourteen-year-old, and incidentally, my only fan. After a rather roundabout trip I arrive, only to drive a Pontiac dealer, Dwayne Hoover, insane with the ideas from one of my books. You can imagine my horror; I had never even driven a Pontiac before, and besides, my books had always influenced people to do only one thing: cut out the dirty pictures my publishers put in them and then burn...
...head and faulty wiring in his nervous system. Dwayne represents the belief that we're all machines with no guarantee, programmed to do whether we happen to be doing, until we go haywire. It's quite amazing he lasted as long as he did. Even before I appear in Midland City, Dwayne Hoover is surrounded by quite a cast of characters. Harry LeSabre, his salesman, is a sometime transvestite who expresses his women's clothes fetish during Hawaiian Week at Dwayne Hoover's Exit Eleven Pontiac Village. Francine Pefko, Dwayne's mistress, thinks she is his mother. Bunny is Dwayne...
...attacks two black kitchen workers, he attacks random acquaintances and random strangers, and we last see him being carted away, along with several of his victims, in an ambulance called the Martha Simmons Memorial Mobile Disaster Unit, and talking vaguely about the prospects of investing in health clubs. "The Midland City Festival of the Arts," Vonnegut concludes in one grand sentence, "was postponed because of madness...
...central character in his own novels, seems to conclude on an even grander destructive note, namely the destruction of his own fictional universe. "I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come," he tells his creation, Kilgore Trout, when they meet at Midland City. "Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoy freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career." It is, perhaps, the ultimate goal of every creator to prove his creation by destroying...