Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...weeks the way that Harvard students have been taught to interpret everything--by holding it still (and it won't hold still) and examining it. Mainly, we are intimately concerned with why this is going on. It is a silly thing to be concerned with. Billy Pilgrim (in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five) was concerned with it after some people from another planet carried him away in their space ship, but they set him straight...
...Slaughterhouse-Five was written. I've always thought that the best rock 'n' roll groups were the ones that worked on it a lot; the best writers, the ones that worked on it a lot; the best writers, the ones that threw most of it away. It would guess Vonnegut edits lots. This book is really great in its detail. Writing, especially in a style of such overwhelming simplicity as Vonnegut's, is a matter of manipulating prepositions, adverbs, and, above all, articles. In the contemporary American idiom, at least, the whole punch of what you say depends...
...often thought that Vonnegut is so popular among us youths because his mind is bent by the exact same flashes that clutter the minds of the TV - weaned, let's-go-take-over-that-building - next generation. For instance, I was grumbling just the other day with some revolutionary cohorts about how we could best spread out culture once we took over. It was decided to pave over the whole of Southeast Asia to make way for one gigantic Frosty's, the world's biggest. Then I read that Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Slaughterhouse-Five, the character we identify...
LISTEN: the most fascinating thing about this book is the way Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian understanding of time to deal with the importance of death. Tralfamadore is the planet 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away, to which Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped. Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments of time in the same way we can look at a whole range of the Rocky Mountains. For those who can travel in time (Billy Pilgrim can and does) any particular moment can be visited. Nothing is "future"; nothing is "past." All moments exist, always have, and always will...
...Vonnegut passes on the information that pieces together Billy Pilgrim's life in a Tralfamadorian sense of order, not a chronological one. Instead of telling Billy's life "as it happened," he describes events that might be most enlightening when compared. The actual story of the book depends on the chronology of capture and eventual freedom during World War II. But Vonnegut's ideas don't depend on it--he tells us what the end of the book will be in the first chapter...