Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Kurt Vonnegut Jr. suggested yesterday that "In the history of art, the people who succeed in later life spent their youths being rejected again and again...
...amidst our intolerable political problems, he was writing about moonships and skin-head technicians. Mailer said because they interested him. It was not a popular answer, he had side-stepped a political question with a non-political answer. But the appropriate literary response was not to become a seedier Vonnegut. Questions of the political justifications of art, particularly in a highly politicized time, become the only questions, and writers are left stranded between their literary impulses and political sympathies...
...selling phrase was "black humor." Some of the best books of the '60s came out ghastly-funny, as if novelists were facing nuclear-age madness, crossed eyeballs to crossed eyeballs: Terry Southern in his underrated little masterpiece The Magic Christian, John Barth in The Sot-weed Factor, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Mother Night, Saul Bellow in Herzog...
...Vonnegut also asked the graduates to take advantage of some of youth's prerogatives. A "great swindle of our time," he said, "is that people your age are supposed to save the world. I was a graduation speaker at a little preparatory school for girls on Cape Cod a couple of weeks ago. I told the girls that they were much too young to save the world and that after they got their diplomas, they should go swimming and sailing and walking, and just fool around...
...Kurt Vonnegut tells about some secretaries he knows who live in New York, alone, somewhere in the jungle, and carry around Valley of the Dolls. (imagine 900 pages of Jaqueline Susan), in the hope that some man will walk up to them and say. "Wow, you're reading that too. huh? Where do you want to go for lunch?" I guess you just don't accidentally bump into someone twice in New York...