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Tag Archives: Kurt Vonnegut

hand

December 30, 2024
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with one hand we can speak. with two we can applaud. a surgeon cited hands as proof

of the existence of God.

a hand with age might hurt and hurt. arthritis, carpal tunnel. but a chrono-synclastic infundibulum

is a fictitious, time-warping funnel.

that last may seem quite off-the-wall with from-the-subject strand, but it all ties in when you are told

that this arthritic, Carpal-Tunnel-Syndrome-blighted admirer of Kurt Vonnegut wrote this thing you are reading just to give Kurt a posthumous

hand.

.

Note: The Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum and its fascinating properties may be found in The Sirens of Titan, one of the richest, most entertaining flights of imagination I have ever read.

straws and doughnuts

August 20, 2024
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topologically speaking/straws and doughnuts are identical

you may think a straw has two holes/and a doughnut one/but fuse a stack of doughnuts/and you have an impractical straw

and shorten a straw and thicken its wall/and you see more easily/that the two holes are really one

another commonality of straws and doughnuts/is that they may both convey unneeded sweetness

also, they both have a history/with predecessors much different/from today’s versions

for instance the sumerians of thousands of years ago gathered around vats of fermented beerlike stuff/and used super-long straws to communally drink/the vats being too heavy to move

and the early doughnuts/came to new amsterdam from dutch immigrants/in the form of olykoeken (“oil cakes”)/which lacked holes/and were often nut-filled

and folk rumor credits a sailor/one captain gregory hansen/with putting a hole in them/to facilitate even frying

both straws and doughnuts have been metaphorized/curiously though it is the natural hay-derived straw/that is the last straw or the short straw/or the straw that broke the camel’s back/or the straw in the wind

curiously as well it is the hole in the doughnut/and not the doughnut itself/that is metaphorized/when for instance discussing medical expenses/not covered by medicare

but the most colorful instance of rude dismissal/(effword alert)/is a metaphor of the doughnut itself/and in the public domain for years/before Kurt Vonnegut used it/in one of his novels:

“why don’t you take a flying fuck/at a rolling doughnut?”

fun fact: i am in the lobby/of my apartment complex/where property management has placed free doughnuts/and coffee/and i just finished a third doughnut/in full sight of the guy in the office/who last late july/stuck me with a $9.99 transaction fee/when i paid online/after he wouldn’t take my personal check

and so i determined to eat and drink/$9.99 worth of doughnuts and coffee

because that transaction fee/was the straw that broke the gary’s back

and if he doesn’t like it/i think i hear/the subtle rustle of a rolling doughnut/heading his way

Inktober 2022, day 13: Kind

October 13, 2022
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Today’s prompt, “Kind,” brought to mind one of my favorite scenes from Kurt Vonnegut’s magic/real God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Eliot Rosewater, head of the Rosewater Foundation and active alcoholic, is so revered by the denizens of Rosewater, Indiana that a new mom has asked him to baptize her newborn twins. So Eliot is imagining what he will say to them, and he comes up with this: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies–God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

The Poem Exchange: Joseph A and Gary B

February 26, 2021
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A fellow member of my Poets All Call group, a bright and imaginative man named Joseph Arechavala, wrote a poem and posted it to our group yesterday. I found the poem contained a metaphor for Truth that was apt . . . and I also felt compelled to respond. So I wrote a poem too. I have Joe’s kind permission to post our exchange for all the Blogoverse to see, and that will come soon, but first I want to share a drawing I just made, based on the fact that Joe is using a Groucho Marx headshot for his avatar. I thought it would be cute to draw Groucho and one of my own personal heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, shoulder to shoulder and smoking their tobacco products of choice, thus:

2021 0225 grouch kurt

JOE:

Truth is elusive
Like a woman
Standing in the distance
The sun outlining
Her beauty
A woman who
You know will
Never walk towards you
But will remain
A vaguely fair form
In the far away field
And you will
Walk towards her
But never
Come close to her
And you will weep

****

GARY:

Let me be your wingman Joe
Truth’s elusive this I know
She knows EVERYTHING you’ve done
Stuff for spite and some for fun

She has more than one big sister
I suggest you date one mister
Luscious Evidence will show you
Family pics of Truth–you know you

Could do worse than date Deduce Me
More plot twists than I Love Lucy
You’ll be challenged to decide
If you want Truth by your side
Or for a bride
With Lies denied

One more sister makes things clearer
That is Truth’s twin sister Mirror
Gaze deep DEEP into her glass–
TRUTH–she’s HERE!!!
–to Kick your Ass.

Whoops.
Sorry.

****
Gary: Joe, you have captured an important aspect of Truth in your poem. I am grateful. And I hope you see, for all my clowning, an important bit of Truth in mine, mainly that showing an interest in phenomena related to Truth does bring us closer to Truth Herself.

Joe: Gary Bowers It just feels good to finally be writing again.

Gary: Joe, I would love to do a blog post on this exchange of ours. May I have your permission?

Joe: Sure. Post the link so I can read it.

Gary: Will do, my friend!
****
A couple of things before I go. First, Joe and many others in our group are suffering from writer’s block. I think the pandemic has something to do with it. So his comment about feeling good to be writing again is a hopeful sign to me.

Second, this is not the first instance in poetic history wherein one poem inspires another. Christopher “Kit” Marlowe wrote “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” in the 16th Century. One year after it was published, none other than Sir Walter Raleigh wrote “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” a fitting response (snub) to the Passionate Shepherd’s overtures (lusty). And in subsequent centuries other poets wrote poems inspired by the original, and in the 20th Century those two sly dogs Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker both took a whack at it. So History is not by any means being made by Joe and me, but what matters to me is that the creative spark was ignited by Joe, and then I got ignited as well, for a pleasant journey to deeper digging.

interFEARence

April 19, 2016
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IMG_20160419_094420

Facing unforeseen adversity often generates FEAR whenever unknown forces energize.

“Simple–almost comic,” as F Murray Abraham as Salieri said of the beginning of a Mozart piece in AMADEUS. So that’s where Fear comes from. But how do we make it go away? For Fear DOES interfere–with endeavor, with romance, with peace of mind.

There is a Vonnegut book called GALAPAGOS which imagines the next million years of human evolution beginning with a handful of survivors of a disaster that wiped out the rest of the human race. Their heads become more streamlined, that they may swim faster and catch the fish they need to survive; their brains become smaller and less capable of deceit and other problems “great big brains” create.

I have a strong feeling that Stephen Baxter, author of MANIFOLD: ORIGIN, has read GALAPAGOS and was influenced or inspired by it. In M:O different offshoots of hominids such as Homines Erectus, Australopithecus and Neandertalis are stranded on an outsized red-dusted, atmosphered moon, which has suddenly appeared in Luna’s place. Onto this moon Emma Stoney, lover/hater of Reid Malenfant, has fallen, due to Malenfant’s foolhardy go-fevered impulse . . .

Sorry about that. Off-track digression. Please read the book if you want an ingenious answer to Fermi’s Paradox, which may  be oversimply stated as “If there are other intelligences than our own, why haven’t they been here already?” The M:O connection with Vonnegut has to do with Baxter’s imaginings of the different ways different intelligences could evolve in different species. The most intelligent of his lot, his Homo Superior folks, look a lot like gorillas, and walk on their knuckles as well as their feet. They are so intelligent that they move vast distances by mentally manipulating space.

Each intelligence has its upside and downside. Neandertals are unhampered by mythology. H. Superior with its short lifetime and limited resources tend to wring every atom’s worth out of their “farms” rather than go spacefaring. H. Sapiens make great intuitive leaps, but we also lie and steal and such.

Back to Fear: Emma Stoney is called upon to think like a Neandertal in order to breach a barrier. She learns of their fatalism, their involvement in the moment, and their lack of sentimentality for tools and other possessions. While making tools in the Neandertal fashion Emma suddenly finds herself becoming the tool she’s making, and in that moment her connection with the Neandertal is made.

Fear, I think, is a lack of connection with that which we fear. Afraid to show your feelings to a potential Special Someone? Learn about that person and what welcome your feelings would get. (Do not stalk, though.) Afraid to go off the High Dive into a washtub full of piranha? Find something better to do. 🙂

Tenors 3 Eggs 3 Lock 1 All-Important Spoon 1

December 1, 2013
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This one is crying to be made into a painting ten feet high. Alas, it would need to be photoreal, and none of that Giclée stuff either; that’d be cheating. If fifty grand fell out of the sky into my lap I’d quit my job and spend a year on the project. That’s unlikely to happen, since when I sit outside I’m usually at a picnic table, and if the shade tree didn’t stop the 50 Gs in its tracks, the top of the table would. But it is a nice dream.

This brings up the subject of Patronage and Grants. In his landmark novel Stranger In a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein had his Wise Old Owl character Jubal Harshaw yell, “A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!” I read Stranger more than forty years ago, when I was wet behind the ears and impressionable, but I shouldn’t have taken RAH’s word for it; after all, both Leonardo and Michelangelo enjoyed the patronage of Lorenzo “Il Magnifico” de’ Medici, and if he wasn’t The Government, who was? (Pope Julius? Well, yeah, but “in addition to” not “instead of.”)

So far the only people to buy my artworks or otherwise give me money to create have been private parties. But I did apply for a grant once, so this is no sanctimonious testimonial. And my hero Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five “on Guggenheim money (God love it).”

As for the image, and why the tenors and the eggs and the lock, and why the Spoon is All-Important, not to mention the torn envelope, which wasn’t mentioned, I’m of the opinion that the story the viewer creates of this concatenation stands a good chance of being better than the story I would tell about it.

Support the Arts, folks!

Anew Leaf; or, A. Newleaf; or, A New Leaf

August 19, 2013
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Not all modern folk know that turning over a new leaf means turning a page of a book. Many sayings are rooted in the archaic, and we’ll know what they mean metaphorically even while we’ve forgotten how they came to be. “A stitch in time saves nine,” but who stitch-sews or darns any more, darn it?

In this age of controversy about genetic modification of plants, though, a “new leaf” could mean anything from ganja to a more efficient oxygenator. Both? The mind boggles.

This page was done under conditions of extreme sleep deprivation and sporadic retail sales. Looking at it, I don’t know exactly why I went semicolon crazy. I do know that my hero Kurt V had scorn for semicolons, thinking them hermaphroditic.

Words:

Abs; traction may well; be a Pal
NeoReal may boost; morale
Evangelics wax; aloof–a
Way; fair; err; a; semi; goof

I also debit SleepDep for the sloppiness of illustrative execution. That top right leaf certainly could use some makeover…

Lincoln: Hit or Myth?

February 13, 2013
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Yesterday was Lincoln’s birthday. I wanted to say something new, or at least meaningful, about him. I had little to go by in my recent experience aside from having viewed both LINCOLN and ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER. So I did a little research…

Which led me to documentation that President Lincoln frequently used the N-word, loved minstrel shows demeaning to people of color, and told “darky” jokes. In other words, today he’d be considered a racist by many.

There are those who might say that we can’t expect too much from a man of the near-south in the 1800s. And my hero Kurt Vonnegut once confessed to admiration for the writing of known Nazi sympathizer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. And Robert Penn Warren once wrote “And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.”

Somehow I found myself grouping Lincoln, Barack Obama, and Jomo Kenyatta, founder of the independent Republic of Kenya, where Barack Obama Sr. came from when it was still British East Africa. Jomo Kenyatta is on much Kenyan currency and coin, but not for long. Perhaps it is because he was publicly in favor of female genital mutilation. “No proper Kikuyu would dream of marrying a girl who has not been circumcised,” he stated in his book Facing Mount Kenya. Wikipedia mentions his taking the “traditionalist” side in public debate.

And what of Barack Obama? He has most of his second term before him. I would like to urge him to become an example to the world of what the United States is all about. He has already done that to some extent. His two inaugural speeches were magnificent, and I have praised them both on my modest Facebook soapbox. But Gitmo remains open for business, and many of his other promises go either as yet unkept or bent or shattered. “That’s politics,” some may say. But, Mr. President, I urge you to at least pretend to transcend politics, to the good of the world citizenry. Pretend to be transcendent, early and often, and with good will and good luck Kurt Vonnegut’s admonition will apply favorably.

NOTE: I wish my journal page above had contained much more of the message that is here below it. I was seduced by wordplay, and the acrostic format, plus some semblance of meter, plus an incorrigible proclivity towards punmanship, made the words what they are. I regret that they did not mean more; I hope they and these words are at least thought-provoking.

Blurred Visions

January 31, 2013
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Once upon a time, a man named Lyon Sprague de Camp summed up the Propheteering game by opining, “It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.” Many years later, a charismatic charlatan named John Edward McGee Jr. truncated his name and hung his Psychic Medium shingle on the airwaves, fooling millions with “I’m seeing a J. He’s VERY important…” and similar claptrap. If you’d like to become a Psychic Medium yourself, there’s plenty of How To material on the Internet; just do a search on “Cold Reading.”

Ever since the summer of 2012 I have lived in the charming subsection of Sedona, Arizona known as the Village of Oak Creek (also known as the VOC). In this beautiful rock-formationed land there is much belief in the supernormal. Last December a fellow went up Bell Rock with the publicized claim that a “space portal” was going to open up and he was going to jump in. Alas, no such portal materialized for him. It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.

The last line in the acrostic refers to Kurt Vonnegut, who was my favorite writer in the 70’s, and continued to be so in the 80’s, the 90’s, and the Aughts. In his Slaughterhouse-Five he followed every mention of death with “So it goes.” It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.

Finally, for those unfamiliar with American alphabet soup, an ATV is an All-Terrain Vehicle. I can be specific about that, since I’m no prophet.