Accidents in a Very Busy Place:Kurt Vonnegut in Schenectady

K. A. Laitykalaity.com

“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

— Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, 1974

“Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

“Palm Sunday”

a sermon delivered at St. Clement’s Church

I told my brother one time that whenever I did repair work around the house, I lost all my tools before I could finish the job.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “I always lose whatever I’m working on.”

We laughed.

Slapstick

“We didn’t belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine.”

There was an empty seat between us, which was spooky poetry. It could have been a seat for our sister Alice whose age was halfway between mine and Bernard’s. She wasn’t in that seat and on her way to her beloved Uncle Alex’s funeral, for she had died among strangers in New Jersey, of cancer—at the age of forty one.

“Soap opera!” she said to my brother and me one time, when discussing her own impending death. She would be leaving four young boys behind, without any mother.

“Slapstick,” she said.

Exhaustion, yes, and deep money worries, too, made her say toward the end that she guessed that she wasn’t really very good at life.

Then again: Neither were Laurel and Hardy.

I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.

“Thus it happened that Kurt received a call in late August from George W. Griffin Jr., a General Electric public relations executive. Griffin explained that [Vonnegut’s brother] Bernard had recommended his younger brother as the kind of man they might be looking for: someone with a science background who was also a reporter. Would he be interested in interviewing for a job in Schenectady?”

Charles J. Shield, And So It Goes

A pop, a green flash, and the cat sailed high over the top strand as though thrown. She dropped to the asphalt—dead and smoking, but outside.

“We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

— A Man Without a Country, 2005

“You were a damn fine machinist, Rudy.”

“I say so myself. Knowing that, knowing smart men like you say that about Rudy, that means a lot. It’s about all I got, you know, Doctor? That and the dog.”

Where willow wands blessRill-crossed hollow,There, thee, Pat, dear,Will I follow…

“That profession specializing in the cultivation, by applied psychology in mass communication media, of favorable public opinion with regard to controversial issues and institutions, without being offensive to anyone of importance, and with the continued of the economy and society as its primary goal.”

“If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”

— a “composite self-interview” in The Paris Review, 1977