The Vonnegutist Vol.1: The Quote by The Vonnegutist

Edited by Ádám T. Bogár

The Quote

Edited by Ádám T. Bogár

The Quote Volume 1

The Vonnegutist

The Quote by Ádám T. Bogár (editor) © 2016 by Ádám T. Bogár. © 2016 by individual contributors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying form without written permission of the publishers, The Drawer Project and the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Budapest Chapter. Published by The Drawer Project, Folkestone, UK, and the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Budapest Chapter, Budapest, Hungary Bogár, Ádám T. (ed.), 1984 – The Quote ISSN: 2398-5097

Contents

Foreword

vii

Notes on Contributors

Foreword

viii

The secondever event organized by the Budapest Chapter of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is the namesake as well as the point of origin of this publication. It bore the title ‘The Quote’, and it took place, as usual, in Massolit Budapest Bookstore and Café on May 23, 2014. The main idea behind this event was to ask participants to choose a quote from Kurt Vonnegut and respond to that in whatever creative way they saw fit. ‘Quote’ was meant to be broadly construed here: basically, the only limitation was to keep the length of the quote shorter than a novel. Given Vonnegut’s endeavors, his visual artworks were also ‘quotable’. The responses were diverse and intriguing. Although, as expected, most of them were textual in nature, some works of visual art have also found their way to these pages. The seven sections of this volume collect distilled and extended responses by select contributors to befittingly mark the second anniversary of the original event. Sections 1, 2 and 4 contain poetry written by Mohammad Azim Khan and, by reacting mainly to Vonnegut’s scathing opinion about war and about the War on Terror in particular, offer an unsettling insider’s view on the US bombing of Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

His array of poems is cradling a very Vonnegutian piece of microprose by Ray McManus in Section 3. It is the only work that lacks any form of directly referenced quotation: instead, in just one sentence, it evokes the general tone of Vonnegut’s writings. In Sections 5 and 6, Ádám T. Bogár contributes first a digital collage, in response to a photograph of Vonnegut taken by his wife Jill Krementz, and then a brief essay on the metafictional significance of the opening sentence of Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. The latter piece has originally been published in 2014 in The First Line Literary Journal, whose kind permission to republish this text in this volume is hereby kindly acknowledged. The final section of the volume contains Headshot in the Open, a 2015 oil painting by Hungarian artist and photographer Dániel Ferencz. His referenced Vonnegut quotation summarizes the main intent behind the collation of this volume, and can in fact be read as probably one of the greatest pieces of practical advice ever given by Vonnegut: the primal importance of the creative act to any one’s and everyone’s lives. Á. T. B. Folkestone, UK

Mohammad Azim Khan “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.” (Kurt Vonnegut, interview to The Progressive, Feb. 12, 2003) out of Manhattan project the Fatman feeding on plutonium blew himself up over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 churning cherry blossoms into ashes

Image source: http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_japan

Image source: http://silviorodriguez.blogspot.com/2014_02_01_archive.html

Mohammad Azim Khan “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.” (Kurt Vonnegut, interview to The Progressive, Feb. 12, 2003) they produced two dragon’s egg igniting flesh and blood Oh! Hiroshima Oh! Nagasaki where are the cherry blossoms?

Ray McManus They say it is a dog eat dog world, but I never saw a dog eat another dog; dogs are smart they got it sussed.

Mohammad Azim Khan “The attack on the World Trade Towers has allowed Bush and his gang to do anything. What are we to do now? I say when there’s a code red, we should all run around like chickens with our heads cut off. I don’t feel that we are in any great danger.” (Kurt Vonnegut, interview to The Progressive, Feb. 12, 2003) Afghanistan, 2001 A.D. (US bombing of Afghanistan, October 2001) Steel hawks hovering the sky, a resounding bang, Mushrooms of dust sprouting out of the land, Igniting flesh and blood. Yes, indeed you knew them all Those cutthroat thugs with lolling tongues, The hounds of heaven, The stripped hyena with spotted stars The howl of infinite justice…. They have shown you enough The primrose path to martyrdom, The mountains move, meadows smeared with blood, Between the sunshine and the dark valley, You stand alone neither dead nor living.

Prisoners with knotted hands Slaughtered like sheep and cattle. A village is dead, churned into a graveyard An overnight feat by those gallant sky surgeons! Sorrows heaped up in rubbles There is no one to mourn the dead. Broken dreams shattered In the dead of night…...

Ádám T. Bogár Ádám T. Bogár Based on Jill Krementz’s photo “Kurt “Kurt Vonnegut on the beach in East Hampton, N.Y., with his Lhasa apso, Pumpkin, on July 19, 1976 Pumpkin, on July 19, 1976.”

Ádám T. Bogár “Nothing in this book is true”: on Kurt Vonnegut’s

Cat’s Cradle In the first place, this is very much like Vonnegut. Readers tend to consider “Call me Jonah” the first sentence of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, and parallels are of course often drawn between this phrase and the “Call me Ishmael” of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (see e.g. Thomas [2006] and Wharton [2003]). However, due to the authorial and narrative structure of the novel, it is really the inscription “Nothing in this book is true” that acts as the actual first line of the text. This inscription is obviously an invasive interference of the author with the text, and as such, is part of the novel (not only of the book), regardless of the fact that it can be found in the middle of the front matter. Vonnegut mingles his identities as author of the novel with a tendency to penetrate his work and as Kurt Vonnegut, an actually existing person, and thus creates a narrative with an inextricable, circular structure.



Originally published in 2014 in The First Line Literary Journal 16.3 (pp. 61–63).

Vonnegut pushes his novel’s fictitiousness to the fore to an almost awkward extent by calling the readers’ attention, in the very beginning of the novel, to the otherwise wellknown fact that what they are to read here is nothing but fiction: a bunch of artfully structured lies, if you like. Of course, one is generally already aware that information provided in a work of fiction not necessarily matches the reality outside the novel. Vonnegut, however, makes it overly clear that what he is writing must not be taken as true. We are presented with a Vonnegutian version of the ‘Liar Paradox’: if nothing in this book is true, then the inscription is also not true, meaning that nothing in this book is not true, that is, things in this book are true. But then the inscription is also true, which means that nothing in this book is true, and so on ad infintum. The inscription in page vii of Cat’s Cradle makes the narrative an example of that which Douglas R. Hofstadter calls ‘strange loops’ or ‘tangled hierarchies’. These phenomena occur when something in the system jumps out and acts on the system, as if it were outside the system. What bothers us is perhaps an illdefined sense of topological wrongness: the insideoutside distinction is being blurred […] (Hofstadter 1979: 686)

Through this inscription, Vonnegut jumps out of the system (the novel) and acts on it (negates it) from the outside, thus turning the novel into “a book of triply ironic negation” (AbádiNagy 1996: 86). Excessive authorial presence in the text, providing readers with information at a nearabsurdity rate, and self negation are recurrent, key elements of Vonnegut’s style of writing, examples of which abound both in his fiction and nonfiction works. “You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit” (Standish 1973: 77); this is how Vonnegut begins his reply to a question by Steven Standish concerning the Tralfamadorian view of time presented in SlaughterhouseFive. Right off the bat, he inserts a disclaimer that lingers above the text (in that case, his reply) ever after, questioning every sentence, every word he writes or utters. He employs a similar strategy of self negation in practically all of his novels by getting them narrated by clearly unreliable narrators. This is how most of Vonnegut’s works operate, and in Cat’s Cradle it is especially emphatic. This tendency toward selfnegation is a key ingredient, the essential core in the sarcasm so characteristic of his thought and writings: in a way, his oeuvre, and Cat’s Cradle in it, may be read as the anatomy of acrid, sarcastic humor.

References AbádiNagy, Zoltán (1996) ‘Bokononism as a Structure of Ironies,’ in Peter J. Reed & Marc Leeds, eds. (1996) The Vonnegut Chronicles : Interviews and Essays (Westport, CT: Greenwood) Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach : an Eternal Golden Braid (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Standish, Steve (1973) ‘The Playboy Interview,’ in William Rodney Allen, ed. (1988) Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Jackson: U of Mississippi P) Thomas, Paul Lee (2006) Reading, Learning, Teaching Kurt Vonnegut (New York: Peter Lang) Vonnegut, Kurt (1963) Cat’s Cradle (New York: Delacorte) Wharton, David Michael (2003) ‘Dubious Truths: An Examination of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle,’ in Strange Horizons, 24 Mar. 2003

Dániel Ferencz “The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” (Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, p.24.)

Fejlövés a szabadban [Headshot in the Open], 2015 Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 cm

Notes on Contributors

Dániel Ferencz was born in Veszprém, Hungary in 1987. He attended the Photography degree course at University of Kaposvár and holds a Foundation Degree in Graphics from Art School Szentendre. While studying at university, he was also working as a photo reporter and journalist. His works have been displayed in both individual and group exhibitions, and he organizes exhibitions and fine art events as well. He is a member of ASAN, the Esztergom Artists’ Guild, Eat My Funk and the TeleSzubjektív Comprehensive Artwork Association, and he is the co founder of Colorful Community Space Social Cooperative and of Bringart. He currently resides in Cologne, Germany. Mohammad Azim Khan took to poetry writing during his school days, and recently has developed a special interest in haiku and tanka writing. He holds Master’s degrees in English Literature and Economics from Peshawar University in Pakistan. After retiring from the United Nations World Food Program, he served as Head of Program Unit in Peshawar, where his job was mainly to provide humanitarian assistance to victims of wars and natural disasters. Ray McManus is Irish, living off the grid in Spain, fighting the New World Order. He likes fish.

Ádám T. Bogár is the founder of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library’s Budapest Chapter and cofounder of the creative enterprise The Drawer Project. His main research interests are the oeuvre of Kurt Vonnegut as well as the philosophical and cultural aspects of technology, and he has been publishing papers on these and other topics since 2010. He is currently living in Folkestone, UK.

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