I really like Vonnegut’s writing, but his concepts drive me nuts. They seem like a teenager, high, has an idea, doesn’t think about the secondary effects, but becomes obsessed with the primary effect. Then writes a story to retroactively justify the primary effect.
Some people have unfair advantages. Well, obviously, give everyone a disability to even it out! What could possibly go wrong?
Huh. Okay, let me see if I can find a representative passage, that is simultaneously very well written, and annoyingly full of platitudes.
Her talent was as a poetess. She had published anonymously a slim volume of poems called Between Timid and Timbuktu. It had been reasonably well received.
The title derived from the fact that all the words between timid and Timbuktu in very small dictionaries relate to time.
But, well-endowed as Mrs. Rumfoord was, she still did troubled things like chaining a dog’s skeleton to the wall, like having the gates of the estate bricked up, like letting the famous formal gardens turn into New England jungle.
The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren’t everything.
Malachi Constant, the richest American, locked the Alice-in-Wonderland door behind him. He hung his dark glasses and false beard on the ivy of the wall. He passed the dog’s skeleton briskly, looking at his solar-powered watch as he did so. In seven minutes, a live mastiff named Kazak would materialize and roam the grounds.
“Kazak bites,” Mrs. Rumfoord had said in her invitation, “so please be punctual.”
Constant smiled at that—the warning to be punctual. To be punctual meant to exist as a point, meant that as well as to arrive somewhere on time. Constant existed as a point—could not imagine what it would be like to exist in any other way.
Six paragraphs, some witty remarks, a throwback to a remark (like a good comedy routine), and several observations that sound like they could be made as part of a valedictorian speech if written by ChatGPT.
“To learn my teachings, I must first teach you to learn.” No, wait, that was the Sphinx from Mystery Men. ;)
yea, thats a lot of words to place-set, but doesn’t seem to actually say anything.
Definitly one of my problems is i’m not a detail oriented reader. i learned a bad habit at a young age just to… skip parts of sentances if i feel that i know what its going to say, and that the sentence is boring… and that writing would totally trigger that problem of mine.
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