I’m rereading Slaughterhouse Five at the moment and realising, subconsciously or dyslexic-ly, that I’ve always associated Poo-tee-weet with ‘pretty sweet?’ in my head.
I was wondering if it may have been in anyway intentional, or if that language was even used in 1968.
Apologies if this has been asked before.
I am absolutely floored and had to come to a group that would get it, but someone is releasing a book with this title this week 😳 This is by far my most prominent tattoo and I am just so bothered. The author had to know, right? Or am I being crazy???
Home visiting Chicago and passed this book-sharing box on the street today. I thought of you.
If this isn’t nice…
Born on the 4th of July.
I got this 3 or 4 years ago and never opened it since I had recently read the book and got it whenever I decided to reread it. Well 2026 is my year of rereads including SH5, and realized it was marked on every paragraph that had "so it goes" in it. Pretty cool! I love getting used books and seeing all the notes, highlights etc people wrote in them.
Started seeing this sub in my feed more and more and figured I'd share, in the midst of trying to find a more permanent place to put these. Have picked these up one at a time over the years as I've lucked upon them.
Just putting some thoughts out there:
I keep thinking about our big brains and how they get us into trouble.
“Overthinking”
My best friend is a constant over thinker and it complicates his life unnecessarily. He just wants to chill but he just can’t.
“Ignorance is bliss”
Not having this ability for “higher thought” would make our lives simpler. Maybe not “better” but what makes life better, really? Not more stuff, that’s for sure.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and maybe how our lives would be better as pseudo manatee type animals lol.
I think it’s a figment of Billy’s imagination, but I want to know what y’all think.
Featuring a couple of publications by Kilgore Trout. I'm slowly trying to replace all my Dial Press copies with Dell mass market versions, with the catch being I have to find them in the wild from bookstores or marketplace meetups. Such is life
My son is visiting the galapagos and sent me this video of a bird that I honestly thought Kurt made up for the book. Next he'll send me a picture of a tralfamadorian.
Twenty some years ago David Foster Wallace called Jorge Luis Borges the bridge between modernism and postmodernism. Incidentally Borges and the author above, Adolfo Bioy Casares, were very close friends. Their style planted the seeds of Latin American magical realism, but it also tee up much of what Vonnegut would later publish.
I say that to say that these novels are, much like Vonnegut: weird, funny, philosophical, and incredibly engaging. As an enjoyer of Latin American literature and Kurt Vonnegut, I strongly recommend.
This past year, I read and enjoyed Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Soon after finishing, I read a New York Times article about the CIA's loss of a nuclear device on Nanda Devi - into the fresh water supply of the Indian sub-continent:
I was impressed with Vonnegut's prescience. Cat's Cradle was originally published in 1963, and the device was lost in 1967. News of the event may not have even come out until 1978. Yet the real-life event feels plucked out of Vonnegut's book.
As I read A People's History now and the US installation of Ngo Dinh Diem from New Jersey to South Vietnam is discussed, it also seems prescient of Vonnegut to write from the perspective of such a puppet.
It seems he had his finger on the pulse of many of the shady activities his own government was engaged in throughout the 60s. But I'm not really satisfied with the book.. It felt inconsistent in pacing, messy in the handling of all its themes and its characters. Maybe I would enjoy it more on a re-read, and I just didn't get it - the Cat's Cradle itself, for example, I don't understand (Maybe a theme of damaged and traumatized children becoming dangerous adults who hurt others?). But I am curious if there is a novel anyone can recommend that does what Cat's Cradle is trying to do more effectively.