Samplehouse Five
I just finished reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five for the first time. At a later point, perhaps, I’ll share some thoughts on it. Today, however, just a brief sample from the text, one I found rather attractive in light of other interests.
From Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five, or, The Children’s Crusade. 1969. New York: Dell, 1991.
. . .Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message–describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths or many marveous moments seen all at one time.
There is first the echo (or rather, prefiguring) or Sirc’s box logic, as well as (interestingly) a rejection of the seriality his C & W talk seemed to advocate. Yet this also recalls (for myself at least) Rice’s hip-hop pedagogy, in "1963 Hip-Hop Machine:" a temporal invention (as I think Rice as described it elsewhere) that chooses as its topos (here heavily metaphorized) a year, a moment, and event and parses out its significance in different discursive registers. No particular insight here, just echoes.
