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.
Here’s a Vonnegut clip I recently uploaded to YouTube. For me, Vonnegut’s response to the question of having writer’s block, anticipates some of the temporal folding of my recently completed dissertation: –Rereading and Rewriting Bloc/ks–.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpOZPwN_Mes
As I read you hearing echoes of Sirc’s box logic, I hear echoes of what I describe –by way of Ulmer’s conductive logic– signature-bloc/k logic that extends such Sirc-cuitry in various directions. Although I don’t discuss “bloc/ks” directly in a recent piece I wrote for C&W Online, such echoes interests intersect as well with my interest in Rice’s hip-hop pedagogy.
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/gvcarter/
I note this piece not so much as an advertisement for my own work, but to extend the insight-cum-incites of the echoes found therein.
Be sure to check out in the same C&W issue Thomas Rickert’s and Michael Salvo’s award-winning essay on sound and writing.
gvcarter
Comment by gvcarter — 16 June, 2007 @ 11:53 am