Two Words

Mop Heads

UNLIKE STUPY, I've read Time Quake and actually am one of the few people I'm aware of who liked it, though it being Kurt Vonnegut it was deeply sarcastic and somewhat cynical and world weary.  The times I've given up on him was when it got too sarcastic and too world weary.  When he adds sarcasm to that, it's pointless.  All of which are found in that stupid quote about the Mop Heads.  Some of the book is very wise, some of it brilliant, though fully showing his limits in understanding things that he had no real interest in.  That's a widely spread habit of the kind of guy he was.  On what he's not spot on about, it's all miss and no hit.  Fond as I am of him, I'm not going to lie about that.

That passage comes at the beginning.

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, “The Beatles did.”

It appears to me that the most highly evolved Earthling creatures find being alive embarrassing or much worse.  Never mind cases of extreme discomfort, such as idealists’ being crucified. Two important women in my life, my mother and my only sister, Alice, or Allie, in Heaven now, hated life and said so. Allie would cry out, “I give up! I give up!”

The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: “I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood.” That is in an essay on the sudden death of his daughter Jean a few days earlier.Among those he wouldn’t have resurrected were Jean, and another daughter, Susy, and his beloved wife, and his best friend, Henry Rogers.

Twain didn’t live to see World War One, but still he felt that way.

If there is one thing he was not an expert in it was finding joy in life, where to find it and how to know it when he found it. 

If I were able to have K.V. restored to life I'd like to ask him what he thinks of the habit of Stupy to rail and rage theatrically at the deaths of people well past the age of 70 as a means of getting attention for himself.   I'd also ask him why he settled for so little in regard to what he said about the Mop Heads, I could name hundreds of musicians who accomplished more for longer in that regard.  He names a few of them in the text of that book.  Maybe he didn't listen to a lot of music.

As for critics like Simps:

Ernest Hemingway in 1952 published in Life magazine a long short story called The Old Man and the Sea. It was about a Cuban fisherman who hadn’t caught anything for eighty-four days. The Cuban hooked an enormous marlin.He killed it and lashed it alongside his little boat. Before he could get it to shore, though, sharks bit off all the meat on the skeleton.

I was living in Barnstable Village on Cape Cod when the story appeared. I asked a neighboring commercial fisherman what he thought of it. He said the hero was an idiot. He should have hacked off the best chunks of meat and put them in the bottom of the boat, and left the rest of the carcass for the sharks.

It could be that the sharks Hemingway had in mind were critics who hadn’t much liked his first novel in ten years, Across the River and into the Trees, published two years earlier. As far as I know, he never said so. But the marlin could have been that novel.

And then I found myself in the winter of 1996 the creator of a novel which did not work, which had no point,which had never wanted to be written in the first place. Merde! I had spent nearly a decade on that ungrateful fish, if you will. It wasn’t even fit for shark chum.

I had recently turned seventy-three. My mother made it to fifty-two, my father to seventy-two. Hemingway almost made it to sixty-two. I had lived too long! What was I to do?

Answer: Fillet the fish. Throw the rest away.

Forget chum, Simps is all chump.