Busy, Busy, Busy
Recently finished re-reading the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle (1963). It was on my make believe list of high school/early college reading that I intend to revisit in my newly old age. Great book...relevant beyond its commentary on Cold War technologies and nuclear proliferation.
Vonnegut introduces the reader to an entirely new religion. Wikipedia definitions from Bokononism, the fictional (and severely outlawed) religion of the novel:
Foma - harmless untruths, the basis and essence of Bokononism.
Karass - a group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God's will.
Wampeter - the central point and focus of a karass that unites seemingly random people. A wampeter may be something tangible...Vonnegut gives the Holy Grail as an example.
Granfalloon - a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is "Hoosiers"; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so really share little more than a name.
Busy, Busy, Busy - words Bokononists whisper when they see an example of how interconnected everything is.
A few quotes from the Indiana native:
(On what's encouraging about the writing trades) ... They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. they also allow lunatics to seem saner than same.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
Afterthought: The pictures below (click for larger image) reminded me of something else Vonnegut wrote:
So now I believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imaginations. I am not especially satisfied with my own imaginative works, my fiction. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS
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