h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'd got all the really vital work done today, and I was enjoying a sneaky, edifying, ten minute Internet break reading the Paris Review.

Until Kurt Vonnegut gave the game away, that is. I'm sorry, but you can't read a passage like this, sneakily, in a quiet office, without a laugh erupting:

VONNEGUT

'...“Twerp” also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, “twerp” is a pretty formless insult now.

INTERVIEWER

What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?

VONNEGUT

It’s a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.

INTERVIEWER

I see.

VONNEGUT

I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I’m always offending feminists that way.

INTERVIEWER

I don’t quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.

VONNEGUT

In order to bite the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs. That’s the only reason twerps do it. It’s all that turns them on.

INTERVIEWER

You went to Cornell University after Shortridge?"

(The whole interview if you're interested - http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3605/the-art-of-fiction-no-64-kurt-vonnegut . There's lots of good stuff in the Paris Review, I have discovered.)

Thanks for that - we can read in safety, as I work from home, and my editor can't hear me in Seattle.

Elektra's response: 'You DO know that man was nuts,nuts, nuts?'

I would say that is a great expression of Vonnegut's religion of Bokononism.


So it goes.

Ah, reading Vonnegut, bringing culture to the office.

I do try!

I haven't read that many of his books. I'm not really sure why that is, because what I have read both by and about him, I've liked. Perhaps I need to rectify that.

I've started to rectify it. I'm about to start into Cat's Cradle.

I haven't read it since I was a young man. I'm going to reread it soon. I might get an ecopy even though I still have my paperback.

It's...decidedly odd. I have no idea where he's going with it.

...I have a terrible habit of dozing off when I'm reading, and sometimes I will actually read quite a bit in a sort of dream-state, half asleep. I have to re-read the last page or two, because half of what I "read" the first time wasn't actually in the book.

When that happens with this kind of a book, things get very surreal.

Even more fun doing that when the bookmark's fallen out, and you're trying to find your place based on what you "remember reading"

I've finished with Cat's Cradle now, and moved on to Raymond Chandler.

I'm just thinking about his famously colourful similes. While they are vivid and picturesque, they sometimes stop just in time: any further and they'd collapse into William McGonagall ridiculousness!