(new age music)
(tape rewinding)
(cassette tape clinking into machine)
(piano playing)
- It's a great pleasure to introduce Kurt Vonnegut.
(applause)
- I left Indianapolis following puberty.
When I went to high school in Indianapolis,
I learned how to walk around looking tough.
'Cause everybody had to do that and I, I went out
to Indianapolis, 'cause I got out there occassionally,
and they're still doing it.
Just walking around looking very tough.
'Cause something might happen, you know?
(piano music)
- [Kurt Vonnegut] I was raised by a black maid
by the name of Ida Young.
I probably talked to her more than anybody.
So, whatever is nutty about me .
was nutty about her too, I think,
'cause I saw a lot more of her than I did of my parents.
And here comes a rather intimate part,
is I used to keep it a big secret and I used to have
awful guilt feelings, my Mother was crazy toward the end.
She was alright in the day time unless you tried
to take her picture.
Where you would get a bizarre reaction at night.
She would really get wild, swearing people away
and crashing around the house.
That was barbiturates.
These were supposed to tranquilize her
and they turned her brain to cobwebs.
And I can't get mad at my Mother
because I pitied her so much, with what she went through.
(dark music)
I went and saw my parents tombstone
a couple of months ago and I cried
and I hadn't cried for a long time
and what I was crying about
was I wished they had been happier
than they were.
And I think this is probably a dumb thing to do.
I think probably, parents are
much happier than the parents realize.
I remember I asked my father
what the happiest day of his marriage had been.
This is after my Mother died.
And he said, well, they had an Oldsmobile
and they broke into the Indianapolis 500 Mile Speedway
one Sunday and just drove around
and around and around and around.
(crowd laughing)
(melancholy music)
I've heard that a writer is lucky
because he cures himself every day with his work.
What everybody is well advised to do is
not write about your own life.
This is if you want to write fast.
You will be writing about your own life anyway.
But you won't know it.
And the thing is, in order to sit alone
and work all day long, you must be a terrible
over reactor and you're sitting there,
doing what paranoids do, is putting together clues,
making them add up, you know.
Putting the fact that they put me in the room 471,
you know, what does that mean and everything.
Well, nothing means anything,
except the artist makes his living by pretending,
by putting it in a meaningful hole, though no such holes
exist and you need paranoia for energy too.
You must be terribly worried and secretly full of hate.
(scary music)
I am now older than George Orwell when he died.
I'll soon be older than Jack Kerouac when he died.
Anyway, I've wondered why all these people killed themselves
and I think that writers, creative writers
are in the process of becoming,
they are humanity becoming.
It's like reaching in to the mouth of a student
and taking a hold of a piece of tape
in the back of the mouth without getting bitten.
And seeing what the hell's written on it.
And then just keep pulling it out.
And the person doesn't know what the hell it is.
And I think it becomes an exhausting thing to do.
That's about it.
A lot of people decline to do it anymore
and it becomes too unpleasant.
(speedy piano music)
I had written story called the Big Space Fuck.
(crowd laughter)
And it's a,
it's about this big--
(crowd laughter)
Uh, (laughing)
it's about the end of the world.
All are left are lamprey's and human beings.
And they're turning into man-eating lamprey's.
The space program now
has built this enormous spaceship and the hope is
that human life will somewhere go on.
It's got a big warhead on it, filled with sperm, you see.
(crowd applause)
And they're firing this think out there
hoping it'll hit something you see and life--
(crowd laughter)
(piano music speeds up)
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Now back to the interview.
- [Kurt Vonnegut] How important my books are, are
or anybodies books are, I don't know.
I don't think they're terribly important.
I think that they make people contented
during the period they're reading them.
And this is worth something
is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours.
There will always be magic entertainers
who'll comfort people some during the Job story,
that all our lives are.
For this reason, I honor my own profession.
We are entertainers.
We don't do a whole lot, but something.
(somber piano music)
(tape rewinding)
Subtitles by the Amara.org community