Kurt Vonnegut on the state of the world

Tuesday, May 25th, 2004

Really got a lot out of this Vonnegut piece. I found it via this post on Vegan Blog which I found rather ridiculous.
By UltraBob at 04:12 AM Link to this post here!
3 comment s


  • on May 25th, 2004 05:47 PM Richard Kahn said:

    ridiculous, why?

    or rather—how?

    ridiculous as “irrelevant”

    ridiculous as “silly”

    or

    ridiculous as “deserving of ridicule”

    and then why?

    i’m happy that you enjoyed the piece and were able to find it via my blog!

    and happy to have been led here…

    best!
    richard

  • on May 26th, 2004 01:50 AM UltraBob said:

    Hi Richard,

    Thanks for the comment.  It wasn’t fair of me to say ridiculous, it was lazy and I apologize.  I meant that I didn’t feel that the animal references you brought up, especially the cold turkey one are a part of our national lexicon, and do not to the majority of people have an connection to the the objections expressed.  I guess in short what I meant to say was that I thought that the depth you went to in analyzing the animal references in Vonnegut’s piece seemed rather strained, like you were just looking for something to write about rather than having an actual gripe about it.

    I think my main objection was to the cold turkey paragraph which I thought was quite strained.  I was very happy to come accross your blog via bastish.net though and plan to read it regularly.

    Once again I apologize for the ‘ridiculous thing’, I’ll stick a pointer in the main post to these comments if you’d like.

    Take Care,

    UltraBob

  • on May 26th, 2004 02:09 AM Richard Kahn said:

    Hey,

    No problem or need to apologize. Your critique is fair, certainly. Though I think the analysis is also sound though not tailored to a mass public or part of a public debate, which I generally am more interested in publishing towards (as opposed to academic ivory tower hi-fallutinism). Let me assure you that I have an actual gripe with Vonnegut’s use of speciesist representation, which is not true of his earlier work as I noted. Part of a progressive politics today is, whether an animal rightist or not, getting conscious about our language and ideas and outing those that are part of a reactionary history. “Cold turkey” in itself may not have been worthy of a whole take on Vonnegut, I’d agree, but he in fact had numerous anti-animal represenational tropes in the piece and it was he that allowed it to be published with that image of the monkey as the statue of liberty. This makes it fair game for a critique from the standpoint of animals.

    The reason it was written in a non-popular manner? I am in academe and occasionally publish things on the representation of animals, so this post was really just a draft for a possible longer piece in the future.

    Anyhow, well met and like I said, no problem to agree or disagree with me—that’s not the point! Meeting and communication, this is the really interesting outcome of blogging. The rest is just ego.