Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Reading Fiction

Kurt Vonnegut. 

Buck Squibb.

Suzanne McConnell, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s students in his “Form of Fiction” course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, saved this assignment, explaining that Vonnegut “wrote his course assignments in the form of letters, as a way of speaking personally to each member of the class.” The result is part assignment, part letter, part guide to writing and life.

This assignment is reprinted from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield, out now from Delacorte Press.

FORM OF FICTION TERM PAPER ASSIGNMENT

November 30, 1965

Beloved:

This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”

As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all …”

I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt,Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction,beginning each as though, only seven minutes before,you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze.“Except ye be as little children …”

Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others.

Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take three stories that please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pretend that they have been offered for publication. Write a report on each to be submitted to a wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior.

Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.

poloniøus

—

Posted Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, at 11:21 PM ET by The Slate

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield. Delacorte Press.

Read Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to a friend thinking about teaching at Iowa.

See all the pieces in this month’s Slate Book Review.
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so you want to be a writer

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.
and there never was.

by Charles Bukowski.
(via The Atlantic)

absent

photo: francesca woodman

Bird Language

From The Atlantic

The Remote Village Where People ‘Talk’ in Intricate, Ear-Splitting Bird Whistles

By Alexander Christie-Miller

For centuries, residents of Kuşköy have communicated over rural Turkey’s vast distances with kuş dili, which literally means “bird language.”

In most ways, Kuşköy resembles countless other villages nestled in the Pontic Mountains along Turkey’s Black Sea coast. Its 500 or so residents cultivate tea and hazelnuts; there is one street with a baker, a butcher, and a few cafes. It is the sounds, not the sights, that make Kuşköy different. For generations, villagers have conversed using a unique form of whistled communication they call “kuş dili,” or “bird language” in Turkish.

The name Kuşköy itself means “bird village.” “Come over here for some tea!” Ibrahim Kodalak calls to his neighbor as he stands outside his home, which clings to a sheer hillside far above a valley. The 45-year-old hazelnut farmer is “speaking” in a series of earsplitting, warbling whistles that really do resemble bird song.

In fact, according to Kodalak, the melodies of local birds are often similar to kuş dili; a morning song of the blackbird is the same as a famous verse in the Quran, he claims. “Electricity only came here in 1986, and before that it was hard to communicate over long distances; we really needed bird language,” Kodalak said, reverting to Turkish.

Like other forms of whistled communication, kuş dili arose in a region where the rugged ground and sparse population made travel difficult even over short distances. A whistle can reverberate for more than a kilometer, according to Kodalak. “If you can’t make your voice heard over a long distance, you could also make a chain with different people relaying the message.”

Most villagers believe kuş dili arose about 400 years ago, although no one knows for sure. The “language” is, in fact, a whistled dialect of Turkish, with each syllable rendered in one of about 20 different sounds. Typical subjects include invitations to tea or to help with work, notifying neighbors about the arrival of a truck to pick up the harvest, or announcements of funerals, births and weddings.

The slow process of modernization in the village helped preserve kuş dili, but, in recent decades – particularly since the arrival of cell phones – the language has been in decline, said Kuşköy’s mukhtar, or village headman, Metin Köçek. “Now we have roads, electricity and phone lines,” Köçek said. “In our childhood, the bird language was used a lot in daily life. Now we meet the same needs by using a cell phone.”

Technology is not the only threat. As in other parts of rural Turkey, many young people are leaving Kuşköy in search of better opportunities in the country’s booming cities. “Lack of opportunities is a general problem in our area,” commented Mehmet Fatih Kara, the governor of Canakçı district, within which Kuşköy is situated. “Young people go and leave the elderly behind, and only visit on vacation.”

For the past 15 years, the village has held an annual festival to promote the language. There are whistling displays, and a contest between the finest whistlers, in which they relay instructions to each over the valley before a panel of judges.

“Our purpose is to promote bird language to our country and to the world,” said Şeref Köçek, organizer of the festival, and head of the village’s Bird Language Association.

Around 2,000 people attended this year’s festival, on July 8, which had an emphasis more on local music and dancing than on whistling. Almost all were from the nearby area, or were relatives who had returned specially for the festival.

Kara believes that kuş dili could be used as a means of boosting the local economy and arresting the current exodus to the cities. “I want to use tourism to turn this language into an economic source for the region,” he said.

Recently, he approached Türk Telekom, the former state-owned telecommunications company, to provide sponsorship for the festival. At the time of publication, Telekom representatives had not responded to the request.

The funding would be used to improve roads in the area, and move the festival to a more picturesque location on the grassy plateau above the village, he said.

Whether any of it will help reverse kuş dili’s slow decline remains to be seen.

But for Bird Language Association Director Seref Köçek ‘s brother Rıfat, a 38-year-old Istanbul firefighter who terms kuş dili his “mother tongue,” Kuşköy has a obligation to preserve its cultural heritage. “[W]e need to keep the language alive out of respect to our ancestors,” he said. “They created it, and they never knew that one day it could make us famous.”

This article originally appeared at EurasiaNet.org, an Atlantic partner site.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/the-remote-village-where-people-talk-in-intricate-ear-splitting-bird-whistles/259900/

we’ll eat you up- we love you so

Only Trying

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate- but there is no competition-
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us, there is only trying. The rest is not our business.

(T.S. Eliot)

Eternal Love, Hollywood, Fla

(via the NYT interactive section- what they were thinking)

Michelle Trebow, 59:

I have dysphagia, which is an illness of the esophagus. It is progressive and irreversible. Eventually I won’t be able to swallow at all and will require a feeding tube. Everyone in my family is gone, so I had been totally alone in my illness. But then I met Danny at our assisted-living facility in May. He had just been transferred here from hospice, and the first time we looked into one another’s eyes, our souls locked. I love Danny’s quietness and his acceptance of the situation we are in. We decided to get married and vowed to take care of each other to the end. The facility director wanted to throw a party. She took me shopping — we found a prom dress on sale — and she did my makeup and hair. We married on July 2, 2011, and all of the residents came. Some even cried during the ceremony, and everyone danced afterward. It was the most beautiful day of my life. I’d been married before, but this was different. I realized, it does not matter when you meet the love of your life — all that matters is that I got to meet him.

Danny Clauson, 53:

The very first moment I saw Michelle, I thought, I’m going to marry that woman. I was bowled over by her beauty. And then I fell in love with her spirit. Less than a month later, I asked her to spend the rest of my life with me. I’ve lived a hard life: I’ve been married before, but it did not end well. Since then, I’ve been homeless and am now dying from liver cirrhosis due to hepatitis C. I’ve suffered a lot and was ready to give up. But ever since I met Michelle, I wake up happy.

Postscript: Michelle Trebow died on Nov. 18.

Interviews by Liz Welch

Photo:Maggie Steber