(no subject)

[zustifer]

On Bookslut they linked this, and, aaagh! Is this how Vonnegut was, always, or have I got some filter that no one else has?

Quote:

Kurt Vonnegut: What are you effing writing now?

Kilgore Trout: It’s about how the future has as much to do with the present as the past does. Giraffes can only have come from the future. There’s no way evolution in the past would have let something that defenseless and impractical live for 15 minutes.

Okay, Mr. Vonnegut! Great! I'm glad you like to make statements that, though whimsical, can be disproven in seconds by asking someone who's seen a giraffe before, even on television. 'Folk wisdom' of that sort where you sacrifice meaning and thought to make a cute little memetic observation (If a real person was shaped like a barbie, they'd snap in half! You swallow ten spiders a year in your sleep!) is a really poor tendency of ours. It depends on our rabid willingness to accept pat ideas where they're not warranted.

Sorry, sir, but pretty much nothing fucks with adult giraffes. They can kick hard enough to crush lions' skulls, and they can run faster than most things. Baby giraffes do get eaten, but baby pretty much everything gets eaten too, and this doesn't make them evolutionarily unviable.
And your joke about tying your shoes betraying your fear of commitment is depressing.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Yes, but it's a FACT that George Bush had an earpiece feeding him lines during the debate, AND that John Kerry has twelve mansions, all of which will get taxpayer-funded Secret Service protection round-the-clock, and most of which are being used to hide Viet Cong war criminals.

Also, glass is a liquid. It said so in my elementary school libary.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Ever read Timequake? There are a few moving bits in it, but for the most part it reads like that article. The whole first part of it consists of ruminations about how "life is a crock of shit" and you're really better off dying (this after he'd decided quite the opposite in the only marginally less depressing Fates Worse than Death). His recent work all reads like the ruminations of an untreated clinical depressive-- don't know whether he is or not.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...You'll notice that he also describes George W. Bush as possessing "overwhelming popularity", which as far as I can tell is not the case, though it is overwhelmingly believed that he has overwhelming popularity.

[jwgh]

One of the things about Kilgore Trout is that he's supposed to be a crappy hack science fiction writer, so his ideas aren't really supposed to hold up to close scrutiny, even in Vonnegut's good books.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

God, I forgot about that. I haven't read Galapagos since high school or something.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and there was a whole alternate Kilgore Trout in Jailbird, which nobody seems to remember any more. He retconned Trout entirely out of existence in that one; Trout was just a pseudonym for a guy named Bob Fender.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Man, you call that _close scrutiny_? Anyway, I read the hacky scifi bit to be the Animals From The Futarr! bit (esp since, if something isn't viable NOW, how can it become viable LATER?). The concept that the world can work like that. Which I can accept as a crappy scifi idea. The lameness of the example just made me sad though.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Was that me who told you about the giraffes kicking in adult lion's skulls or did you come to that some place else? I only ask because I have an entire riff about suicide by giraffe, and it's one of my favourite giraffey facts.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Ha, amusing. No... I've been doing a lot of animal research in the last couple of years. Picked up all kinds of junk.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

Stylized Giraffe Head!