Word: cats
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...AVERAGE SHOPPER at his local chain store, those damn picketers are just another pain in the neck. It's below freezing, after all, and he just wants a can of cat food, or maybe a box of onion chips for the party that's starting in ten minutes. The next stores's three blocks down, and cat food's four cents more there, and he's not buying lettuce anyway. What difference can he make...
Ritter's contribution is one of a very few lively and enlightening pieces in The Vonnegut Statement. But good grief! A term paper on Vonnegut? Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the author of Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rose-water and Slaughterhouse-Five? Vonnegut, that enemy of pretension who writes about the cosmos and fate as if God were a tricky garage mechanic? Since the late '60s, following the republication of some of the early novels, students have indeed been assigned Vonnegut term papers...
...essays that make up most of The Vonnegut Statement are founded on the rustiest claptrap in literary exegesis. Moby Dick whale imagery, phrases like "an inversion of the objective correlative" and "eschatological imperatives" constantly threaten everyone with intellectual lockjaw. For one assistant professor, the idea of Dynamic Tension in Cat's Cradle evokes Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, although Charles Atlas' muscle-building method is more in keeping with Vonnegut's unpretentious style and sources...
...bully and the runt who is getting sand kicked in his face toward the same bitter fate. Both will grow old, die and vanish in a universe that is 99.9% indifferent vacuum. There are no immortal souls in Vonnegut, only the soles of the feet which his Bokononists in Cat's Cradle warm by ritually flattening against other friendly soles...
...Brien has muted his celebrated in flammatory style in this book, perhaps in deference to the gravity of the problems discussed. He does point out, how ever, that traveling from Northern Ire land to the South is like leaving a kingdom of dogs, gruff and demonstrative, and entering the cat kingdom of the sly, unpredictable Southern Irish...