Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing by Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer.
Title: Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing.
Author: Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer.
Genre: Non-fiction, writing, philosophy, interviews, books on books.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: First interview October 1, 1998. Second January 1999. Book 1999.
Summary: It is an increasingly rare occasion to find two writers wiling to speak candidly, thoughtfully, and concretely about the intersection of life and art. The setting is a bookstore, and restaurant for the second interview, in New York City, and the writers jump onto the aesthetic fray, taking up humanity, writing, salvation, art, and the challenge of living, day to day. A book for anyone interested in why the simple act of writing things down can be so much more important than the amount of memory in our computers.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ LEE: In a way... it's a struggle to be human. I mean, if you really look at it, we wake up every morning to an alien environment. Certainly not the environment man was created in. It's a busy, throbbing, hustling, buzzing, spinning, crazy, alien environment. And the struggle for me, within that, is to try and be human, to try and do human things, to try and remember what we were born with. So to me it is very much a struggle just to be human, not so much a human struggle to do something else, but a struggle just to feel... human.
♥ KURT: And of course literature is the only art that requires our audience to be performers. You have to be able to read and you have to able to read awfully well. You have to read so well that you get irony! I'll say one thing meaning another, and you'll get it. Expecting a large number of people to be literate us like expecting everybody to play the French horn. And as I've said in this book here [Timequake], when we think about what reading is... it's impossible. Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of only twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. And yet there are people like you who can look at a printed page and put on shows in your head - the battle of Waterloo, for God's sake. The New York Times says that there are forty million people in the United States who can't read well enough to fill out an application for a driver's license. So our audience cannot be large, because we need a highly skilled audience, unbelievably skilled... Thank you for learning how to do this virtually impossible thing.
♥ KURT: ...About "the death of the novel" and so forth: it has never been terribly alive - again, because the audience has to be made up of performers and such an audience is going to be very small.
Bill Styron pointed out one time, in a lecture I was privileged to hear, that the great Russian novels - which were more of an influence on American writers than Hawthorne or Twain or any American writers you'd want to name - were written for every small audiences because the literate population was very small, amid an enormous empire of illiterate people. So Tolstoy, Gogol, and Dostoevsky were glad to write, even though their audience was small.
♥ LEE: You know, the subject of Grand Central Winter, which involves homelessness, has been seen by a lot of people as a tragedy. But usually at the end of a tragedy somebody dies, and being alive right now I can't think of it as a tragedy. What I've taken away is a certain brand of optimism. Even the bad stuff is an opportunity. There are possibilities there. In fact, I see more possibilities in adversity than in, say, lying on satin pillows. So, in that respect, I guess I am an optimist. I think there's reason for optimism - at least for personal optimism. I don't know if the world is going to survive, but I'm going to go as long as my heart beats.
♥ LEE: You know, man tries to be a sociologist all the time, but the truth is, you know, if you look around, we really suck at it. So I don't know if there is anything to be done about it [homelessness].
What?
Eliminate it?
Move these people?
Get them our of our faces?
Feed everybody?
I don't know what's to be done about it, except to find what your relation is to it.
I think that's the only work.
Not to eliminate what offends our sense of what should be, or who we are. Just to find a relationship to it. Just, when you pass somebody on the street: What is your relationship to that person?
I mean, how as human beings do we relate to one another? Anything beyond that is bullshit.
♥ LEE: Actually, I'm not very presumptuous either. You know, I barely rescued myself. And one thing I noticed from being on the street is that, looking the other way, all of us are really - everybody in this room - is really just groping their way around in life. We grab on to things that tell us we've got it all figured out, but I bet if I ask for a show of hands of people who have just the littlest bit of doubt that they don't have it all figured out, I bet you everybody would raise their hands. So in that context it would be kind of presumptuous to know you could save the next person - at least for me. This may surprise a lot of people to hear me say it, bit it's an honest answer.... Saving myself is going to be a lifetime job, so I don't know if I can really get to the point where I have the time or the wherewithal to save the next guy. I don't know what's right for you. And I wouldn't presume to tell you right now.
KURT: Well, you gave us a wonderful gift in the process of building your soul.
♥ KURT: ...And I have said about the practice of the arts that practicing any art - be it painting, music, dance, literature, or whatever - is not a way to make money or become famous. It's a way to make your soul grow. So you should do it anyway. And what Bill Gates is saying now... ... Gates is saying, "Hey, don't worry about making your soul grow. I'll sell you a new program and, instead, let your computer grow year after year after year..." - cheating people out of the experience of becoming.
♥ KURT: So it's a most agreeable field we're in and I think, in a sense, we are veterans of the same battle and we know what the hell it was like. We're not like Duke Wayne, who was never in a battle. We know what that fight was like and we respect each other for making it.
And anyone who has finished a book, whether the thing has been published or not, whether the thing is any good or not, is a colleague of ours.
♥ LEE: ...It's a joy of discovery for me. I kind of would not like to know what I'm doing.
I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how I was going to fill u these pages, and then, convinced that I'm not going to figure it out, bingo! something happens. It's like shaking hands with God. It's really a great payoff for the hours you sit around wondering if you can do what you're trying to do.
♥ LEE: I once heard someone say, speaking of secrets, you're only as sick as your secrets. Absolutely true. Absolutely! True.
♥ ROSS: Is writing a form of public speaking?
KURT: Partly it's about how you hold an audience. Because they can leave.
♥ LEE: You know, when I first met Greg [Greg Ruggiero, an activist and published], he asked me, "Are you an activist?" And I kind of hemmed and hawed on it. And he walked away disappointed. But it occurred to me afterward that before you had the guys marching, you had the people who reported on the poverty and the war... Before the action there has to be the question. I just have more fun playing around with the questions.