Product Description

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) is a rare opportunity to experience Kurt Vonnegut speaking in his own voice about his own life, his views of the world, his writing, and the writing of others. An indignant, outrageous, always witty, and deeply felt collection of reviews, essays, and speeches, this work is a window not only into Vonnegut’s mind...but also into his heart.

“A great cosmic comedian and a rattler of human skeletons, an idealist disguised as a pessimist…has written a book filled with madness and truth and absurdity and self-revelation.”— St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“He is our strongest writer…the most stubbornly imaginative.”—John Irving

* The New York Times

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58490 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-12
• Released on: 1999-01-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as "a true artist" with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, "one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface


Dear Reader:

The title of this book is composed of three words from my novel Cat's Cradle. A wampeter is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. Foma are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: "Prosperity is just around the corner." A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. Taken together, the words form as good an umbrella as any for this collection of some of the reviews and essays I have written, a few of the speeches I have made. Most of my speeches were never written down.

. . .

I used to make speeches all the time. I needed the applause. I needed the easy money. And then, while I was doing my regular routine of Hoosier shit-kicking on the stage of the Library of Congress, a circuit breaker in my head snapped out. I had nothing more to say. That was the end of my speaking career. I spoke a few times after that, but I was no longer the glib Philosopher of the Prairies it had once been so easy for me to be.

The proximate cause of my mind's shutting off in Washington was a question from the floor. The middle-aged man who asked it appeared to me to be a recent refugee from Middle Europe. "You are a leader of American young people," he said. "What right do you have to teach them to be so cynical and pessimistic?"

I was not a leader of American young people. I was a writer who should have been home and writing, rather than seeking easy money and applause.

. . .

I can name several good American writers who have become wonderful public speakers, who now find it hard to concentrate while they are merely writing. They miss the applause.

I do think, though, that public speaking is almost the only way a poet or a novelist or a playwright can have any political effectiveness in his creative prime. If he tries to put his politics into a work of the imagination, he will foul up his work beyond all recognition.

. . .

Among the many queer things about the American economy is this: A writer can get more money for a bungling speech at a bankrupt college than he can get for a short-story masterpiece. What's more, he can sell the speech over and over again, and no one complains.

. . .

People complain so rarely about bad speeches, even speeches costing a thousand dollars and more. That I have wondered if anybody really hears them. And I received an interesting opinion on how people listen to them right before my speech to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which is in this book.

I was seasick with dread before I gave the speech. I was seated between a famous old architect, and the president of the Academy. We were three skinny, blank-faced human beings, in full view of the audience. We spoke as convicts in motion pictures to, when planning a break under the eyes of guards.

I told the architect how frightened I was. I expected him to comfort me. But he replied pitilessly, and in a voice the president could hear, that the president had read my speech and detested it.

I asked the president if this was so.

"Yes," he said. "But don't worry about it."

I reminded him that I still had to deliver the detestable speech.

"Nobody is going to listen to what you say," he assured me. "People are seldom interested in the actual content of a speech. They simply want to learn from your tone and gestures and expressions whether or not you are an honest man."

"Thank you," I said.

"I will bring the meeting to order," he said. And he did. And I spoke.

. . .

In this miracle age of organ transplants and other forms of therapeutic vivisection, it would be wrong of me to protest my being dissected while still alive. Two nice young college professors, Jerome Klinkowitz of the University of Northern Iowa, and John Somer of Kansas State Teachers College, are doing just that to me. They have published one seemingly posthumous volume, The Vonnegut Statement, a collection of essays about me. And they proposed to do another: a collection of everything I had ever written and which had never been put between hard covers before.

They presented my publisher with an appallingly complete bibliography. I keep no records of my work, and had been delighted to forget a lot of it. Klinkowitz and Somer refreshed my memory with their rap sheet. Their intentions were friendly. They thought of themselves as archaeologists, unearthing primitive artifacts which might help to explain whatever it is I have become. But some of the ugliest artifacts were actually of very recent origin. When I examined all the crap indubitably associated with my body, I did not feel like the ghost of Tutankhamen. I felt like a person who was creepily alive, still, and justly accused of petty crimes.

. . .

From all that crap, I have called this volume. I would not have been able to do it without the help of Klinkowitz and Somer, who knew where almost all the bodies were hidden. There are only three or four works of mine they know nothing about. Not even the ordeal of the veglia, said to be the most excruciating torture ever devised by Earthlings, could compel me to reveal where those three or four were published--and when.

This is not a book of my laundry lists, so to speak. I am pleased to have most of this stuff preserved. There are several short stories which have never been collected. I am content to leave them that way, except for one, Fortitude, a screenplay for an unproduced short science-fiction film. That is the only fiction in this book.

Everything else in here shows me trying to tell the truth nakedly, without the ornaments of fiction, about this or that. Which brings us to a discussion of the place of the "New Journalism," as opposed to fiction, in the literature of modern times.

. . .

Thucydides is the first New Journalist I know anything about. He was a celebrity who put himself at the center of the truths he was trying to tell, and he guessed when he had to, and he thought it worthwhile to be charming and entertaining. He was a good teacher. He did not wish to put his students to sleep with the truth, and he meant to put the truth into strikingly human terms, so his students would remember.

He is to be admired for his usefulness and good citizenship, and so is anybody who writes or teaches that way today. I am crazy about Hunter Thompson, for instance, on the account, and I say so in a review I have included in this book.

Am I a New Journalist? I guess. There's some New Journalism in here--about Biafra, about the Republican Convention of 1972. It's loose and personal.

But I am not tempted to do much more of that sort of stuff. I have wavered some on this, but I am now persuaded again that acknowledged fiction is a much more truthful way of telling the truth than the New Journalism is. Or, to put it another way, the very finest New Journalism is fiction. In either art form, we have an idiosyncratic reporter. The New Journalist isn't free to tell nearly as much as a fiction writer, to show as much. There are many places he can't take his reader, whereas the fiction writer can take the reader anywhere, including the planet Jupiter, in case there's something worth seeing there.

In either case, the principal issue, as I learned at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is whether or not the person who is trying to tell the truth gives the impression of being an honest man.

. . .

I am reminded now, as I think about news and fiction, of a demonstration of the difference between noise and melody which I saw and heard in freshman physics lecture at Cornell University so long ago. (Freshman physics is invariably the most satisfying course offered by any American university.) The professor threw a narrow board, which was about the length of a bayonet, at the wall of the room, which was cinder block. "That's noise," he said.

Then he picked up seven more boards, and he threw them against the wall in rapid succession, as though he were a knife-thrower. The boards in sequence sang the opening notes of "Mary Had a Little Lamb." I was enchanted.

"That's melody," he said.

And fiction is melody, and journalism, new or old, is noise.

. . .

He gave a lecture on equilibrium, too. He stood behind a twenty-foot row of waist-high cabinets in front of the room. He had a string tied to his finger. And, as he said this and that about equilibrium, he appeared to be playing with a yo-yo, which we couldn't see because of the cabinets.

He kept that up for the better part of an hour. At last he raised his arm so we could see what was on the other end of the string. It was a piece of wood molding twenty-feet long, with the string tied to its midpoint.

"That," he said, "is equilibrium."

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction. I remember I was with the theatrical producer Hilly Elkins one time. He had just bought the film rights to Cat's Cradle, and I was attempting to become urbane. I made some urbane remarks, and Hilly shook his head, and he said, "No, no, no. No, no. Go for Will Rogers, not for Cary Grant."

. . .

I happen to have my equilibrium just now. I received a note from a twelve-year-old this morning. He had read my latest novel, Breakfast of Champions, and he said, "Dear Mr. Vonnegut: Please don't commit suicide." God love him. I have told him I am fine.

This book is dedicated to a person who helped me to regain my equilibrium. I say she cronkled me. That is another coined word. She came to me with an expressed wish to "chronicle" my wonderful life from day to day on photographic film. What eventuated was much deeper than mere chronicling.<...

Customer Reviews

Vonnegut for a Vonnegut reader
This collection is probably most interesting to those who are arleady Vonnegut fans. It doesn't really even pretend to contend with the writer's greater works. I think that, perhaps, this book is most helpful to those who already know Vonnegut's body of work, and simply wish to understand more about the author himself. "Wampeter's, Foma, and Granfalloons" basically consists of Vonnegut's public speeches, as well as various essays. The book can help a reader, already familiar with Vonnegut, understand more about the writer, and the ideas behind his novels. However, I would recomend that a first time reader pick up one of Vonegut's actual novels (Slaughter House five and Mother Night are higly recomended) before looking at this. I would recomend this book to an avid Vonegut reader/fan.

3 1/2 Stars - Vonnegut fans only
Although you'd never guess it from the title, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons is a collection of essays, speeches, and reviews from Kurt Vonnegut - along with one piece of fiction and one interview. Certainly, it isn't on par with his wonderful fiction (or even his marvelous non-fiction book, Fates Worse Than Death), but neither does it pretend to be. This is a book for those who have already read most of what else Kurt Vonnegut has written. The reviews are nothing to write home about, though some of the essays are quite good - but his public speeches, as always, make for excellent reading. There is a handful of them in here. The highlight of the book, though, for any Vonnegut fan is his long interview with Playboy magazine that closes the book. It's an essential read for any KV fan. I reccommend this book to those who love Kurt Vonnegut and his fiction, and know it. If you're not familar with this quite amusing author, you should pick up some of his marvelous fiction first...

You'll Enjoy It!
Again, Kurt Vonnegut produces an excellent work of art through literature. This book, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) is a collection of essays written by Vonnegut. It took me only a few hours to begin and finish this book while drinking coffee in front of a coffee shop on a Saturday morning. I found the book to be highly entertaining, generously humorous, and, of course, packed with blithe satire.

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) exists in an aura of surreality, recounting the experiences had by Vonnegut. The preface, itself, explains that the novel contains situations related to ideas that are not only abnormal but not tangible, either. The word wampeter comes from Vonnegut's book, Cat's Cradle (see my review of Cat's Cradle at http://preview.epinions.com/book-review-5DE0-39E4406-397F4030-prod6 ), and it describes any "object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve". This definition, alone, prompts the reader to realize that the book will involve many exemplifications of abstract ideology.

The novel contains essays describing events and satiring politics and societal figures. Vonnegut is one of the world's greatest black-humorists, and it is expected that he will try to offend quite a few persons while writing his works. Thus, Vonnegut's writing may not be for the light-hearted, and if this means you, then maybe you should not rush out to the bookstore and buy this book. However, if you dare to delve into the depths of derogatory literature, then this should be your next book. Another book I need to recommend -- completely unrelated to Vonnegut, but very much on my mind since I purchased it off Amazon is "The Losers' Club" by Richard Perez, an exceptional, highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.