Esta página apresenta as histórias contadas por Kilgore Trout e citadas por Kurt Vonnegut em seus livros. Primeiro, uma lista em ordem alfabética das histórias, classificadas em novelas e romances, contos, memórias e roteiro (com a indicação dos livros em que são citadas). Depois, excertos correspondentes às citações, listados livro a livro de Kurt Vonnegut.
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Novelas e romances:
- Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto or This Year’s Masterpiece — Breakfast of Champions
- The Big Board — Slaughterhouse Five
- The Era of Hopeful Monsters — Galápagos
- First District Court of Thankyou — Jailbird / God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- The Gospel from Outer Space — Slaughterhouse Five
- The Gutless Wonder — Slaughterhouse Five
- How You Doin’? — Breakfast of Champions
- Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension — Slaughterhouse Five
- The Money Tree — Slaughterhouse Five
- Now It Can Be Told — Breakfast of Champions
- Oh Say Can You Smell? — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank — Breakfast of Champions
- The Pan-Galactic Straw Boss a.k.a. Mouth Crazy — Breakfast of Champions
- The Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- Plague on Wheels — Breakfast of Champions
- The Smart Bunny — Breakfast of Champions
- The Son of Jimmy Valentine — Breakfast of Champions
- 2BR02B — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- Venus on the Half-Shell — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Contos:
- Albert Hardy — Timequake
- An American Family Marooned on the Planet Pluto — Timequake
- Asleep at the Switch — Jailbird
- Bunker Bingo Party — Timequake
- The Dancing Fool — Breakfast of Champions
- Dog’s Breakfast — Timequake
- Dr. Schadenfreude — Timequake
- Empire State — Timequake
- Gilgongo! — Breakfast of Champions
- Golden Wedding — Timequake
- Hail to the Chief — Breakfast of Champions
- No Laughing Matter — Timequake
- The Planet Gobblers — Palm Sunday
- The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore — Hocus Pocus
- The Sisters B-36 — Timequake
- This Means You — Breakfast of Champions
Memórias:
- My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot — Timequake
Roteiro:
- The Wrinkled Old Family Retainer — Timequake
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Maniacs in the fourth dimension
Excerto de Slaughterhouse five, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1971, p.104.
The book was called Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people, whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them.
One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were vampires and were-wolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth dimension. So was William Blake, Rosewater’s favorite poet, according to Trout. So were heaven and hell.
The gospel from outer space
Excerto de Slaughterhouse five, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1971, p.108-110.
It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He conclud-ed that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being of the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And then that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crash-ing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!
Sem título [Money tree]
Excerto de Slaughterhouse five, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1971, p.167.
Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.
The gutless wonder
Excerto de Slaughterhouse five, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1971, p.167-168.
This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarka-ble, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.
It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.
Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halito-sis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.
The big board
Excerto de Slaughterhouse five, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1971, p.201-202.
…It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.
These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and comodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth.
The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimu-lants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo–to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers’ arms.
The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And reli-gion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl.
It worked. Olive oil went up.
Sem título [Jesus and the time machine]
Excerto de Slaughterhouse five, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1971, p.202-203.
Another Kilgore Trout book there in the win-dow was about a man who built a time machine so he could go back and see Jesus. It worked, and he saw Jesus when Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.
Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.
Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it.
So it goes.
(…)
The time-traveller in the book went back to Bible times to find out one thing in particular: Whether or not Jesus had really died on the cross, or whether he had been taken down while still alive, whether he had really gone on living. The hero had a stethoscope along.
Billy skipped to the end of the book, where the hero mingled with the people who were taking Jesus down from the cross. The time-traveller was the first one up the ladder, dressed in clothes of the period, and he leaned close to Jesus so people couldn’t see him use the stethoscope, and he listened.
There wasn’t a sound inside the emaciated chest cavity. The Son of God was dead as a doornail.
So it goes.
TBR0TB
Excerto de God bless you, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1978, p.20-21.
Trout’s favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved. In 2BR0TB he hypothecated an America in which almost all of the work was done by machines, and the only people who could get work had three or more Ph.D’s. There was a serious overpopulation problem, too.
All serious diseases had been conquered. So death was voluntary, and the government, to encourage volunteers for death, set up a purple-roofed Ethical Suicide Parlor at every major intersection, right next door to an orange-roofed Howard John-son’s. There were pretty hostesses in the parlor, and Barca-Loungers, and Muzak, and a choice of fourteen painless ways to die. The suicide parlors were busy places, because so many people felt silly and pointless, and because it was supposed to be an unselfish, patriotic thing to do, to die. The suicides also got free last meals next door.
And so on. Trout had a wonderful imagination.
One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to Heaven, and she told him that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said, “Certainly, honey.”
And he said, “I sure hope so. I want to ask Him something I never was able to find out down here.”
“What’s that?” she said, strapping him in.
“What the hell are people for?”
Venus on the half shell
Excerto de God bless you, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1978, p.114-115.
Queen Margaret of the planet Shaltoon let her gown fall to the floor. She was wearing nothing underneath. Her high, firm, uncowled bosom was proud and rosy. Her hips and thighs were like an inviting lyre of pure alabaster. They shone so whitely they might have had a light inside. “Your travels are over, Space Wanderer,” she whis-pered, her voice husky with lust. “Seek no more, for you have found. The answer is in my arms.”
“It’s a glorious answer, Queen Margaret, God knows,” the Space Wanderer replied. His palms were perspiring profusely. “I am going to accept it gratefully. But I have to tell you, if I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, that I will have to be on my way again tomorrow.”
“But you have found your answer, you have found your answer,” she cried, and she forced his head between her fragrant young breasts.
He said something she did not hear. She thrust him out at arm’s length. “What was that you said?”
“I said, Queen Margaret, that what you offer is an awfully good answer. It just doesn’t happen to be the one I’m primarily looking for.”
Oh say can you smell?
Excerto de God bless you, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1978, p.156.
“You know–” said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.”
(…)
“This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.”
“Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?”
“No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”
The first district court of Thankyou
Excerto de God bless you, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1978, p.163.
It was called, The First District Court of Thankyou, which was a court you could take people to, if you felt they hadn’t been properly grateful for something you had done. If the defendant lost his case, the court gave him a choice between thanking the plaintiff in public, or going into solitary confinement on bread and water for a month. According to Trout, eighty per cent of those convicted chose the black hole.
Pan-galactic three-day pass
Excerto de God bless you, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1978, p.173-174.
It was an exciting story, all about a man who was serving on a sort of Space-Age Lewis and Clark expedition. The hero’s name was Sergeant Raymond Boyle.
The expedition had reached what appeared to be the absolute and final rim of the universe. There didn’t seem to be any-thing beyond the solar system they were in, and they were setting up equipment to sense the faintest signals that might be coming from the slightest anything in all that black velvet nothing out there.
Sergeant Boyle was an Earthling. He was the only Earthling on the expedition. In fact, he was the only creature from the Milky Way. The other members were from all over the place. The expedition was a joint effort supported by about two hundred galaxies. Boyle wasn’t a technician. He was an English teacher. The thing was that Earth was the only place in the whole known universe where language was used. It was a unique Earthling invention. Everybody else used mental telepathy, so Earthlings could get pretty good jobs as language teachers just about anywhere they went.
The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time–to start thinking in terms of projects.
Boyle was called out of his English class, was told to report at once to the commanding officer of the expedition. He couldn’t imag-ine what it was all about. He went into the C.O.’s office, saluted the old man. Actually the C.O. didn’t look anything like an old man. He was from the planet Tralfamadore, and was about as tall as an Earthling beer can. Actually, he didn’t look like a beercan, either. He looked like a little plumber’s friend.
He wasn’t alone. The chaplain of the expedition was there, too. The padre was from the planet Glinko-X-3. He was an enormous sort of Portuguese man-o’-war, in a tank of sulfuric acid on wheels. The chaplain looked grave. Something awful had happened.
The chaplain told Boyle to be brave, and then the C.O. said there was very bad news from home. The C.O. said there had been a death back home, that Boyle was being given an emergency three-day pass, that he should get ready to leave right away.
“Is it–is it–Mom?” said Boyle, fighting back the tears. “Is it Pop? Is it Nancy?” Nancy was the girl next door. “Is it Gramps?”
“Son–” said the C.O., “brace yourself. I hate to tell you this: It isn’t who has died. It’s what has died.”
“What’s died?”
“What’s died, my boy, is the Milky Way.”
Sem título [Chicken soup]
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.21.
[Trout] wrote a novel about an Earthling named Delmore Skag, a bache-lor in the neighborhood where everybody else had enormous families. And Skag was a scientist, and he found a way to reproduce himself in chicken soup. He would shave living cells from the palm of his right hand, mix them with the soup, and expose the soup to cosmic rays. The cells turned into babies which looked exactly like Delmore Skag.
Pretty soon, Delmore was having several babies a day, and inviting his neighbors to share his pride and happiness. He had mass baptisms of as many as a hundred babies at a time. He became famous as a family man.
And so on.
Skag hoped to force his country into making laws against excessively large families, but the legislatures and the courts declined to meet the problem head-on. They passed stern laws instead against the possession by unmarried persons of chicken soup.
Plague on wheels
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.26-29.
The words in the book, incidentally, were about life on a dying planet named Lingo-Three, whose inhabitants resembled American automobiles. They had wheels. They were powered by internal combustion engines. They ate fossil fuels. They weren’t manufactured, though. They reproduced. They laid eggs containing baby automobiles, and the babies matured in pools of oil drained from adult crankcases.
Lingo Three was visited by space travelers, who learned that the creatures were becoming extinct for this reason: they had destroyed their planet’s resources, including its atmosphere.
The space travelers weren’t able to offer much in the way of material assistance. The automobile creatures hoped to borrow some oxygen, and to have the visitors carry at least one of their eggs to another planet, where it might hatch, where the automobile civilization could begin again. But the smallest egg they had was a forty-eight pounder, and the space travellers themselves were only an inch high, and their space ship wasn’t even as big as an Earthling shoebox. They were from Zeltoldimar.
The spokesman for the Zeltol-dimarians was Kago. Kago said that all he could do was to tell others in the Universe about how wonderful the automobile creatures had been. Here is what he said to all those rusting junkers who were out of gas: “You will be gone, but not forgotten.”
…
So Kago and his brave little Zeltoldimarian crew, which was all homosexual, roamed the Universe, keeping the memory of the automobile creatures alive. They came at last to the planet Earth. In all innocence, Kago told the Earthlings about the automobiles. Kago did not know that human beings could be as easily felled by a single idea as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.
And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content didn’t matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with ene-mies, in order to express enmity.
“The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.
“They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
“And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.
“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”
Within a century of little Kago’s arrival on Earth, according to Trout’s novel, every form of life on that once peaceful and moist and nourishing blue-green ball was dying or dead. Everywhere were the shells of the great beetles which men had made and wor-shipped. They were automobiles. They had killed everything.
Little Kago himself died long before the planet did. He was attempting to lecture on the evils of the automobile in a bar in Detroit. But he was so tiny that nobody paid any attention to him. He lay down to rest for a moment, and a drunk automobile worker mistook him for a kitchen match. He killed Kago by trying to strike him repeatedly on the under-side of the bar.
The dancing fool
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wy-man, London, 1988, p.58-59.
A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.
Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap danc-ing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club.
Sem título [Dirty movies]
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.59-61.
It was about an Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.
They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of business some-how, but without interfering with free speech.
They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don said, “Yes.” They asked him if the movies were really dirty, and Don replied, “As dirty as movies could get.”
This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.
It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.
So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn’t any picture. There were slurps and moans from loud-speakers. Then the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focused on his Adam’s apple. His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the Planet:
THE END
It was all faked, of course. There weren’t any pears anymore. And the eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway. It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.
Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate stead-ily for an hour and a half–soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples. And then the father put the cat and the dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.
After a while, the actors couldn’t eat any more. They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.
The audience went wild.
When Don and his friends left the theater, they were ac-costed by humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn’t actually deliver these goodies, of course.
The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.
And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.
This means you
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.73.
…It was set in the Hawaiian Islands, the place where the lucky winners of Dwayne Hoover’s contest in Midland City were supposed to go. Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only about forty people, and, in the story, Trout had those people decide to excercise their property rights to the full. They put up no trespassing signs on everything.
This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore.
But the Federal Government came through with an emergency program. It gave a big baloon full of helium to every man, woman and child who didn’t own property.
There was a cable with a harness on it dangling from each baloon. With the help of the baloons, Hawaiians could go on inhabiting the islands without always sticking to things other people owned.
Gilgongo!
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.86-87.
“Gilgongo” was about a planet which was unpleasant because there was too much creation going on.
The story began with a big party in honor of a man who had wiped out an entire spe-cies of darling little panda bears. He had devoted his life to this. Special plates were made for the party, and the guests got to take them home as souvenirs. There was a picture of a little bear on each one, and the date of the party. Underneath the picture was the word:
GILGONGO!
In the language in the planet, that meant “Extinct!”
People were glad that the bears were gilgongo, because there were too many species on the planet already, and new ones were coming into being almost every hour. There was no way anybody could prepare for the bewildering diversity of creatures and plants he was likely to encounter.
The people were doing their best to cut down on the number of species, so that life could be more predictable. But Nature was too creative for them. All life on the planet was suffocated at last by a living blanket one hun-dred feet thick. The blanket was composed of passenger pigeons and eagles and Bermuda Erns and whoop-ing cranes.
Hail to the chief
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.88.
Trout couldn’t tell one politician from another one. They were all formlessly enthusi-astic chimpanzees to him. He wrote a story one time about an optimistic chimpanzee who became President of the United States. He called it “Hail to the Chief.”
The chimpanzee wore little blue blazer with brass buttons, and with the seal of the President of the United States sewed to the breast pocket.
Everywhere he went, bands would play “Hail to the Chief.” The chimpanzee loved it. He would bounce up and down.
Sem título [But it sounds good!]
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.110.
It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of words were anymore.
So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.
The barring-gaffner of Bagnialto (or this years’ masterpiece)
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.128-129.
The name of the planet where Trout’s book took place was Bagnialto, and a “Barring-gaffner” there was a government official who spun a wheel of chance once a year. Citizens submitted works of art to the government, and these were given numbers, and then they were assigned cash values according to the Barring-gaffner’s spins of the wheel. The viewpoint of character of the tale was not the Barring-gaffner, but a humble cobbler named Gooz. Gooz lived alone, and he painted a picture of his cat. It was the only picture he had ever painted. He took it to the Barring-gaffner, who numbered it and put it in a warehouse crammed with works of art.
The painting by Gooz had an unprecedented gush of luck on the wheel. It became worth eighteen thousand lambos, the equivalent of one billion dollars on Earth. The Barring-gaffner awarded Gooz a check for that amount, most of which was taken back at once by the tax collector. The pictire was given a place of honor in the National Gallery, and people lined up for miles for a chance to see a painting worth a billion dollars.
There was also a huge bonfire of all the paintings and statues and books and so on which the wheel had said were worthless. And then it was discovered that the wheel was rigged, and the Barring-gaffner commited suicide.
The son of Jimmy Valentine
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.?.
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short novel about the importance of the clitoris in love-making. This was in response to a suggestion by his second wife, Darlene, that he could make a fortune with a dirty book. She told him that the hero should understand women so well that he could seduce anyone he wanted. So Trout wrote The Son of Jimmy Valentine.
Jimmy Valentine was a famous made-up person in another writer’s books, just as Kilgore Trout was a famous made-up person in my books. Jimmy Valentine in the other writer’s books sandpapered his fingertips, so they were extrasensi-tive. He was a safe-cracker. His sense of feel was so delicate that he could open any safe in the world by feeling the tumblers fall.
Kilgore Trout invented a son for Jimmy Valentine, named Ralston Valentine. Ralston Valentine also sandpapered his fingertips. But he wasn’t a safe-cracker. Ralston was so good at touching women the way they wanted to be touched, that tens of thousands of them became his willing slaves. They abandoned their husbands or lovers for him, in Trout’s story, and Ralston Valentine became President of the United States, thanks to the votes of women.
How you doin’?
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.169-171.
Trout wrote a novel one time which he called “How You Doin’?” and it was about national averages for this and that. And advertising agency on another planet had a successful cam-paign for the local equivalent of Earthling peanut butter. The eye-catching part of each ad was the statement of some sort of average–the average number of children, the average size of the male sex organ on that particular planet–which was two inches long, with an inside diameter of three inches and an outside diam-eter of four and a quarter inches–and so on. The ads invited the readers to discover whether they were superior or inferior to the majority, in this respect or that one–whatever the respect was for that particular ad.
The ad went on to say that superior and inferior people alike ate such and such brand of peanut but-ter. Except that it wasn’t really peanut butter on that planet. It was Shazzbutter.
And so on.
And the peanut butter-eaters on Earth were preparing to conquer the shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this time, the Earthlings hadn’t just demolished West Virginia and Southeast Asia. They had demolished everything. So they were ready to go pioneering again.
They studied the shazzbutter-eaters by means of electronic snooping, and determined that they were too numerous and proud and re-sourceful ever to allow themselves to be pioneered.
So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the average for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt inferior to the majority in every respect.
And then the Earthling armored space ships came in and discovered the planet. Only token resistance was offered here and there, because the natives felt so below average. And then the pioneering began.
Now it can be told
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wy-man, London, 1988, p.153-157.
The premise of the book was this: Life was an experiment by the Creator of the Universe, Who wanted to test a new sort of creature He was thinking of introducing into the Uni-verse. It was a creature with the ability to make up its own mind. All the other creatures were fully pro-grammed robots.
The book was in the form of a long letter from The Creator of the Universe to the exper-imental creature. The Creator congratulated the creature and apologized for all the discomfort he had en-dured. The Creator invited him to a banquet in his honor in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, where a black robot named Sammy Davis, Jr., would sing and dance.
And the experi-mental creature wasn’t killed after the banquet. He was transferred to a virgin planet instead. Living cells were sliced from the palms of his hands, while he was unconscious. The operation didn’t hurt at all.
And then the cells were stirred into a soupy sea on the virgin planet. They would evolve into ever more compli-cated life forms as the eons went by. Whatever shapes they assumed, they would have free will.
Trout didn’t give the experimental creature a proper name. He simply called him The Man.
On the virgin plan-et, The Man was Adam and the sea was Eve.
The Man often sauntered by the sea. Sometimes he waded in his Eve. Sometimes he swam in her, but she was too soupy for an invigorating swim. She made her Adam feel sleepy and sticky afterwards, so he would dive into an icy stream that had just jumped off a mountain.
He screamed when he dived into the icy water, screamed again when he came up for air. He bloodied his shins and laughed about it when he scrambled up rocks to get out of the water.
He panted and laughed some more, and he thought of something amazing to yell. The Creator never knew what he was going to yell, since The Creator had no control over him. The Man himself got to decide what he was going to do next–and why. After a dip one day, for instance, The Man yelled this: “Cheese!”
Another time he yelled, “Wouldn’t you really rather drive a Buick?”
The only other big animal on the virgin planet was an angel who visited The Man occasionally. He was a messenger and an investigator for the Creator of the Universe. He took the form of an eight hundred pound male cinnamon bear. He was a robot, too, and so was The Creator, according to Kilgore Trout.
The bear was attempting to get a line on why The Man did what he did. He would ask, for instance, “Why did you yell, ‘Cheese’?”
And The Man would tell him mockingly, “Because I felt like it, you stupid machine.”
Here is what The Man’s tombstone on the virgin planet looked like at the end of the book by Kilgore Trout:
P.173-175.
“Dear sir, poor sir, brave sir: You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next–and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine.
“Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.
“You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it’s exhausting, having to reason every time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.
“You are surrounded by loving machines, hating machines, greedy machines, unselfish machines, brave machines, cowardly machines, truthful ma-chines, lying machines, funny machines, solemn machines. Their only purpose is to stir you up in every conceivable way, so the Creator of the Universe can watch your reactions. They can no more feel or reason than grandfather clocks.
“The Creator of the Universe would now like to apologize not only for the capri-cious, jostling companionship he provided during the test, but for the trashy, stinking condition of the plan-et itself. The Creator programmed robots to abuse it for millions of years, so it would be a poisonous, fester-ing cheese when you got here. Also, He made sure it would be desperately crowded by programming robots, regardless of their living conditions, to crave sexual intercourse and adore infants more than almost anything.
“He also programmed robots to write books and magazines and newspapers for you, and television and radio shows, and stage shows, and films. They wrote songs for you. The Creator of the Uni-verse had them invent hundreds of religions, so you would have plenty to choose among. He had them kill each other by the millions, for this purpose only: that you be amazed. They had commited every possible atrocity and every possible kindness unfeelingly, automatically, inevitably, to get a reaction from Y-O-U.”
This last word was set in extra-large type and had a line all to itself, so it looked like this:
Y – O – U
“Every time you went into the library, the Creator of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgledy-piggledy cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free will, choose?
“Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines. Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective money-making machine, and your father was programmed to bawl her out for being a defective housekeeping machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being defective loving machines.
“Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and slam the door. This automat-ically turned your mother into a weeping machine. And your father would go down to a tavern where he would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent fucking machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very slow forgiving machine.”
Sem título [Skid row]
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.184.
Kilgore Trout wrote a story one time about a town which decided to tell derelicts where they were and what was about to happen to them by putting up actual street signs like this:
Sem título [Yeast dialogue]
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.208-209.
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue be-tween two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocat-ed in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
The smart bunny
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wy-man, London, 1988, p.232.
The leading character was a rabbit who lived like all the other wild rabbits, but who was as intelligent as Albert Einstein or William Shakespeare. It was a female rabbit. She was the only female leading character in any novel or story by Kilgore Trout.
She led a normal female rabbit’s life, despite her ballooning intellect. She concluded that her mind was useless, that it was a sort of tumor, that it had no usefulness within the rabbit scheme of things.
So she went hippity-hop, hippity hop toward the city, to have the tumor removed. But a hunter named Dudley Farrow shot and killed her before she got there. Farrow skinned her and took out her guts, but then he and his wife Grace decided that they had better not eat her because of her unusually large head. They thought what she had thought when she was alive–that she must be diseased.
The pan galactic memory bank
Excerto de Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Cox & Wyman, London, 1988, p.278.
In Trout’s novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back.
The librar-ian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I already know about human beings.”
Sem título [Sports robots]
Excerto de Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1988, p.70-71.
… I just want to add that my father, who was a science-fiction writer, once wrote a novel about a man whom everybody laughed at because he was building sports robots. He created a golf robot who could make a hole in one every time, and a tennis robot who served an ace every time, and so on.
At first, people couldn’t see any use for robots like that, and the inventor’s wife walked out on him, the way Father’s wife, incidentally, had walked out on him–and his children tried to put him into a nuthouse. But then he let advertisers know that his robots would also endorse automobiles or beer or razors or wrist-watches or perfume or whatever. He made a fortune, according to my father, because so many sports enthu-siasts wanted to be exactly like those robots.
Don’t ask me why.
The era of hopeful monsters
Excerto de Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell, New York, 1988, p.82-83.
It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment. And then, with all the forests being killed and all the lakes being poisoned by acid rain, and all the groundwater made unpotable by industrial wastes and so on, the humanoids found themselves the parents of children with wings or antlers or fins, with a hundred eyes, with no eyes, with huge brains, with no brains, and on and on. These were Nature’s experiments with creatures which might, as a matter of luck, be better planetary citizens than the humanoids. Most died, or had to be shot, or whatever, but a few were really quite promising, and they intermarried and had young like themselves.
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