Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing

Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Language: English

Pages: 28

ISBN: B002DSPMB4

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Like Shaking Hands with God details a collaborative journey on the art of writing undertaken by two distinguished writers separated by age, race, upbringing, and education, but sharing common goals and aspirations. Rarely have two writers spoken so candidly about the intersection where the lives they live meet the art they practice. That these two writers happen to be Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer makes this a historic and joyous occasion.
The setting was a bookstore in New York City, the date Thursday, October 1, 1998. Before a crowd of several hundred, Vonnegut and Stringer took up the challenge of writing books that would make a difference and the concomitant challenge of living from day to day. As Vonnegut said afterward, ""It was a magical evening.""
A book for anyone interested in why the simple act of writing things down can be more important than the amount of memory in our computers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Laughter] LEE: Oh! I like sleep. I like sleep when I’m waking up. KURT: No, but he came up with the right answer. I really was counting on dreaming. And that— LEE:—Then you have to choose your dreams. KURT: No, I’ll take ’em as they come. I haven’t really had any really bad ones. Have you? LEE: Oh, I’ve had bad dreams. Not many lately … I used to have a recurring dream of being in an airplane that’s about to crash—right in the cockpit—about to crash. And you know it’s about to crash and it

York: Delta, 1998. (Any of the other nearly twenty book-length works of fiction by Kurt Vonnegut are also recommended reading.) KURT VONNEGUT (1922–2007) was among the few grandmasters of twentieth-century American letters, one without whom the very term American literature would mean much less than it does now. Vonnegut’s other books from Seven Stories Press include God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, and the national hardcover and paperback bestseller, A Man Without a Country. LEE STRINGER is the

going to happen. I guess in that kind of environment it is difficult for what we call literature to exist because a book is not all that practical a thing in the short term. It’s probably infinitely practical in the long term. But you’re not going to pick Timequake off the shelf and learn how to scramble eggs tomorrow. So, in that context, writing is a struggle to preserve our right to be not so practical … KURT: When I taught at City College, the students were very upset to find out there was

wider than ever. Most of us in the cell could expect to walk. We knew if we just bided our time and let the criminal justice grind take its course, we could get back to whatever it was we were doing with a minimum of hassle. The Kid, though, knew he wasn’t going anywhere. He was a “career criminal.” He also knew that with his good looks, youth and diminutive size, it was better to go inside with a “don’t-give-a-fuck” badass rep preceding him. In that respect he was, for all his bravado, only

get at the feeder. They can become trapeze artists, if they have to. She has had back trouble in the past. I ask her how her back is. She says her back is OK. She asks how my daughter Lily is. I say Lily is OK. She asks how old Lily is now, and I say she’ll be fourteen in December. She says, “Fourteen! My gosh, my gosh. It seems like only yesterday she was just a little baby.” I say I have a few more pages for her to type. She says, “Good.” I will have to mail them to her, since she doesn’t

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