Vonnegut, cont'd.
Customer: I’m looking for a fast car.
Vonnegut: This one right here will take you where you want to be before you want to be there.
Customer: Wow. So it goes...really fast?
Vonnegut: So...it...goes [distant look in eye]. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Customer: Alright, good, now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me about the warranty.
Vonnegut: Why do you need a warranty? Does life come with a warranty?
Customer: I’m concerned about safety.
Vonnegut: Then you should be inside your house right now, with the blinds drawn, head down, gripping rosary beads.
Customer: It’s my day off. That’s not really an option.
Vonnegut: Then there’s nothing I can tell you about this car that you won’t already know after I tell you.
Customer: I’m getting confused. Let me ask you, have any customers bought this exact model?
Vonnegut: Kilgore Trout bought one last week. Took it to a clambake. Big hit with the kids.
Customer: I’m not big on clambakes.
Vonnegut. Neither is Kilgore Trout. I should also note that this particular car runs not on ordinary gasoline, but on something called ‘ice-nine.’ If used incorrectly, it could destroy the entire universe, as well as your transmission.
Customer: Ummm...
Vonnegut: Oh I’m just fucking with you!
Customer: I’m sensing you’re not too excited to be a car salesman.
Vonnegut: That would be correct.
posted by Earl Warren at 1:06 PM
10 Comments:
Brilliant. And much needed entertainment in the midst of writing requirement hell. Thanks Earl.
So it goes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atABhlMLYvU
Sorry to comment on an unrelated post.
But can we have a chat on the strikingly unrepresentative nature of the 1L admit day panel?
It looked the CLR info session, sure, but nothing like the law school I see everyday...
Agreed with 7:29.
Something that definitely needs to be discussed. I am kind of shocked that Boalt continues to be as blatant as they are about toting around their token minorities / public interest students and billing them as representative of the school.
Yeah, they should definitely have had at least one or two anonymous blog commenters on the panel. And maybe they could have invited a student to represent the cross-section of students who literally only show up to final exams. That would be way more representative than having students who you are actually very likely to run into at Boalt because they are involved. And they didn't meet their anonymous commenter-required Federalist Society quota either. I don't see how Edley thinks he is going to escape the heat on this one!
Not sure if I agree with the above commentors, but I cant imagine it fooled any of the 0Ls.
Given that's the case, I just worry that the whole thing just came across as a charade, rubbing non-minority prospectives the wrong way while insulting potential minorities by patronizing them.
I already commented once about Vonnegut, but I have something else to say.
One of the most fun things I ever did was lead a study group in Cuba about post-1960 U.S. literature. The participants (besides me) were grad students and professors of English literature at the University of Havana. One of them, about 45 years old when I knew him, had commanded a tank battalion in Angola, where Cuba fought a proxy war through much of the 1980s. The first book we read together was Slaughter-House Five.
Pedro loved the book. He was convinced that its crazed, out-of-order storytelling was an indictment of America’s attempt to tell a virtuous story about its foreign military involvement. I think he was right. But I could never convince him that it was also about the craziness, in general, of war and what it does to the young people who fight in it. His own foreign military adventurism somehow never seemed comparable to that of Americans in Europe or Vietnam (we also read Tim O’Brien’s _The Things They Carried_). Cubans traveling to Africa at the behest of the Russians to fight against U.S.-armed Angolan soldiers seemed perfectly normal to Pedro. I tried to suggest that some young Cubans, like many young Americans in Vietnam and Korea, got caught up in a war they never totally understood. “No,” he told me, “we knew exactly what we were doing, and why. We were fighting for the worldwide Marxist-Leninist revolution.”
Pedro also wanted to know why Vonnegut was always telling his readers the size of people’s penises. I didn’t have a good explanation for that one.
I really love Vonnegut’s novels. I loved knowing that he was alive. I miss him.
10:11,
The very fact that the 0Ls applied to law school means they are susceptible to being fooled. By the way, who, other than the 0Ls and those on the panels, saw the presentation given to the 0Ls anyway?
i don't know isaac zaur in person. but i think i am beginning to heart him. a SNAG (sensitive new-age guy) right here in our midst. and wicked cute, too!
It's not his best, but my favorite piece he wrote was the lengthy autobiographical introduction to 'Bagombo Snuff Box.' If you've ever written or worked hard to create anything, you'll see why.
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