Ok so I spent a good portion of my evening reading The Best American Nonrequired Reading and this particular edition had many Vonnegut quotes. If you know me, you know I'm not a fan of Vonnegut. I gave a couple of his books a try (Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five) and found myself drifting off into my own thoughts far too many times. To me, a good book is one that can keep me away from my own thoughts and that is hard to do! Anyway, his quotes were pretty amazing. I guess taking him in small doses, one sentence of utter brilliance, is a lot different than trying to analyze his crazy novels. It made me start thinking, or rather continue thinking of a notion that has been running in and out of my mind quite often lately, a notion of craziness. Or being random. Or not-giving-a-fuck about social norms and rules and the-way-things-should-be. Which of course is something I've always dabbled in. Me, the sociology lover, breaking social norms and mores. Like turning around in an elevator and facing a crowd of people pretending that nothing is weird about that at all. Or talking in silly made-up languages with a fellow co-worker in front of other fellow co-workers who have nicknames they will never know about. Small doses of weirdness, of fucking with the social norm. It's fun, but then it is over with and you are back to living life...well the way that is of course socially acceptable. It would be hard to live life without social norms, but what about in the writing world? Must I stick to the rules of writing? Must I write things that make sense to the majority of readers? What about Vonnegut? Did he write in a way that only the elite-literary-junkies would understand and this is why I have a hard time figuring out what is going on? Or did he write his OWN way using his OWN symbolism and allegories? And maybe if I quit trying to understand what the fuck he is saying, then and only then will I finally understand? Maybe that is why they say Vonnegut is for people who don't like to read. Because you don't really need to read into anything. You read it and make it what you want to make it. Right? It is about entering someone else's mind and not trying to figure out what the majority of the world THINKS he is writing about. I can think with my own mind.
I can write with my own mind too, as in not what society has created my mind to write.
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