Champions Take the Cake

Is there a theme here? Well, lessee. This blog is about art, art that I like, art that I take pictures of (or find pictures of as the case may be), and especially big art - that follows because I like big art. The theme(s) so far.

And then there is Vonnegut. I have been re-reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Champions take the cake, of course, win the prize, are favorites primed to please.

Breakfast of Champions is a wry wacky work with drawings. It stars the great Kilgore Trout, consumate pessimist, but still the book gave me a certain hopeful perspective on the mess of things that is humanity. In this way:

Dwayne was hoping that some of the distinguished visitors to the Arts Festival, who were staying at the Inn, would come to the cocktail lounge. He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.

Poor Dwayne mishears the truth and ends badly... but still, Dwayne looked to art for truth and sanity. Me too.

My motto is: Art Saves.

So far, I am not insane, off my rocker, loony toons, nor vicious. Wacky wingnut...well, why yes, that I am.

To enourage you to ingest your Breakfast of Champions, I offer these bits, my favorites.

"Americans are always afraid of coming home," said Karabekian, "with good reason, I may say."
"They used to have good reason, " said Beatrice, "but not any more. The past has been rendered harmless. I would tell any wandering American now, 'Of course you can go home again, and as often as you please. It's just a motel.'"

***
The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights above street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it; in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan his mistress kept in front of the refrigerator. Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.

***
(ETC)-C-CH2-C-CH2-C-CH2-(ETC)

And when [the chemist] sketched a plausible molecule, he indicated points where it would go on and on just as I have indicated them - with an abbreviation which means sameness without end.
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with "And," and "So" and end so many paragraphs with "... and so on."
And so on.
"It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

Hail Kurt Vonnegut. May he enjoy cakes, ale, peace, etc. forever.