So it goes?

カート・ヴォネガット死去の報せは先ずhttp://d.hatena.ne.jp/nessko/20070412/p1、http://d.hatena.ne.jp/saltwatertaffy/20070412#p1、http://eunheui.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2007/04/post_ce13.htmlで知る。
NYTの記事；


April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies
By DINITIA SMITH

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

His death was reported by his wife, the author and photographer Jill Krementz, who said he had been hospitalized after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of science fiction, philosophy and jokes, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.

His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”

His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” summed up his philosophy:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography in a vernacular voice, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.

During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.

He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.”

“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.

Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.

Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American warplanes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.

Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

“The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)

In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started a Saab auto dealership.

His first novel was “Player Piano,” published in 1952. A satire on corporate life — the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses — it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.

“Player Piano” was followed in 1959 by “The Sirens of Titan,” a science-fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published “Mother Night,” involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.

In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.

Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science-fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”

As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” provided another stage for his fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout, a recurring character introduced in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.” The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”

One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No. 1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.

“The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.”

Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)

In 1970, Mr. Vonnegut moved in with Ms. Krementz, whom he married in 1979. They had a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.

Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with “Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday” (1973), calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time his alter ego is Philboyd Studge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.

In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “Timequake,” a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a stew” of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”

Though it was a best seller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a novelist’s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut’s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.”

Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.

His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.

It concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/12vonnegut.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&ref=books&pagewanted=print

ヴォネガットの代表作といえば、『スローターハウス５』を挙げるのが常であろう。
スローターハウス5 (ハヤカワ文庫SF ウ 4-3) (ハヤカワ文庫 SF 302)

スローターハウス5 (ハヤカワ文庫SF ウ 4-3) (ハヤカワ文庫 SF 302)

しかし、私にとっては『ローズウォーターさん、あなたに神のお恵みを』
ローズウォーターさん、あなたに神のお恵みを (ハヤカワ文庫 SF 464)

ローズウォーターさん、あなたに神のお恵みを (ハヤカワ文庫 SF 464)

の印象の方が強い。
ところで、私とヴォネガットとの密かな繋がりのようなものもある。ヴォネガットは上の記事にあるように、シカゴ大学大学院で文化人類学を専攻した（修士論文は撥ねられてしまったようだが）。指導教授はロバート・レッドフィールドである。私の恩師Ｈ先生はシカゴ学派の「農民社会（peasant society）」論を受け継いだ人なので、ヴォネガットは、私にとって学問上の親戚に当たるということになる。

韓国文学、「一人称語り」

　Yang Sung-jin “Korean Literary Market Confronts Protracted Slump” http://e.sinchew-i.com/content.phtml?sec=2&artid=200704040009


http://eunheui.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2007/04/post_12dd.htmlにて知る。「うに」さんは「中国の英字新聞」と書かれているが、『星州日報』はマレイシアの新聞。韓国の「文学市場」の停滞の話。「文学市場」全体が縮小気味であるにも拘わらず、韓国では日本文学（ライト・ノヴェルから純文学まで）が売上を伸ばしており、日本の小説の翻訳は韓国の小説をマーケット・シェアにおいて逆転してしまったという。


Arts & Culture: Korean Literary Market Confronts Protracted Slump
Updated:2007-04-05 13:50:33 MYT

Jo Jung-rae, a widely respected novelist, thinks Korean literary circles are missing a crucial point.

At a publication event held early this year, Jo summed up the crux of the problem: "Today's young writers do not practise a third-person perspective."

Jo's comment referred to what he calls a "deplorable" trend in which mainstream writers largely depend on the so-called first-person narrative, a convenient technique for investigating psychological or personal literary issues.

"When writers cannot depict a person from a third-person perspective, they are virtually trapped in a self-imposed boundary," Jo said.

Indeed, Korean writers and the publishing industry need to develop an objective third-person perspective because a slew of ominous signs threaten to undercut their already vulnerable foothold amid the growing public interest toward multimedia and the Internet rather than text-based storytelling.

The Korean Publishers Association said in a report that the domestic publishing industry produced a total of 45,221 titles in 2006, up 4.4% from a year earlier. But the market size shrank by as much as 12% to KRW2.69 trillion (USD2bn), reflecting the severe downturn that plagues the industry at large.

The gloomy statistics point to a pessimistic situation. Last year, publishers poured more resources into their book-making projects and put out more titles than 2005. But the local readers did not respond enthusiastically.

Not all publishing sectors are mired in a slump. Japanese novels are rapidly increasing their share of the domestic market, threatening Korean titles and writers.

The KPA estimates that about 4,300 titles, or 42% of all the translated books in 2006, were translations from Japanese to Korean. The figure suggests that Japanese books represent a dominant trend in the domestic publishing industry.

Kyobo Bookstore, Korea's largest offline bookstore, said Japanese novels carved out a 31% share in the Korean fiction market last year. In contrast, Korean novels secured only 23%.

The protracted and pervasive slump in the Korean publishing industry, coupled with the dramatic rise of Japanese novels, is alarming to writers, publishers and critics.

"There were some early signs of the decline of Korean novels in the past years, but writers did not pay much attention, continuing to stick to their own styles. Writers believed that things would remain the same, but the situation turned out to be far different," said Pyo Jung-hoon, a literary critic.

The initial attack came from cyberspace. Even back in the early 1990s, reading novels or poems was a legitimate entertainment activity.

Not any longer, especially after the Internet began to offer an overwhelming stream of information ranging from movies to blogs and news to a majority of households in Korea.

Writers and literary critics also blame video games and other multimedia toys for stealing precious time formerly reserved for reading serious novels. But blaming such non-literary factors is unlikely to reverse the trend.

The days when Korean novels often sold one million copies are gone. A new trend has local readers ignoring nationality when they browse and buy novels.

Chun Jeong-hwan, professor of Korean literature at Sungkyunkwan University, said Korean readers are becoming sophisticated, but writers do not realise the change.

"People now read books to enjoy something or get some help from a specific perspective, but mainstream writers are still preoccupied with ideological or nationalistic issues."

Bang Min-ho, a professor at Seoul National University, pointed to the diversified tastes of Korean readers. "In the past decade, Korea has undergone drastic social, political and economic changes. Accordingly, Korean readers came to have more diverse preferences and needs," Bang said.

He said that while Korean novels fail to fill the vacuum created by the increased needs of local readers, Japanese novels--with their diverse subject matter and depth--have settled quickly in the domestic market.

The unsettling phenomenon is that Korean readers are rushing to buy not only Japanese novels on light subjects but also serious literary works.

The soaring popularity of Japanese literature regardless of genre, meanwhile, highlights the problems facing the Korean publishing industry, critics said.

"The underling problem is not the sudden boom of Japanese literature but the slump of Korean literature," said Kwon Young-min, a literary critic.

"Korean writers should come up with new techniques and also sharpen their storytelling in a way that meets the diverse needs of readers."

Although many novelists are complaining about the downturn in the market, the genre itself is still alive and kicking.

According to the Korean Publishing Research Centre, the overall preference for novels is indeed steadily declining, but novels as a literary genre still exercise strong power in terms of sales in Korea.

Meanwhile, new-generation writers are making some innovative attempts to win back local readers who are rapidly shifting their focus toward trend-setting Japanese books and other foreign literature.

Park Min-gyu, for instance, has secured a significant number of fans through his humorous, gravity-defying writing style. Kim Ae-ran, a young female writer, is solidifying her literary position with her fantasy-driven narrative that resonates with the lonely and powerless urbanites. Lee Gi-ho is also breaking new literary ground with playful short stories peppered with fresh bits of satire.

Established writers are also trying to refine their storytelling techniques in line with the internet-oriented culture.

Jo Jung-rae is no exception. The 64-year-old epic novelist recently completed Oh My God, a novel about an ill-fated Korean man. Jo built his story on a single old photograph, whose existence incidentally was made known through the internet. (By Yang Sung-jin, The Korea Herald/ANN)
Sinchew-i 2007.04.05

興味深かったのは、韓国文学衰退の理由として、Jo Jung-raeという小説家が、韓国の小説家たちは「一人称語り（first-person narrative）」に拘って、「第三者的視点（third-person perspective）」を導入しないことを挙げている。「一人称語り」が駄目だと言われてしまうと、マルグリット・デュラスが好きな私としては文句の１つや２つはつけたくなるのだが、それは措いておく*1。ところで、「一人称語り」の小説といえば、日本文学のお家藝じゃなかったのか。所謂私小説の伝統。近代日本文学の主流を肯定するにせよ否定するにせよ、私小説への言及は回避できなかった筈。それが現在韓国で問題になっているとは！　ということで、韓国における「一人称語り」の伝統がどのような起源を有しているのかとか、そこに〈日本〉の影響はなかったのかといったことに興味を覚えた。
上の記事では、専ら散文（小説）が採り上げられているのだが、以前、韓国通の知人から、韓国人は散文よりも詩を好み、韓国っていうのは詩集が売れる国なんだよという話を聞いたことがある。韓国に詩文はどうなっているのかと不図思った。

*1:映画においては、映像の〈一人称性〉がどれだけ確保されているかがその映画の質をかなり左右するのではないかと思っている。

Apocalypse Movies

南京西路の某書店にて購入；


　Kim NEWMAN Apocalypse Movies: End of the World Cinema St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999 2000


Foreword: Beginning with the End(David J. Schow)
You Are One Day Closer to the End of the World
She’s an Atom from Manhattan
Peace is Our Profession
The Atomic Decade
Mutants and Monsters
The Shadow of Doom
Earthlings, Grow Up!
The World Went…Crazy
Learning to Love the Bomb
Warriors of the Wasteland
Side Issues
The Atom Strikes Back
‘There Ain’t No Sedalia’
No Nukes?
Afterword
Bibliography
Index
ぱらぱら捲ってみると、所謂〈映画的ハルマゲドン〉大全みたいな本であるらしい。目次を見てもわかるように、nukeとかatomの影が全体を覆っているようだ。勿論、核と映画ということで、『ゴジラ』以来の日本の怪獣映画（第５章）、『はだしのゲン』に至る日本の原爆映画の系譜（第２章）も詳しく論じられているようだ。
Apocalypse Movies: End of the World Cinema

Apocalypse Movies: End of the World Cinema

原価は$16.95だが、その５分の１以下の値段で買った。

ところで、ヒッチコックの名画『汚名』も核兵器ということに関しては、おいおいというところがありますね。

汚名 [DVD] FRT-036

汚名 [DVD] FRT-036