
...
-b.

Among many other things, "Slaughterhouse-Five" is a book about the difficulties of trying to write "Slaughterhouse-Five." Vonnegut, being Vonnegut, was determined to make the result as easy as eating ice cream. He was always on the reader's side, a stance that, as his career went along through many books, some excellent ("Breakfast of Champions," "Galapagos"), others fractured and not-so-good ("Deadeye Dick," "Timequake"), made him easy meat for critics while being admired and adopted by the many practicing writers who have proclaimed his influence, among them Irving, Jonathan Safran-Foer and Haruki Murakami.


[Proust] warns that the descendants of those who lied to escape from Sodom now populate the world and 'form in every country a colony at once Oriental, cultivated, musical and slanderous, which has charming virtues and unbearable defects.' Proust is concerned that these 'inverts' might organize themselves and for that reason he 'wanted provisionally to forestall the fatal error that would consist, just as a Zionist movement has been encouraged, in creating a sodomist movement and in rebuilding Sodom.'
I disagree.
The year 2008 marked the sixtieth birthday of the state of Israel, an entity that brazenly justifies its existence and territorial expansion by citing the political geography of the first magical-realist text, also known as the Old Testament - a view uncritically accepted by the governing elites of the Western world, whose Christian forbears regarded Jews primarily as Crist-killers. Is it not therefore time now for other tribes whose tribulations have also been recorded in the same five books to claim what is rightfully theirs? Why should the sauce for the Zionist gander be denied to the Sodomist goose? The Old Testament is seen by some as the family history of the Jewish tribes (for challenging this view in the seventeenth century and claiming that the stories were fairy tales, Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated by the Amsterdam Synagogue), but for the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah it is nothing more or less than slander, an elder version of what we could describe as the Protocols of the Elders of Sodom: a false account of the destruction of tribal groups that resisted Abrahamic hegemony.
Tveir útlendingar, sem búsettir eru hér á landi, klifruðu í nótt upp vinnupallana á Hallgrímskirkju í Reykjavík og fóru inn í klukknaportið. Þar fóru þeir að hringja kirkjuklukkunum með því að slá í þær með verkfærum, sem þar eru á vegum verktakans, sem vinnur að viðgerð á turninum. Lögreglu var tilkynnt um málið laust upp úr klukkan tvö og þar sem mennirnir vildu ekki koma niður, þurftu lögregluþjónar að klifra upp vinnupallana, við hættulegar aðstæður, og sækja mennina. Þeim var sleppt, enda liggja ekki sektir við svona athæfi.
Nóttin var dimm og það var myrkur í henni. Dökkt var allt í kring vegna myrkursins sem var þarna útaf dimmri nóttinni. Rökkrið var mjög mikið vegna næturinnar, sem var koldimm, því það var komin nótt. Klukkan var þrjú eftir miðnætti og þá var komið myrkur afþví klukkan var orðin svo margt. (Þrjú) Það var stormur úti og vindurinn gnauðaði í glugganum því það var svo hvasst. Hvassviðrið var svo mikið að allt fauk í rokinu, sem var þarna af því það var svo hvasst. Og mikið rok og vindur, margir, margir metrar. Á sekúndu. Regnið lamdi gluggana og droparnir fuku á þá í rokinu sem var þarna af því að það var svo hvasst. Og dimmt. ? Og þá var allt blautt í rigningunni og rokinu. Klukkan var rosalega margt og komin nótt og rok og rigning.
Rigningin og rokið settu svip sinn á þessa dimmu dimmu nótt.