Slaughterhouse//BtZ

[Smoke Teff]

Is anything concrete known about Pynchon having read or enjoyed Vonnegut's
book? He must've read it before *GR. *

A few weeks ago I recommended reading it alongside *BtZ* and I repeat that.
It's very fast.

Sharing a few passages I marked that seemed relevant.

p. 208

"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic
confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much
the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war,
after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."

227

"There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame
ate everything organic, everything that would burn."

213

"Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had
twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its
fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around
the roots and made very good fertilizer."

213-214

(about a different story of Trout's)

"But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that
it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.

"It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had
no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was
happening to the people on the ground."

215

"Trout told him that he had never seen a book of his advertised, reviewed,
or on sale. 'All these years,' he said, 'I've been opening the window and
making love to the world.'"
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