INTERVIEWER: The Indianapolis high school you and your mother attended -
VONNEGUT: And my father. Shortridge High.
INTERVIEWER: It had a daily paper, I believe.
VONNEGUT: Yes. The Shortridge Daily Echo. There was a print shop right in the school. Students wrote the paper. Students set the type. I've always found it easy to write. Also, I learned to write for peers rather than for teachers. Most beginning writers don't get to write for peers - to catch hell from peers.
INTERVIEWER: So every afternoon you would go to the Echo office -
VONNEGUT: Yeah. And one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny - and ever after that I was given the name "Snarf". In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I'm listed as "Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr." Technically, I wasn't really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls' bicycle saddles. I didn't do that. Twerp also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, twerp is a pretty formless insult now.
INTERVIEWER: What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?
VONNEGUT: It's a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.
INTERVIEWER: I see.
VONNEGUT: I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I'm always offending feminists that way.
INTERVIEWER: I don't quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.
VONNEGUT: In order to bite the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs. That's the only reason twerps do it. It's all that turns them on.
2 Comments:
so it goes.
kurt is up in heaven now.
a follow-up (or: remembering kurt vonnegut):
INTERVIEWER: The Indianapolis high school you and your mother attended -
VONNEGUT: And my father. Shortridge High.
INTERVIEWER: It had a daily paper, I believe.
VONNEGUT: Yes. The Shortridge Daily Echo. There was a print shop right in the school. Students wrote the paper. Students set the type. I've always found it easy to write. Also, I learned to write for peers rather than for teachers. Most beginning writers don't get to write for peers - to catch hell from peers.
INTERVIEWER: So every afternoon you would go to the Echo office -
VONNEGUT: Yeah. And one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny - and ever after that I was given the name "Snarf". In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I'm listed as "Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr." Technically, I wasn't really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls' bicycle saddles. I didn't do that. Twerp also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, twerp is a pretty formless insult now.
INTERVIEWER: What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?
VONNEGUT: It's a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.
INTERVIEWER: I see.
VONNEGUT: I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I'm always offending feminists that way.
INTERVIEWER: I don't quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.
VONNEGUT: In order to bite the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs. That's the only reason twerps do it. It's all that turns them on.
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