"Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
 A lot of people have oodles of charm.
Trout's employer and co-workers had no idea that he was a writer. No reputable
publisher had ever heard of him, for that matter, even though he had written one
hundred and seventeen novels and two thousand short stories by the time he met
Dwayne.
He made carbon copies of nothing he wrote. He mailed off manuscripts without
enclosing stamped, self-addressed envelopes for their safe return. Sometimes he didn't
even include a return address. He got names and addresses of publishers from
magazines devoted to the writing business, which he read avidly in the periodical rooms
of public libraries. He thus got in touch with a firm called World Classics Library, which
published hard-core pornography in Los Angeles, California. They used his stories,
which usually didn't even have women in them, to give bulk to books and magazines of
salacious pictures.
They never told him where or when he might expect to find himself in print. Here is
what they paid him: doodley-squat.


They didn't even send him complimentary copies of the books and magazines in
which he appeared, so he had to search them out in pornography stores. And the titles
he gave to his stories were often changed. "Pan Galactic Straw-boss," for instance,
became "Mouth Crazy."
Most distracting to Trout, however, were the illustrations his publishers selected,
which had nothing to do with his tales. He wrote a novel,/for instance, about an
Earthling named Delmore Skag, a bachelor in a neighborhood where everybody else
had enormous families. And Skag was a scientist, and he found a way to reproduce
himself in chicken soup. He would shave living cells from the palm of his right hand, mix
them with the soup, and expose the soup to cosmic rays. The cells turned into babies
which looked exactly like Delmore Skag.
Pretty soon, Delmore was having several babies a day, and inviting his neighbors to
share his pride and happiness. He had mass baptisms of as many as a hundred babies
at a time. He became famous as a family man.
And so on.


Skag hoped to force his country into making laws against excessively large families,
but the legislatures and the courts declined to meet the problem head-on. They passed
stern laws instead against the possession by unmarried persons of chicken soup.
And so on.
The illustrations for this book were murky photographs of several white women giving
blow jobs to the same black man, who, for some reason, wore a Mexican sombrero.
At the time he met Dwayne Hoover, Trout's most widely-distributed book was Plague
on Wheels. The publisher didn't change the title, but he obliterated most of it and all of
Trout's name with a lurid banner which made this promise:
 A wide-open beaver was a photograph of a woman not wearing underpants, and with
her legs far apart, so that the mouth of her vagina could be seen. The expression was
first used by news photographers, who often got to see up women's skirts at accidents
and sporting events and from underneath fire escapes and so on. They needed a code