"Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

HOCUS
POCUS
KURT _ VONNEGUT
 EDITORтАЩS NOTE

The author of this book did not have access to writing paper of uniform size and quality. He wrote in a
library housing some eight hundred thousand volumes of interest to no one else. Most had never been
read and probably never would be read, so there was nothing to stop him from tearing out their blank
endpapers for stationery. This he did not do. Why he did not do this is not known. Whatever the reason,
he wrote this book in pencil on everything from brown wrapping paper to the backs of business cards. The
unconventional lines separating passages within chapters indicate where one scrap ended and the next
began. The shorter the passage, the smaller the scrap.
One can speculate that the author, fishing through trash for anything to write on, may have hoped to
establish a reputation for humility or insanity, since he was facing trial. It is equally likely, though, that he
began this book impulsively, having no idea it would become a book, scribbling words on a scrap which
happened to be right at hand. It could be that he found it congenial, then, to continue on from scrap to
scrap, as though each were a bottle for him to fill. When he filled one up, possibly, no matter what its
size, he could satisfy himself that he had written everything there was to write about this or that.
He numbered all the pages so there could be no doubt
about their being sequential, nor about his hope that someone, undaunted by their disreputable
appearance, would read them as a book. He in fact says here and there, with increasing confidence as he
nears the end, that what he is doing is writing a book.
There are several drawings of a tombstone. The author made only one such drawing. The others are
tracings of the original, probably made by superimposing translucent pieces of paper and pressing them
against a sunlit library windowpane. He wrote words on the face of each burial marker, and in one case
simply a question mark. These did not reproduce well on a printed page. So they have been set in type
instead.
The author himself is responsible for the capitalization of certain words whose initial letters a
meticulous editor might prefer to see in lowercase. So, too, did Eugene Debs Hartke choose for reasons
unexplained to let numbers stand for themselves, except at the heads of sentences, rather than put them
into words: for example, тАЬ2тАЭ instead of тАЬtwo.тАЭ He may have felt that numbers lost much of their potency
when diluted by an alphabet.
To virtually all of his idiosyncrasies I, after much thought, have applied what another author once told
me was the most sacred word in a great editorтАЩs vocabulary. That word is тАЬstet.тАЭ

K.V.
 This work of pure fiction is dedicated to the
memory of
EUGENE VICToR Dens
1855тАФ1926
тАЬWhile there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I
am not free.тАЭ
 1
y name is Eugene Debs Hartke, and I was born in 1940. I was named at the behest of my maternal
M grandfather, Benjamin Wills, who was a Socialist and an Atheist, and nothing but a groundskeeper
at Butler University, in Indianapolis, Indiana, in honor of Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana.
Debs was a Socialist and a Pacifist and a Labor Organizer who ran several times for the Presidency of
the United States of America, and got more votes than has any other candidate nominated by a third
party in the history of this counDebs died in 1926, when I was a negative 14 years of
age.