Well I think this counts as the second time I’ve seen or heard Vonnegut give a talk. The first was at the Harold Washington Library and now in Second Life. If this, the Suzanne Vega performance, and the impending Duran Duran show doesn’t signal the ready-to-hit-mainstream quality of SL, I don’t know what does.
I put up a link of a video-taping/machinima of the Vega interview above. Hopefully, someone’s done a machinima of the Vonnegut interview. If I find a video recording of it, I’ll put a link up here. In any case, the group that put the events together, Infinte Vision Media, may have a recording of sorts in their archives in their SL simulation.
Vonnegut is a wonderful speaker. I delight in hearing him talk. Even when I don’t necessarily agree with his opinions, he says them with such clarity and ease.
I particularly liked his comments on the the general practice of an art (I paraphrase because I couldn’t type fast enough to record his exact wording):
“Everyone should practice an art. One thing I hate about art criticism is that they say what you do has to be original. It doesn’t. Just do it. People should be doing it. It doesn’t matter if you’re lousy at it. It will still help you learn what’s inside of you.
“The payoff is when the author writes it. It doesn’t have to be justified by money or fame. The big payoff is doing it.”
– Vonnegut in SL interview via slight paraphrase (because it’s difficult to type at the speed of speech.)
I find his writing to be the literary equivalent of grapes: nutritious, easy to digest, consumable in bite-size quantities, and tasty, too.
