#8. Time, Time, Time Again, Younger Now Than We Were Before

What scene in the novel would lend itself well to film and why?

A fun scene to produce into film is the blurb about how Billy Pilgrim and his peers had to work in a factory that produced malt syrup. Billy actually revisted this memory of Dresden during a time of unconsciousness, so it can be inferred that he was time-travelling again. Film is the most effective way of producing the feel of a protagonist experiencing a dreamy, hazy, other-world.
This part of the novel was written in an amusing, nostalgic kinda way. The narrator seemed to miss the taste of the malt syrup, and tried to decribe it in a way that could also be decribed via film. A novel leads much to the imagination, whereas with film there is visual aid. A visual of the malt syrup would evoke the audience's taste buds to a higher degree.
The comedic aspect of the paragraphs was how child-like the workers acted. Although they were supposed to be working dilligently in the factory, they secretly spooned the malt syrup. Vonnegut details that spoons were hidden all over the factory in radiators and rafters. This sentence made me chuckle. It reminded me of how children act when they try to hide some petty "crime". I don't know what malt syrup tastes like, but I can assume that it actually does taste good, though it is possible that Billy only thought it tasted euphoric because of the lack of substantial food.

Yum yum.

In my head, this is how the scene runs:

-The screen is a haze; a tik-tok noise plays as background music, this music merges with factory sounds (implies time-travelling)
-Reveal a tablespoon that is thrust into a vat of a thin honey substance, turned round and round and re-emerges like a gooey lollipop
-This is plopped into a human's mouth; zoom out; it is Billy Pilgrim's pleasured face
-Suddenly, the workers hear someone else coming; suspenseful music plays
-A person of authority is auditing the factory
-The factory workers now appear to be hard at work
-As soon as the manager figure leaves, the workers simultaneously take their spoons from their hiding places and spoon some syrup on the sly
-The sound of footsteps play again
- Billy Pilgrim sees Edgar Derby through a factory window wanting some syrup, and quickly shoves a spoonful into his gaping mouth; Edgar's surpised face would be worth a thousand words
- Billy hides the spoon
-The workers spring up, immediately hide the spoons, and proceed with sweeping the floor or cleaning lavatories (or whatever else they were doing)

Ta-da.

#7. I Haven't Done This in Awhile...

This is what I felt when I read Slaughterhouse Five, in poetry form. I haven't written poems in a long, long while, and it's hard to be lyircally passionate about book-reading aha, but this is it. S-5 made me visit my memories as I was reading, especially the ones I hated and the ones I wish I could redo. I'm so intrgued by Vonnegut's mentality about time that that has become the theme of my blog. Vonnegut's words of wisdom made me want to come to peace with all my regrets. And I'm not just saying that. This is me trying to come unstuck in time. I hope it makes no sense.

Epigram or epitaph,
I could not understand those four lines
What is black ink on manilla paper
When it is both read but unread
At once.

I fell through the pages
Had to pace myself the second time around
I rushed past floating trees and pebble trails
It was then the lines unblurred into words.

Bygone days became mental scenery
As I sat there on the staircase beneath a chandelier
Reading these damn paragraphs-
Please
Stop the tidal waves now.

But my mind ran the 5K into my past
And suddenly I am time-warping in my head
This is my moment of weakness
I'm not leaning against a tree, falling asleep,
I'm sifting through mental photographs,
A disarrayed collection that I have forced into order...

That March day when you couldn't figure out a classic riddle
A summer when you left for the place of your childhood
There you jumped off a train bridge into water
And broke through the surface on an August day
I can feel the warm rain that drenched my jeans that October 9th
You filled out the letters to a hangman
Cut to the Sunday afternoon in January that I fell up the stairs
And a late April night that you were at my door
I begged my brother to tell you I wasn't home
But you walked through the front door
Knew all the steps up to my room
The floor dropped on the Canada Day that you closed the glass door
And I was walking barefoot on hot pavement.
The seasons were rolling around again.

A best friend lost,
And a lot of growing up to do,
But it was like a chain reaction that I couldn't follow.
Billy seemed lost all along
Somehow I found peace in his insanity
But I cannot in mine.

I've lived through the dead ends and open holes countless times
Scrawled out every possible way to describe all that happened
Yet my paper heart is still as blank as a cloudless sky.

Time can make you ugly,
But
What is time,
death,
and life
When I cannot feel anything at all?

Could I live the way Billy lives
Without regret,
resistance of fate
and
free will?
But you know I'm fallible
Chagrin has been all I could feel for the last few seasons
I've been treading in quicksand
Painted in colors so wrong that I could black out heaven's field.

And
This book
So broken and raw
Distorted yet enlightening
I loved it.

I found a way to come unstuck in time.

Live vs. Death [QUOTE]

'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."'

-Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut