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From: campbell@ufomind.com (Glenn Campbell, Las Vegas) Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 09:45:13 -0800 |
[3 Messages]
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[Via kerry@hungerford.chch.cri.nz]
"Vonnegut Speech" Circulates on Net
Dan Mitchell
6:13pm 4.Aug.97.PDT
A copy of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s recent MIT commencement address made
heavy email rotation on Friday. The characteristically pithy, funny,
thoughtful speech was passed from friend to friend stamped with such
comments as "worth a read" and "check this out - it's great."
And it was great. Trouble is, it wasn't Vonnegut's. "Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
had never given a commencement address at MIT," said Robert Sales,
associate director of the school's news office.
It turns out the "speech" was actually a column penned by the Chicago
Tribune's Mary Schmich. The column ran on 1 June - five days before UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered the actual commencement address
at MIT. That speech "was a lot longer and maybe not as clever" as the
purported Vonnegut address, Sales said.
Much of Schmich's column - which consists of advice for graduates -
sounds like stuff Vonnegut might say: "Don't be reckless with other
people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with
yours.... Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you
succeed in doing this, tell me how.... Keep your old love letters.
Throw away your old bank statements.... Do one thing every day that
scares you."
Nobody - least of all Schmich - can figure out why Vonnegut's name was
slapped onto her column. "Some prankster apparently decided it would
be funny. Why is it funny? If you can figure that out, you're a
genius," she said Monday.
Perhaps the act itself wasn't funny, but some of the fallout has been.
First of all, there's the fact that (ahem) Wired News ran part of the
column as its Quote of the Day on Friday. Also, Schmich says she's
gotten as much attention from the incident as just about anything
she's written. "My email's just flooded with messages," she says. And
she says she's actually been accused of plagiarizing Vonnegut - and
vice versa. On Friday, she managed to reach Vonnegut, who, Schmich
says, said the whole thing is "spooky."
In her column on Monday, Schmich writes that she wrote the piece "one
Friday afternoon while high on coffee and M&M's." And, she insisted,
"it was not art."
In part, Schmich blames the "cyberswamp" of the Internet for all the
trouble. "At newspapers, things like this have to go through a barrier
before they go out to the world," she said. But on the Net "anybody
can put anybody's name on anything."
Nonetheless, she added, "No one involved in this did anything bad,
except the person who started it."
http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/5762.html
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[VIA James Graham <jgraham@genetics.com>]
Date: Sunday, August 3, 1997
Source: Mary Schmich.
Section: METRO CHICAGO
Parts: 1
Copyright Chicago Tribune
VONNEGUT? SCHMICH? WHO CAN TELL IN CYBERSPACE?
I am Kurt Vonnegut.
Oh, Kurt Vonnegut may appear to be a brilliant, revered male novelist.
I may appear to be a mediocre and virtually unknown female newspaper
columnist. We may appear to have nothing in common but unruly hair.
But out in the lawless swamp of cyberspace, Mr. Vonnegut and I are
one. Out there, where any snake can masquerade as king, both of us are
the author of a graduation speech that began with the immortal words,
"Wear sunscreen."
I was alerted to my bond with Mr. Vonnegut Friday morning by several
callers and e-mail correspondents who reported that the sunscreen
speech was rocketing through the cyberswamp, from L.A. to New York to
Scotland, in a vast e-mail chain letter.
Friends had e-mailed it to friends, who e-mailed it to more friends,
all of whom were told it was the commencement address given to the
graduating class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The
speaker was allegedly Kurt Vonnegut.
Imagine Mr. Vonnegut's surprise. He was not, and never has been, MIT's
commencement speaker.
Imagine my surprise. I recall composing that little speech one Friday
afternoon while high on coffee and M&M's. It appeared in this space on
June 1. It included such deep thoughts as "Sing," "Floss," and "Don't
mess too much with your hair." It was not art.
But out in the cyberswamp, truth is whatever you say it is, and my
simple thoughts on floss and sunscreen were being passed around as
Kurt Vonnegut's eternal wisdom.
Poor man. He didn't deserve to have his reputation sullied in this
way.
So I called a Los Angeles book reviewer, with whom I'd never spoken,
hoping he could help me find Mr. Vonnegut.
"You mean that thing about sunscreen?" he said when I explained the
situation. "I got that. It was brilliant. He didn't write that?"
He didn't know how to find Mr. Vonnegut. I tried MIT.
"You wrote that?" said Lisa Damtoft in the news office. She said MIT
had received many calls and e-mails on this year's "sunscreen"
commencement speech. But not everyone was sure: Who had been the
speaker?
The speaker on June 6 was Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United
Nations, who did not, as Mr. Vonnegut and I did in our speech, urge
his graduates to "dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your
living room." He didn't mention sunscreen.
As I continued my quest for Mr. Vonnegut - his publisher had taken the
afternoon off, his agent didn't answer - reports of his "sunscreen"
speech kept pouring in.
A friend called from Michigan. He'd read my column several weeks ago.
Friday morning he received it again - in an e-mail from his boss. This
time it was not an ordinary column by an ordinary columnist. Now it
was literature by Kurt Vonnegut.
Fortunately, not everyone who read the speech believed it was Mr.
Vonnegut's.
"The voice wasn't quite his," sniffed one doubting contributor to a
Vonnegut chat group on the Internet. "It was slightly off - a little
too jokey, a little too cute . . . a little too `Seinfeld.' "
Hoping to find the source of this prank, I traced one e-mail backward
from its last recipient, Hank De Zutter, a professor at Malcolm X
College in Chicago. He received it from a relative in New York, who
received it from a film producer in New York, who received it from a
TV producer in Denver, who received it from his sister, who received
it. . . .
I realized the pursuit of culprit zero would be endless. I gave up.
I did, however, finally track down Mr. Vonnegut. He picked up his own
phone. He'd heard about the sunscreen speech from his lawyer, from
friends, from a women's magazine that wanted to reprint it until he
denied he wrote it.
"It was very witty, but it wasn't my wittiness," he generously said.
Reams could be written on the lessons in this episode. Space confines
me to two.
One: I should put Kurt Vonnegut's name on my column. It would be like
sticking a Calvin Klein label on a pair of Kmart jeans.
Two: Cyberspace, in Mr. Vonnegut's word, is "spooky."
=========================================================
[And here's a clip from the columnists' profiles from the Chicago
Tribune]
MARY THERESA SCHMICH
(Embedded image moved to file: PIC17138.PCX)
Mary Theresa Schmich was born in Savannah, Ga., the oldest of eight
children, and spent her childhood in Georgia. She attended high school
in Phoenix then earned a B.A. at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.
After working in college admissions for three years and spending a
year and a half in France, she attended journalism school at Stanford.
She has worked as a reporter at the Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo
Alto, Calif., at the Orlando Sentinel and, since 1985, at the Chicago
Tribune. She spent five years as a Tribune national correspondent
based in Atlanta.
For three years starting in 1992, she wrote a column for the Tribune.
She left for a year to attend Harvard on a Nieman fellowship for
journalists, then returned to the column in July 1996.
She also writes the "Brenda Starr" comic strip and plays a decent
barroom piano. She lives in Chicago.
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From Glenn Campbell:
I was a Vonnegut fan in my youth. The style of the address was consistant
with his, but the recent date struck me as odd. He hasn't written anything
this good in two decades.
Index: Essays in Philosophy & Psychology
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Created: Aug 6, 1997