Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. capitalized on the 1997 MIT graduation speech hoax where he was quoted offering the following advice to college graduates: "wear sunscreen."
Though the quote actually came from a newspaper column that somehow got attributed to Vonnegut via the Internet, he opened his speech Friday at UNM's Popejoy Hall with a similar injunction.
"People ask if I have advice for young writers," he said. "Don't use semicolons."
Vonnegut said semicolons are "transvestite hermaphrodites," adding that they have no practical use.
"It's just a way of showing off that you've been to college."
And so began an hour of often amusing - though mostly recycled - aphorisms from the 80-year-old newspaper reporter and General Electric public relations man turned tragicomic science fiction writer.
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His 60-year career spawned such classics as "Cat's Cradle," "Slaughterhouse Five," "Welcome to the Monkey House," "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," "The Sirens and the Titans" and "Hocus Pocus."
Though the newspaper advertisement - complete with head shot from 1982 - billed the speech as a lesson on "How to Get a Job Like Mine," Vonnegut spent most of the night keeping the audience laughing with rambling musings on a variety of completely unconnected subjects. Like a trained comedian, he paused between each joke, and knew just when to laugh at his own. He's done this before.
After explaining that he recognized his gift for addressing audiences in a college public speaking class, he apologized to the audience.
"The first rule in those classes is never to apologize," he said. "When I heard that, I realized that there must be audiences around the world that had never been apologized to. I thought it might be refreshing, so, I'm sorry."
Vonnegut said the Sept. 11 attacks and the resulting aftermath were like "science fiction," calling revenge and hate a sick response to the event.
"The whole country is recovering from something they saw on television," he said. He added that the television should be renamed "the tantrum," a gag he's been repeating since the O.J. Simpson case.
"It will never shut up, and can't shut up," he said.
After briefly touching on a list of literature, from "Huckleberry Finn" to the "Red Badge of Courage," which he summed up as "all about how stinky it is to be a human being," he turned to the environment.
"We have mortally wounded the only planet in the solar system capable of supporting us with transportation whoopee," he said, adding that he thought the so-called 'war on drugs' should be redirected towards petroleum, which he said is much more addictive.
Vonnegut did mention the importance of writing and creating art.
"If you want to hurt your parents, but you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts," he said.
Vonnegut added that despite being a bad way to make a living, "people should be practicing arts all the time to make their souls grow, not to become famous."
Computers, he said, have not always been necessary to create art.
"The computer thing is a swindle," he said, claiming, as he has for years, that he is a Luddite. "We were doing fine without all that stuff - we got the Sistine Chapel and Beethoven's Ninth without them. A computer just puts a porn shop and a loan shark into every American home."
Luddites - a sect of people who hate machinery designed to make life easier - take their name from an 18th century millworker named Ned Ludd, who destroyed labor-saving equipment to protest factory layoffs.
He urged every member of the audience to write a six-line poem after leaving his talk, and then throw it away.
"You'll find you're richly rewarded by getting that out of you," he said.
After an extended explanation of why he liked street corner mailboxes, he switched to the subject of marriage. He said one of the biggest challenges of marriage today is the increased distance between Americans and their extended families.
"I know what women want - a whole lot of people to talk to," he said. "And men, they want more pals and just wish people wouldn't get mad at them. Now, marriage is just two people."
Then he went into a college commencement-esque bit comparing students at the threshold of the rest of their lives to Adam and Eve leaving Eden. Vonnegut said the most important work students should focus on is building communities, and quoting Mark Twain, "gain the good opinion of our neighbors."
"That's the only thing of substance," he said.
He urged the full house to take time out of their daily lives and acknowledge their happiness.
"When things are going sweetly, pause out loud and say, 'If this isn't nice, what is?'" he said.
