Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Slaughterhouse 30000 by Judith Kampfner Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim is born in 1922 and grows up in Ilium, New York. A funny-looking, weak youth, he does reasonably well in high school, enrolls in night classes at the Ilium School of Optometry, and is drafted into the army during World War II. He trains as a chaplain’s assistant in South Carolina, where an umpire officiates during practice battles and announces who survives and who dies before they all sit down to lunch together. Billy’s father dies in a hunting accident shortly before Billy ships overseas to join an infantry regiment in Luxembourg. Billy is thrown into the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and is immediately taken prisoner behind German lines. Just before his capture, he experiences his first incident of time— shifting: he sees the entirety of his life, from beginning to end, in one sweep. Billy is transported in a crowded railway boxcar to a POW camp in Germany. Upon his arrival, he and the other privates are treated to a feast by a group of fellow prisoners, who are English officers who were captured earlier in the war. Billy suffers a breakdown and gets a shot of morphine that sends him time-tripping again. Soon he and the other Americans travel onward to the beautiful city of Dresden, still relatively untouched by wartime privation. Here the prisoners must work for their keep at various labors, including the manufacture of a nutritional malt syrup. Their camp occupies a former slaughterhouse. One night, Allied forces carpet bomb the city, then drop incendiary bombs to create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen into the blaze, asphyxiating or incinerating roughly 130,000 people. Billy and his fellow POW s survive in an airtight meat locker. They emerge to find a moonscape of destruction, where they are forced to excavate corpses from the rubble. Several days later, Russian forces capture the city, and Billy’s involvement in the war ends. Billy returns to Ilium and finishes optometry school. He gets engaged to Valencia Merble, the obese daughter of the school’s founder. After a nervous breakdown, Billy commits himself to a veterans’ hospital and receives shock treatments. During his stay in the mental ward, a fellow patient introduces Billy to the science fiction novels of a writer named Kilgore Trout. After his recuperation, Billy gets married. His wealthy father- in-law sets him up in the optometry business, and Billy and Valencia raise two children and grow rich. Billy acquires the trappings of the suburban American dream: a Cadillac, a stately home with modern appliances, a bejeweled wife, and the presidency of the Lions Club. He is not aware of keeping any secrets from himself, but at his eighteenth wedding anniversary party the sight of a barbershop quartet makes him break down because, he realizes, it triggers a memory of Dresden. The night after his daughter’s wedding in 1967, as he later reveals on a radio talk show, Billy is kidnapped by two-foot-high aliens who resemble upside-down toilet plungers, who he says are called Tralfamadorians. They take him in their flying saucer to the planet Tralfamadore, where they mate him with a movie actress named Montana Wildhack. She, like Billy, has been brought from Earth to live under a transparent geodesic dome in a zoo where Tralfamadorians can observe extraterrestrial curiosities. The Tralfamadorians explain to Billy their perception of time, how its entire sweep exists for them simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When someone dies, that person is simply dead at a particular time. Somewhere else and at a different time he or she is alive and well. Tralfamadorians prefer to look at life’s nicer moments. When he returns to Earth, Billy initially says nothing of his experiences. In 1968, he gets on a chartered plane to go to an optometry conference in Montreal. The plane crashes into a mountain, and, among the optometrists, only Billy survives. A brain surgeon operates on him in a Vermont hospital. On her way to visit him there, Valencia dies of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning after crashing her car. Billy’s daughter places him under the care of a nurse back home in Ilium. But he feels that the time is ripe to tell the world what he has learned. Billy has foreseen this moment while time-tripping, and he knows that his message will eventually be accepted. He sneaks off to New York City, where he goes on a radio talk show. Shortly thereafter, he writes a letter to the local paper. His daughter is at her wit’s end and does not know what to do with him. Billy makes a tape recording of his account of his death, which he predicts will occur in 1976 after Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by the Chinese. He knows exactly how it will happen: a vengeful man he knew in the war will hire someone to shoot him. Billy adds that he will experience the violet hum of death and then will skip back to some other point in his life. He has seen it all many times. Kampfner, Judith. Judith Kampfner is a New York based Anglo-American producer director and playwright. Born in Singapore, she went to secondary school in London and read History at Cambridge where she acted and directed. She went on to study for an MA in drama in Sydney and then worked as a producer in the radio drama department of the Australian Broadcasting Company. She has been a freelance broadcaster for the BBC since 1990 from London, then Chicago and now Manhattan. She has written radio dramas for the BBC about colonial Singapore, an alternative moon landing, a riot in a slaughterhouse and an Internet search for a missing father. As an adaptor, she wrote the radio version of a Broadway play, ‘Warrior Class’ by Kenneth Lin and serialized Said Sayrafiezadeh’s, memoir ‘When Skateboards are Free’. She is also an award winning documentary maker and journalist, She worked on the pilot phase of the Peabody Award winning arts show Studio 360 and has been on staff for New York Public Radio and contributed to National Public Radio across America. Slaughters, KY. Slaughters is a city in Webster County, Kentucky, United States. The population was 238 at the 2000 census. Slaughters lies just west of US 41 and 91⁄2 miles east of Dixon. According to local tradition, it was named for Gustavus G. Slaughter, who in 1855 won the right to name the new town and post office after winning a card game. The post office was established as Slaughtersville on January 29, 1856, with Henry A. Prater, postmaster. Slaughter himself served as postmaster from 1860 to 1865 and was succeeded by Stiman. Though the post office was renamed Slaughters in 1915, the town remained Slaughtersville from its incorporation in 1861 until 1967 when the Board on Geographic Names reversed an earlier decision and conformed to common usage and the present name of the post office. The Meaning of Slaughterhouse-Five , 50 Years Later. In the time since the publication of Kurt Vonnegut’s seminal novel, the work has never gotten old and it’s never waned in energy. There are novels so potent, and so perfected in their singularity, that they have the unexpected side effect of permanently knocking out the novelist: Nothing produced afterward comes close. Had Russell Hoban written no books before Riddley Walker , and no books after it, his reputation today would be exactly the same. Should William S. Burroughs, post– Naked Lunch , or Joseph Heller, with the last line of Catch-22 on the page (“The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.”), have tossed their typewriters out of the window? Probably. And Kurt Vonnegut, at the age of 46, with Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (those twin magnificences) under his belt, was projected into a state of creative culmination/exhaustion by Slaughterhouse-Five . “I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served,” he mused horticulturally to a Playboy interviewer in 1973. “Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, I had the feeling that I had produced this blossom. So I had a shutting-off feeling, you know, that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK. And that was the end of it.” Fifty years have passed since the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five . It’s the same age as me. And the older I get, and the more lumps fall off my brain, the more I find that rereading is the thing. Build your own little cockeyed canon and then bear down on it; get to know it, forward and backward; get to know it well . So I don’t know how many times I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five . Three? Four? It never gets old, is the point. It never wanes in energy. This book is in no way the blossom of a flower. Slaughterhouse-Five is more in the nature of a superpower that the mutant author had to teach himself to master—and then could use, at full strength, only once. The self-training took decades. The mutating event was, as always, brief. Between February 13 and February 15, 1945, Allied bombers dropped nearly four thousand tons of high explosives and incendiaries on the historic German city of Dresden. The effect was elemental: Air became fire. Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war, was there—but 60 feet underground. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, conveyed to Dresden by boxcar, and billeted in a derelict slaughterhouse as the bombs fell, he was sheltering with some fellow POWs and a couple of dazed German guards in a basement meat locker. They emerged to rubble, ash, twisted metal, death. Somewhere between 18,000 and 25,000 people (we still don’t know) had been killed. The innumerability and anonymity of this mass death was in contrast to the one very unique and countable corpse that Vonnegut already had in his life—that of his mother, who had died by suicide less than a year before. How did this bereaved and half-starved young man, stepping out into the necropolis of Dresden, manage not to lose his mind? Native resilience, or ontological elasticity, or something else again—his writerly atman maybe, the eternal indestructible essence that blinked its turtle eyes behind all his ironies and observations. It took him, anyway, 25 years to figure out what to do. There’s a haunting sentence in Charles J. Shields’s Vonnegut biography, And So It Goes : “How to write about a tremendous event of war that he had been there for, and yet had not been there for, because he was suspended underground?” There but not there, midair but buried—suspended underground. This is the limbo zone of Wilfred Owen’s 1918 poem “Strange Meeting,” the behind-the-trenches half-world that the poet enters in a dream or in death: “It seemed that out of battle I escaped / Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped.” In the end Vonnegut had no choice. To get out of the tunnel, he had to write a book about the impossibility of writing a book about Dresden. About the impossibility of even holding a continuous idea of Dresden in your head. And so, Slaughterhouse-Five , with its jump cuts and freeze-frames, its collapsing facades and self-replacing scenery, its chronological slapstick. It begins with a false start; Chapter 1 is all about how long it took Vonnegut to write the book, a kind of high-wire throat clearing. With Chapter 2, the story begins, except that the story is all over the place. “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963.” Billy Pilgrim is an American soldier who was captured and taken to Dresden. It’s become a critical commonplace to point out that these time hops and abrupt dissociations are symptoms of PTSD. Rereading Slaughterhouse-Five now that we’re both 50, I became absorbed, in a new way, by the shifting voltage of the phrase So it goes , which appears in the text (just googled this) 106 times—as a tic, then a sigh, then a valediction, then a disconnection, then a blessing, then a fatalistic fuck you , then a tic again. I was struck afresh by the folktale quality of Vonnegut’s narration and its particular synthesis of American deadpan and skull- like Eastern European laughter. “Somewhere the big dog barked again. With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.” And I got an especially rarefied buzz, this time, off his Trickster-ish audacity: a kind of euphoria of shredded conventions, exploded genres. “Reality was giving its lesson,” the poet Ted Hughes wrote in Crow , “its mish-mash of Scripture and physics.” For Vonnegut, the lesson is more of a mishmash of pulp sci-fi and the gravedigger scene in Hamlet . Billy Pilgrim reads a book by his favorite author, the deeply unsuccessful, prophetically high-concept Kilgore Trout; in this unnamed novel, a time traveler visits the scene of the Crucifixion. With a stethoscope. He wants to find out whether Jesus really died. “The time-traveler was the first one up the ladder . and he leaned close to Jesus so people couldn’t see him use the stethoscope, and he listened. There wasn’t a sound inside the emaciated chest cavity. The Son of God was as dead as a doornail.” (Next line: “So it goes.”) I appreciate, more than ever, the exultant brokenness of this text. The theologian Paul Tillich once preached a sermon about Saint Paul, specifically about the difficult position Paul was in after getting celestially dislodged from his horse on the road to Damascus. Paul was in psychological pieces at this point, says Tillich. Shattered. But crucially, he didn’t try and pull himself together. Instead he “dwelt with the pieces.” He allowed the pieces to be themselves, and the divine light to shine between them. And that’s what I’ll say about Vonnegut, and the courage and mastery of his art in Slaughterhouse-Five : For this one time, completely, he dwelt with the pieces. Romy Bartz. Romy has recently appeared in Slaughterhouse at Belvoir Street, which was a great success. The reviews are below. SUZYGOESSEE “Romy Bartz captivates with a persuasive combination of ruthlessness and vulnerability, able to portray complexities that prevent us from relegating the monster to otherness” 1/2 AUDREY JOURNAL Romy Bartz takes it to a whole other level. Playing company founder Hannah, a psychopathic entrepreneurial mastermind in a bombshell carapace and perfect white suit, she delivers lines like, “all I remember from the night is that I fellated a sausage” to perfection. ARTS REVIEW – ADAM BOYS “As director Benita de Wit brings a team of inspired artists that apply a level of detail to their work, it is clear that the audience experience is at the forefront of every choice.” “The specificity brought to the performances by each actor if so rewarding to watch, as living gets in the way of storytelling.” “Bartz holds the space captive with her dangerous deployment of sexuality wielded a weapon” Some of her other Credits include: Info Stage 2019 Waynelle Hillbilly Thriller Legs on the Wall , Joshua Thompson 2019 Agatha The Moors Siren Theatre Company, Kate Gaul 2019 Duchess Mercury Fur White Box Theatre/Hasemann, Ball & Radda, Kim Hardwick 2019 Hannah Slaughterhouse 25A Belvoir Downstairs/, Benita de Wit 2015 Isobel Bull The Old Fitz Theatre, Rowan Greaves 2015 Mae Idle Lies Doll Parts, Erin Brookhouse 2014 Hildergarde Why Torture is Wrong and The People Who Love Them The New Theatre, Melita Rowston 2013 Betty White Thank You for Being a Friend The Comedy Store 2010 Jigsaws Actor’s Forum, Linden Wilkinson 2010 Sarah Trying Actors Forum, David Baldwin 2009 Georgiana Georgiana Woman of Flowers Nida Studio, Kim Carpenter 2009 Gwendolyn Caravan Actors Forum, Donald Macdonald 2009 Billy Love Child Actors Forum, Belinda Giblin 2009 Alice Pearse Randwick in a Nutshell Randwick Council, Bill Conn 2008 Sandy Rabbit Sydney Theatre Company, Brendan Cowell 2008 Actor Happy Prince Theatre of Image, Kim Carpenter 2006 The Cat & Others Go PINOCCHIO – Return season & tour Theatre of Image, Kim Carpenter 2005 The Cat & others GO PINOCCHIO Theatre of Image, Kim Carpenter 2004 Stacey Fidelity Tamarama Rock Surfers, Tanya Denny 2004 Kirsty Car Gods Railway St Theatre, Nic Clark 2003 Beccy Rocket Baby – Top Shorts 2003 – One Woman Show Naked Theatre Company/Old Fitzroy Hotel, Melita Rowston 2003 Tracked Prompt Theatre Co., Jessica Symes 2003 Billie Love Child Griffin Theatre Co, Jennifer Hagan 2003 Various Take Two, Buzz, Thump City, Jump, Boy!, Messages Australian Theatre of the Deaf 2002 Elizabeth The Lady From Dubuque NIDA, Kevin Jackson Television 2019 Chantal Reef Break ABC Studios Intl, Various 2010 Wife The Politically Incorrect Parenting Show Razor Films 2005 Nurse Romy The Surgeon Network 10 2004 Tanya Love My Way Ep 5 Southern Star, Ian Watson 2003 Lucy Skool Sux – Pilot SBS TV, Paul Fenech 2003 Miss Robinson White Collar Blue – Ep. 23 Knapman Wyld Television, Brendan Maher 2003 Alicia McLeod Murder Under the Microscope OTEN / SBS TV, Lesley Stevens Short Film 2019 Perfect Woman Thallium Enthusiasts AFTRS, Madeleine Neate 2015 Teacher Modern Educayshun Neel Kolhatkar, Neel Kolhatkar 2014 Mimi Reisner Unified , Josh Logue 2007 Lucy Tall Poppies , Brodie Lane 2007 Anna Plastic AFTRS, Sandy Widyanata 2006 Alice Brass Teapot Artemis Films UK, Elin Sevov 2006 Kelly Miller Beyond Passion UK, Jyoti Thnjal 2004 Anna Sleeping Dogs , Angie Dowling Commercial 2016 Mother Red Rooster 2014 Mayo Sister Praise Mayonnaise Taxi Films 2014 Woman Allianz Insurance ‘Easier than ever’ Heckler TV , Brendan Fletcher 2014 Woman ING Direct Superannuation Online The Feds, Josh Logue 2014 Mother Ebay Big Sundays Robber’s Dog , Luke Shanahan Presenter 2016 Melbourne Women’s Hospital Education Video Cutting Edge Productions, Marc Tewksbury 2015 Presenter AIM MBA Online Course TCI , Marc Tewskbury Voice Over 2013 Narrator Maintenance , Dael Oates 2004 Wild Lines Deck Dogz Arclight Films, Steve Pasvolsky Corporate Work 2015 Sophie / Jamie AMP Role Playing AMP Horizons 2011 Bank Manager St George Bank 2010 Bank Clerk St George Bank Video 2005 Westpac Bank Training Video Westpac Radio 2012 Freda Echo Point BBC Radio, Judith Kampfner 2012 Jaylene Wedding in Venice BBC Radio, Judith Kampfner Musical Theatre 2016 Writer /Director / Producer Battlers & Dreamers DollpArts for The Sydney Fringe Festival , Romy Bartz Online 2015 Poltava Jane Shopping Up 75% Old School , Yure Covich Training & Additional Notes 2000 – 2002 NIDA BDA , ACTING 1999 UNSW BA , Theatre, Film and Dance view more Romy’s directing credits include: 2016 (Director/Co- Writer) Battlers and Dreamers for The Sydney Fringe Festival 2011 (Director) Glass, Splinters and Cigarettes for The Sydney Fringe Festival 2011 (Director) Cosi for The McDonald College 2010 (Director) Comedy of Manners for The Mcdonald College 2009 (Director) Hair for Short and Sweet. Romy’s acting credits prior to 2002: 2002 ST Kaz; Country Music; NIDA; Dir: Tony Knight 2001 ST Sasha; Vanishing Act; NIDA; Dir: Melanie Hogan 2001 ST Fanny; Bodyline 2 – Bad Seeds; NIDA; 2001 SF Connie; All Tomorrow’s Parties; 8 Players 2002; Dir: Melanie Hogan 2001 ST Arkadina; The Seagull; NIDA; Richard Cottrell 2001 ST Demetrius; Titus Andronicus; NIDA; Dir: Helmut Bakaitis.