forioscribe

John,
Hi--this is sort of a question
about method but is the Plimpton
story based on experience, on an
anecdote about Plimpton or is it
a fiction...?
It has the ring of being a real
anecdote , and so if it is fiction
it is in that sense successful, in
that it does not resolve or reveal
very much... as life in general
does not offer large revelations
or unambiguous ones very often.
+Seraphim.

Seraphim, The Plimpton thing is a faithful account of my encounter with him and Vonnegut several years ago and it's part of an ongoing experiment that involves throwing in such things into a body of fiction to elicit a sort of ambiguity. Or I should say, to make the reader wonder what is real, what is made up. I was quite taken aback by Plimpton's not seeing in the Vonnegut photo the metaphor I so clearly saw in my viewfinder during the shoot. A major disappointment, a disillusion...

he was only a "paper lion" you know...
even if he did write for partisan review...
what about the ali anecdote...that has
a more fictionalized ring.
+S.

That, too, is another episode from real life. Except for the last paragraph. The Ali shoot for UPI came much earlier than the thing with Eve. And Ali was--and remains--the greatest!