"Perhaps it would be helpful to imagine me as the White Rock girl..."

"... kneeling on a boulder in a nightgown, either looking for minnows or adoring her own reflection."

That's the last sentence of the preface to Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House." He's purporting to explain himself, writing in a style that appeals to me more than anything I've read in a long time. Here's the White Rock girl, by the way. Here's Vonnegut.

He's saying that in response to The New Yorker magazine saying that one of his books was "a series of narcissistic giggles."

ADDED: Here's one of the essays that appears in the "Monkey House" collection — one of the 3 things I read in the middle of the night last night. It's a 1966 review of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, which was new back then. Here's the part about the business of unabridged dictionaries:

Whoever decides to crash the unabridged dictionary game next--and it will probably be General Motors or Ford--they will winnow this work heartlessly for bloopers....

Have I made it clear that this book is a beauty? You can't beat the contents, and you can't beat the price. Somebody will beat both sooner or later, of course, because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

And, as I've said, one dictionary is as good as another for most people. Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.