So Gaiman Goes

Neil Gaiman was in Indianapolis last night to receive the Kurt Vonnegut literature award. It is given by the Indianapolis Marion County Library and has only been around for a few years. The award goes to someone whose "works ... document and define the human condition." The first one was awarded posthumously to Kurt himself and other winners have included Richard Peck and Eric Carle.

Vonnegut and Gaiman are probably the two most mentioned authors in this blog. Vonnegut of course inspired the title of it and Neil Gaiman is just a Rock Star, but I never would have connected them so directly. I always find it odd when what I think fairly different realms of my obsessions collide like that. For example, Warren Zevon had cowritten songs with both Bruce Springsteen and Carl Hiaasen.

My Twitter feed this morning also had a link to a bootleg YouTube posting of a short film written and directed by Neil.



It is silent movie style and stars Bill Nighy and a real Doll, Amanda Fucking Palmer. I wonder who he had to sleep with to get her in the movie.

Vonnegut In The Park

When I am traveling, I like to get up early in the morning and go wandering the streets taking pictures. The light at that time of the day is magical and the streets are never too crowded. On a Sunday morning, downtown Pittsburgh is populated by a few homeless early risers and the random jogger. I meandered my way down to Point Park at the tip of the city. The park itself had seen better days and much of it was trapped behind chainlink construction fences which I hope means renovations are imminent.

The one landmark that was still accessible and in operation was the fountain at the end of the park right where the Alleghany and Monongahela Rivers merge to form the Ohio. Marring my pristine view was a woman laying on the fountain reading a book at eight in the morning on a weekend. Making lemonade out of lemons, I put on the telephoto lens and took some shots with one of Pittsburgh’s great steel bridges as a backdrop.


I eventually wandered down to the edge of the water and took some panorama style shots of the river and the city back drop. Walking back inland, my unwitting photo subject had sat up and was staring into the distance. That’s when I noticed that the book she was reading was Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut, which is not even one of his better known novels.

Out of some sense of karmic connection, I told her out of nowhere that I loved Kurt Vonnegut. And then as an afterthought, I asked if I could take her picture with the fountain in the background. She was flustered and confused but said “yes.”

I have no idea who she is and we surely will never see each other again. I bet she is worrying her friends with her story about how some creepy guy with a camera wanted her picture and they are telling her not to hang around public parks alone. But I can’t help but think of the cosmic coincidence that brings two fans of Vonnegut to the same fountain on a random Sunday morning. Some chrono-synclastic infundibulum came unstuck in time to put us both there at the same moment and then spun us back into a separate lives. Hi ho.

For my pictures of Pittsburgh that don't feature random strangers, check out my Flickr set.

Dvorak's Quote Of The Day

As seen on Dvorak Uncensored.

Vonnegut never fails to make you think.

A classmate of mine's goal was to be President by 2004. Instead he was banned for life by the NASD for penny stock fraud before the age of 30.

BooksFirst - April 2009

Books Bought

Odalisque: The Baroque Cycle #3 by Neal Stephenson
Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore

Books Read

Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him by Loree Rackstraw

Comments

If you follow my reviews you may have noticed that I tend to read a lot of humorous fiction but lately I seem to be a tough audience. Recent books by renowned side splitters such as Terry Pratchett and Christopher Buckley have left me flat. Finally, I gave into the many suggestions and gave Christopher Moore a try. Eschewing his new ubiquitous novels, I went for an older novel that came highly recommended. I’m glad to report that Island of the Sequined Love Nun lived up to its billing. It was the funniest thing I have read in ages.

Far too many comic novels start out with a clever premise but eventually collapse of their own weight as the plot gets into the way and the running gags start going stale. From the coitus crashus opening to the final escapade, this book kept the laughs coming the whole way. The titular love nun is a co-conspirator in a nefarious cargo cult scam on a highly obscure South Pacific island. A down on his luck pilot gets drawn into the game and he has to fight for his life and his sanity. The characters are broad but true to their stereotype or anti-stereotype. For a book that relies on the culture clash between western civilization and benighted natives, the book throws political correctness to the wind for great effect.

Moore impressed me and I will definitely try some of his other works. I just want to pace myself. When you find writers this fresh and funny it’s easy to binge and burn out.

A wildly successful author who is a complete and total hack is Dan Brown. Real writers must all have voodoo effigies of him on their desks as a constant reminder that talent doesn’t always win out. I read The Davinci Code just after visiting Paris and even created several blog posts using the conceit of retracing the route of Professor Langdon in his pursuit of his blasphemous macguffin.

When I went to Italy last month I threw in a paperback of Angels and Demons that I could never quite muscle through before. On our bus rides between cities I read this third rate travelogue cum potboiler with an eye toward the geographic landmarks used in the novel. I carefully mapped in my Rick Steves guide all the churches, fountains, plazas, and obelisks to get to and then used them as a touring route. Since the big budget movie version is set to come out in about a week expect a rash of tie-in blog posts from me or visit my Rome and (forthcoming) Vatican City Flickr sets for a sneak preview.

The book itself is every bit as preposterous as I expected. Langdon has the deductive reasoning of an idiot savant Sherlock Holmes as he unerringly figures out obscure ambiguous clues. Each set piece scene is breathlessly over the top and the coincidences just pile up like murdered cardinals. By the end of the book the surprise twists are coming so preposterously fast it’s hard to keep up. Not to cause any spoilers, but if the movie follows the book faithfully, we will have a new contender for the Indiana Jones Refrigerator of Doom Implausibility Award.

As a putative Vonnegut fan I feel obligated to read all the ephemera associated with my favorite writer. Unfortunately, as his corpse cools, the jackals have come out to feed on the carcass. One such ghoul is Loree Rackstraw, a student he had a brief affair with while he was teaching writing and waiting for the fickle finger of fame to strike him. That she actually has sex with him has to be inferred from reading between the lines because Loree is too discreet to say so explicitly even when narrating how his wife shows up unexpectedly in the middle of the term. Since the title of the book is Love As Always, Kurt she is clearly claiming some connection that mere readers don't have.

While the ‘fling’ (as she calls it) is short-lived despite being perhaps resparked once between his marriages but while he is in a relationship with someone else (again she is too demure to kiss and tell), she manages to insinuate herself into the rest of his life. She maintains a pen pal relationship with him and makes sure they hook-up whenever the two of them are in the same state. When he’s not available, she drops in on his ex-wife and children whenever she can.

Each chapter is roughly written around the time period of one of his books and reads like a bad Christmas letter from boring people you don’t know. Rackstraw goes over what is happening in Vonnegut’s life and then tries to tie all that in with what happens in her life. The suicide of her husband devolves into a pop-psychoanalysis of how the many suicides in Vonnegut’s life affected his outlook. She constantly name drops all the other alumni of the Iowa Writers Workshop as well as the circle of literary critics and groupies Kurt attracted. I recognize names like Peter Reed, Jerome Klinkowitz, and Robert Weide from my own obsession with Kurt, but casual readers are going to grow bored and confused with all the inside baseball.

Rackstraw’s fawning over ever word Vonnegut writes is obsequious even in the eyes of superfans like myself. She quotes at length the most banal of letters to her as well as her suspiciously conflict of interest ridden reviews of his books. Worst of all, while KV obviously meant a lot to her over 40+ years, he comes off as a bit of a shallow dick. I want to remember Vonnegut as the literary lion he was and her waving of the bloody shirt just sullies the memory no matter how well meaning she is.

BooksFirst - July 2008

Books Bought

See the Special Vacation Edition post

Books Read

Armageddon In Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut, introduction by Mark Vonnegut
The Quick Red Fox by John D. MacDonald

Comments

For rock stars, death has always been a good career move. For writers, not so much. Often before the corpse is cold, the vultures are rifling through the file cabinet and the trash can for anything that can be sold as “undiscovered” to the core fanbase. In the case of Armageddon In Retrospect, that seems to be several similarly themed short stories that Vonnegut wrote in the fifties for the magazines but never got published, probably for good reason.

Most of the stories have prisoners of war as major characters. Some are in Dresden after the fire bombing that was the centerpiece of Slaughterhouse Five, some take place in recently liberated POW camps. An awful lot of the stories have to do with looting the bodies of the dead or terrorizing the citizenry fleeing the oncoming Russian conquerors. These stories are really only interesting in context as very rough drafts of his later work.

Most of Vonnegut’s very early work was re-published in Bagombo Snuff Box where there was a greater variety of topics. While I hate to cast aspersions on son Mark’s motivations, most of this was better kept lost. He supplies a brief preface and there are some non-fiction sections at the beginning that are like warmed-over out-takes from Palm Sunday. If we are going to just go through the pocket lint, I would have preferred more context and connecting material. But, alas, we are never going to get that from Kurt and have to settle for the scraps we can scrounge.

The book itself is just gorgeous with thick creamy paper and colorful illustrations before each chapter. But that doesn't make up for the rather thin content inside.

The fourth Travis McGee novel picks up slightly from the second and third. The titular Quick Red Fox is a big star actress that between husbands got talked into an orgy that ended up captured on camera by a blackmailing proto-paparazzi. Lyssa Dean pays the extortion, but when a second round of blackmail requests comes around she turns to salvage expert Travis McGee to protect her reputation. Trav really could care less but he needs the money and Lyssa’s assistant is a gorgeous if emotionally repressed gal Friday. And we all know where that is going to lead.

The real fun of this book is watching McGee go around the country and squeezing the real story of the lost weekend out of all the participants. At least the ones that are still alive. The plot is a little convoluted and there are a few too many red herrings, but it keeps the pace up. If anything, the book ends a little too quickly with too much of the denouement happening off-screen. The only really good fight sequence is when Travis takes on a pair of ultra-butch lesbians in a scene that is played for laughs. It’s a little squirm inducing given modern sensibilities, but comes off with a some naïve sociology thrown in.

The first four Travis McGee books are all short quick reads and show some growing pains. By the time of Red, MacDonald is getting his sea-legs and rounding out the character nicely. I'm really enjoying this trip down memory lane and can't wait to get into some of the longer meatier books.

BooksFirst - Summer Vacation 2008

One of the secondary goals of my summer vacation was to get to as many independent and used book stores as possible. I didn't didn't do any research ahead of time to make a list and visit any on purpose, but if we were in an area with one (which was often), I stopped in and browsed. I felt obligated to find at least one book I wanted in each store. Since I didn't actually read any books while on vacation, I'm breaking my standard format for these BooksFirst posts and divide the Books Bought section down by bookstore.

Tim's Used Books - Hyannis, MA

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Located on Main Street in the busy tourist area of Hyannis, this store is large and well organized. The fiction area was along one side wall and had a great mix of contemporary and classic writers. I went with the Toni Morrison book, because I'm feeling I need to add a little heft to my reading list. We'll see if I can get through Morrison's sometimes difficult style.

Brewster Book Store - Brewster, MA

(none)

This bookstore is one of the more famous bookstores on the Cape and was the closest to our rental. One afternoon I went antiquing with the three wives on the trip. We had lunch at Brewster Fish House and then went to Brewster Books Store. Crammed into a small house right on the Antique Row of Route 6A, this is a high-end new book store. Nearly half the store is devoted to children's and young adult books. The rest is a quality mix of recent releases, local interest books, and general stock. It packs a lot into a small space. While I didn't buy any books myself, my wife bought a couple of midlde-school-age fantasies that would appeal to Paoli or Pullman fans.

Yellow Umbrella Books - Chatham, MA

The Soft Machine by William Burroughs

Another highly advertised store located on Main Street in Chatham, it had a great selection of local interest. It's along narrow store with the new books in the front and used selections in the back. My son picked up the first book in the series that my wife had bought at Brewster Books. He ended up reading the first three of the series on the car ride home.

Tim's Used Books - Provincetown, MA

The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell (autographed)

I'm pretty sure this Tim's has nothing to do with the Tim's in Hyannis. The one in Provincetown is the archetypal house that has been taken over by a bookstore. Tucked away off the main drag, this wood frame house has all four ground floor rooms filled with shelves with the check-out stand being a large desk in what would be the living room.

The selection was disorganized and spotty, but the there was a great assortment of modern first editions, a lot of them signed. I read Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation two years ago and loved her quirky style. And here was a signed copy of another travel book by her. What was there to lose?

Lyrical Ballad Bookstore - Saratoga Springs, NY

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut (signed limited edition)
Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen
H is for Homicide by Sue Grafton
Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead

This bookstore was the most serendipitous find on the entire trip. We had dropped our son off at an old friend's house and we went into Saratoga Springs to check it out. On a side street was Lyrical Ballad Books (and I just learned that is the title to a William Wordsworth poetry connection). I told my wife I was just going to dash in for a few moments and then immediately got lost.

The store rambles around from room to room and is quite cluttered. Normally, I don't like the piles of books on the floor type of store, but for Lyrical Ballads it worked. Every room was full of treasures and I had to put back several books just to save me from myself.

Then at the checkout counter I casually mentioned that I collect Kurt Vonnegut first editions and I didn't see any on the collectible shelves. He ran to the back and brought out a limited edition signed collectors edition of Galapagos. It was pricey, but I had to have it.

While hanging around I then mentioned I also collect John D. MacDonald paperbacks. He named a few, but they were all titles I knew I already had. Instead, he rummaged around and found a back issue of Firsts, the magazine for book collectors that had a special JDM issue. I added that to the purchases and walked out of the store giddy.

Lyrical Ballad is one of the greatest used book stores I have ever been in and I found it strictly by chance.

Bear Pond Books - Montpelier, VT

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

While tooling around central Vermont eating dairy products (a topic for another post), I decided to stop for dinner in Montpelier, Vermont. Montpelier is the state capital but has a funky old-fashioned vibe. And there were bookstores all over the place. Bear Pond Books was a new book store and it showed a lot of personal touches. As you would imagine, the selection leaned to the granola crunching side, but it worked. The books displayed were interesting and diverse. I went with Omnivore's Dilemma (which is nothing like Portnoy's Complaint) because I have heard a lot about it and it is out in a trade paperback edition and it seemed the right book to get from this store.

Rivendell Books - Montpelier, VT

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead by Crystal Zevon
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Within rock-throwing distance of Bear Pond Books (if you have a good arm and some small rocks) is Rivendell Books which uses the Powell's style of mixing new and used books on the same shelves. It also had a distinct feel which was a little more relaxed and loose. Everywhere I turned there was something interesting, but by now my bag of books was getting heavy and I needed to taper off the buying binge.

I just love bookstores and visiting a whole bunch of independent new and used stores gave me a great appreciation for how good it is to be beyond the BigBoxOfBooks chains. Small bookstores can be just as fascinating by focusing the selection and making browsing an experience.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Where have you found a good bookstore unexpectedly?

Wanda June Lives

One of the duties of being a fan in the fan-atical sense is the need to be aware of every detail of the object of your obsession. Most people (at least people I consider worth conversing with) can name two or three Kurt Vonnegut novels and perhaps have read more than high school English staple “Harrison Bergeron”. I have read all his novels, essay collections, short stories, and Playboy interviews (I can truthfully say I own the July 1973 issue for the articles). When it comes to Vonnegut, I have to have it all.

Thus, when I learned that a local theater production company was putting on his obscure play Happy Birthday, Wanda June, I had to have a ticket. My wife, knowing where to fight her battles, agreed to go and since kids under 18 were free, we made it a family event. I got a few puzzled looks from them when the GPS led us to a middle school parking lot. It seems that The American Century Theater Company operates out of the Gunston Arts Center in Arlington which is one wing of Gunston Middle Shool. Despite the unusual location, the theater portion of the building consists of two professional caliber black-box style stages.

I had seen the film version back in high school when it played the art house film circuit at the Tampa Theater. That movie is just one in a long string of lackluster Vonnegut film adaptations and part of the problem is that its theatrical roots didn't "open up" well on film.

The entire play takes place (except for a few vignettes set in a particularly Vonnegutian version of Heaven) in the apartment of presumably widowed Penelope Ryan. Penelope is a modern take on Ulysses’ wife holding off suitors while waiting for her hero’s return. Vonnegut’s take, as you might guess, is less than Homeric.

In addition to being inspired by the Greek epic, the play is also a very sly dissection of Hemingway-esque machismo. The “hero” Harold Ryan, played with suitable swagger by Bill Aitken, is a trophy hunting Spanish Civil War veteran that has been lost in the Amazon jungle for eight years with Nagasaki bombardier Looseleaf Harper, played by Joe Cronin. He returns home to a reception much different from what he was expecting.

All of the cast is delightful, but the real standout of this production is Kari Ginsburg as the conflicted Penelope. She brings a lot of sexiness and intelligence to a role where it would be easy to play Penelope Pitstop rather than Penelope of Ithaca. And she looks really good in a leopard print mini-skirt.

I am always amazed by the depth of talent in local productions. The set, costumes, and acting are all first rate. Even the minor parts are amusing and very well cast. Our matinee show was only half full which is a shame for such a razor sharp production.

The Artistic Director’s Notes makes it clear that most novelists that attempt playwriting are usually less than successful, and Vonnegut is no exception. That raises the question of why to restage a nearly (and perhaps deservedly so) forgotten footnote to a bigger career. The play has a lot of that acid-tipped Vonnegut wit, and even though it was written over thirty-five years ago, the show still resonates with themes of war, peace, love, and sex. If you can get past the go-go boots and mostly unironic peace signs, there is as much truth in the play today as there was then. Perhaps more so. And that is the mark of genius, especially when such timeless universality appears even in his lesser works.

The show plays one more week and Wednesday night is “pay what you can night”. More information can be found at the official website.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What does it take to get you to live theater?

Photo credit: Ian Armstrong

BooksFirst - February 2008

Books Bought
Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome To The Monkeyhouse dramatized by Christopher Sergel
Strip Tease by Carl Hiaasen (signed)
Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen (signed)
An Unfortunate Woman by Richard Brautigan
Dreaming of Babylon by Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan: The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
Housekeeping vs The Dirt by Nick Hornby
Florida Roadkill by Tim Dorsey

Books Read
None. Not one. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Comments

The letdown from National Just Read More Novels Month has been tremendous. I didn’t finish any books this month. I think this is the first time in the history of BooksFirst that I have been shut-out. I’ve stretched the deadline a few times, but even that wouldn’t help me this time. On the glass half-full side, I’m primed to finish some off in March.

On the book buying front, my two month drought ended with a vengeance. We were in Atlanta having brunch in Little Five Points and had some time to kill. In meandering through the parking lot trying to avoid the guy that had set up a paylot stand while we were eating, we stumbled past A Capella Books in a little strip center. I begged permission and we wandered in. This place is one of the last real used and rare bookstores. A genuine treasure.

The store was smaller, but was clean, neat, and well organized, words frequently not associated with used bookstores. He also had copious rare and collectible book display cases. The Kurt Vonnegut novels he had were not true first editions so I passed, but he did have this odd little bound play that was a stage adaptation of Welcome To The Monkey House. Since the last few remnants I need to fill out my Vonnegut collection are both rare and expensive, I find myself buying odd little scraps of ephemera like this. Stuff only a true collector would bother paying for.

There is a short list of authors that I have to have hardcovers, and if I can get signed copies so much the better. Someday I will be forced to triage the book collection and a signature may be the only thing saving a book from a quick half.com fate. I had of course read the two Carl Hiaasen novels long ago, but these were signed copies which make the editions I now have expendable.

Anytime I go into a new bookstore, and especially a used one, I check the poetry section for my favorite poemer Richard Brautigan. I am almost inevitably always disappointed, but A Capella had an entire shelf of his stuff, including several books of his I had never heard of, let alone read. I bought a collectible first edition, a paperback of a relatively recent novel and a collection of posthumous works presumably discovered among the detritus after his tragic suicide. That should be enough to keep me in hippie poetry and prose for a while.

Since I came to Gaiman late, I have a lot of catching up to do and while I read his most recent short story collection back in October of 2006, I’ve never picked up his earlier collection Smoke and Mirrors. My copy of Neverwhere (see last month) had a teaser story from it and I’m trying to read more short stories this year, so it seems like a perfect fit.

The inspiration for this monthly post is Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree and its sequel Housekeeping vs. The Dust which is a collection of articles where he chronicles the books he buys and reads every month and using them as a jumping off point for riffs on pop culture. I’ll never hold a candle to Hornby, but it’s a fantastic concept I can only humbly ape.

So I am now seriously backlogged more than even before. Hopefully I can show some progress for March. Until then, keep reading.

Kurt Vonnegut, Veteran

National Blog Posting Month Day 11

Today is Veteran’s Day in the United States, a day commemorating all the men and women who have served our country in the armed forces. It is also, modestly ironically, the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut, a noted pacifist who died earlier this year. His opinions on war were formed while a soldier in World War II and a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of Dresden. He wrote the novel Slaughterhouse Five about his experiences in the war.

In his autobiographical collage Palm Sunday, he includes an introduction to a special edition of Slaughterhouse Five. I’ve excerpted a portion below:

Time marches on—and the key events in this book, which is the fire bombing of Dresden, is now a fossilized memory, sinking ever deeper into the tar pit of history. If American school children have heard of it all, they are surely in doubt as to whether it happened in World War One or Two. Nor do I think they should care much.

I, for one, am not avid to keep the memory of the firebombing fresh. I would of course be charmed if people continued to read this book for years to come, but not because I feel there are important lessons to be learned from the Dresden catastrophe. I myself was in the midst of it, and learned only that people can become so enraged in war that they will burn great cities to the ground and slay the inhabitants thereof.

That was nothing new.

He was being much too modest and self-effacing. The Dresden bombing is still remembered in no small part because of his book, which in now part of the post-war literary canon.

He goes on to declare himself to be the only person to profit from the Dresden atrocity. As a veteran, he witnessed first hand the terror and horror war can inflict on the civilian population. On this day where we remember the veterans that proudly serve our just and noble fights, we must also remember that wars kill more than soldiers and that all life is worth protecting.

The Vonnegut Shelf

Click on picture for a bigger view in a new window

You can tell a lot about people by their bookshelves. Mine are messy, cluttered, and over-stuffed. The pride of my book collection is what I call the Vonnegut Shelf. It contains all the major hardback editions of my various Kurt Vonnegut collectibles and related ephemera. Here is an abridged guide to the highlights.

1. My wife collects penguins of different materials. We have wood, glass, coal, quartz, and several obscure types of stones. When we were in China, the big quest was to find a jade penguin, which is a humorous story all in itself. I had to move a bunch of the penguins off the shelf to take the picture, so only a representative selection is visible.

2. I wrote about my letter from Vonnegut back at the time of his death (so it goes). I keep it in a pretty cheap picture frame and the magic marker signature is starting to show some fading. The envelope it came in was hand addressed, but it has long disappeared.

3. For our first anniversary (which is the paper anniversary), my wife gave me a first edition of Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano. A book dealer just a little up the road from our apartment in Tampa had a copy. Nowadays they are only available from internet dealers at prices easily five to ten times what she paid. It is one of my most treasured possessions for several layers of sentimental reasons. Next to it is the equally rare, but much less valuable book club edition.

4. Vonnegut’s most famous novel is Slaughterhouse Five and first editions of it go for nearly as much as the much older Player Piano. I have two copies and I’m not sure what it would take to make me part with either.

5. My favorite later Vonnegut novel is Bluebeard and I own four different versions of the book. In the red paper cover is the galley proof. The faux-leather bound fancy version is the Franklin Press limited edition. These are silly collector plate type of editions designed to rip-off collectors. I bought mine used at less than what the original price. Next to it is the standard “trade” edition first printing. At the top left of the picture, in a yellow cover, is the latest paperback edition you can get at your local BigBoxOfBooks®. I have had to slowly buy reading copies of all my Vonnegut novels.

6. The one and only time I saw Kurt Vonnegut in person was when he was autographing his last original book, Timequake. The picture of me standing next to him while he is signing it is still misplaced somewhere.

7. For his 60th birthday, Vonnegut’s publisher in cahoots with wife Jill Krementz put together a commemorative collection of tributes to him called Happy Birthday, Kurt Vonnegut in homage to his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June. This book was never available for purchase.

8. Another rare piece of Vonnegutia is the ostensible children’s book Sun Moon Star he wrote with artist Ivan Chermayeff in 1980. While hardly rare, it is usually not listed in bibliographies of his works. Somehow I’ve ended up with two copies.

9. In addition to the printed works, I have a few audio recordings. One is a cassette of excerpts from Slaughterhouse Five read by Vonnegut himself. The full unabridged CD version is read by Ethan Hawke. I also bought on a whim a CD collection of interviews with him. Ironically, I have never listened to any of them because they are all still in the original shrink rap as if they were precious Star Wars figurines. Not on the shelf is the ten-minute CD called “Tock Tick” which is Vonnegut reading the backwards bombing sequence from S5 set to music by Simon Heselev.

10. When we first moved to Maryland, one of our must-do items was to take our son to the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. The two wooden eggs are the souvenir of that rainy Monday. The blue one is the standard egg given to all the kids. The yellow one is the much less common one with Sock’s paw print on it. My son has no memory of the event, but I’m still thrilled he got to do it.

I hope to give tours of other parts of my book collection in future posts, but these are the crown jewels.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: How do you display your books or collectibles?

Listen: A Vonnegut Meta-Tribute

When I learned of Kurt Vonnegut’s passing away, I dashed of a quick tribute. I was not alone in that reaction. Several of my blogfriends and either mentioned the death or came to my blog to offer condolences. Madame Courtney Whiny Complainy Pants, Esq. actually beat me to the publish button in addition leaving a nice message to me. Bob Braughler also thought of me in his post. Flasshe with typical impeccable musical taste posted the Al Stewart “Sirens of Titan” song. So many others left comments that they thought of me when they head the news. I thank all of you for your sympathy.

I kept my post short and personal because I knew there would be many more much more extensive retrospectives by others much more talented than me. And I was right. By mid-morning Joel Achenbach had posted an appreciation in the Achenblog. In particular, he mentioned a thesis that would be repeated several other places, but not as cleverly as Joel’s take:

His books were teenager books, really: To fully appreciate them, it probably helped to perceive yourself as an alien being, forced by Fate to survive on a completely demented planet. To be 16 years old, in other words.

While Vonnegut is a frequent topic in the boodle, Joel's post led to an outpouring of memories and discussion in the comments section that stayed amazingly on topic, particularly by boodle standards. The day ended up being a virtual cyberwake for a great writer. Many of the links I have used in this post came from boodle-mining there.

The Washington Post had several other great features. In addition to the formal obituary, they published an online photo gallery and book critic Michael Dirda held a hastily arranged online discussion. Later, Bob Thompson used his interview from when A Man Without A Country came out to put together another insightful essay.

I’m also active in the Wonkette and Gawker commenter communities where I made contributions to each of their surprisingly reverent posts. Although I really have no idea what the point of this follow-up post was.

Vonnegut’s death was covered by all the major most news agencies, but most places used the excellent New York Times obiturary by Dinitia Smith. Being the newspaper of record, the Times also put together a comprehensive retrospective that includes links to NYT reviews of most of his novels as well as reviews written by him. NYT also opened up comments for people to tell what their favorite book was. That thread now has several hundred responses.

NPR’s Morning Edition led each news summary that morning with news and they also put together a full page of links to previous interviews and profiles. Fresh Air used a very poignant interview from 1986 about Vonnegut’s days in the Dresden firebombing. Unfortunately, many of the older NPR clips are only available in RealPlayer, which does not play well with others on my computer.

The Charlie Rose Show also put together a retrospective on their April 12 show. The Vonnegut clips begin about 45 minutes in. The clips came from longer interviews that are available on Google Video. One was from when he was promoting the film version of Mother Night. The Vonnegut interview begins about 14:28 into the show and includes a good clip of Nick Nolte and John Goodman from the movie. The other was for the release of Bagombo Snuff Box. This interview begins 27 minutes in and has some great self-deprecating commentary on how his skills have declined. There is also a roundtable discussion with other writers about the process of screenplay adaptations.

Another long audio interview is available from one he did for The Infinite Mind on Second Life. If you can get used to a cartoon version of Kurt lounging around, it is an interesting recap of his vies on technology and the internet.

Some other papers had their own memorials including the UK Guardian. SFGate.com even had an obituary that didn't get published. As a college student, he wrote for the Cornell Sun, and even though none of the current staff were gleams in their parents’ eye when he wrote there, they work under his watchful eye.

On the web nothing dies and interviews from before his death are still available, like the beginning of this one by Douglas Brinkley in Rolling Stone which has the best version of his mock diatribe against the cigarette companies:

The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn't work. Now I'm forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, 'Colon.'

That quote illustrates the increasingly curmudgeonly voice he had in later years. His more incendiary essays were written for In These Times, a socially and politically activist magazine. They have their own tribute page of the essays he wrote for them.

All of Vonnegut’s books are in print and can be bought inexpensively in your local new or used bookstore or online. This doesn’t keep people from trying to find his words for free. The high school lit class staple “Harrison Bergeron” is available here. Trying to pick among his books is a popular parlor game. Salon had Dave Eggers put together a great guide to the novels that includes icons that indicate which of his major themes are addressed. Vonnegut famously graded his own books. For the Achenblog Boodle, I put together my own grouping of the relative importance of his works. That spurred a debate on whether to start at the top or save the best for last. I recommended Cat's Cradle to newcomers, but don't avoid Slaughterhouse Five, which Time magazine named one of the hundred best modern novels.

I have read nearly every word Vonnegut has written, often more than once and frequently in multiple places. Going through all these tender reminisces can result in bon mot fatigue. In addition to the many allusions to his catch phrases (of which yours truly is a serial offender), several anecdotes keep re-appearing including his quip on the occasion of Isaac Asimov’s death with a tongue-in-cheek reference to his own passing.

And there will always be the silly stuff. He will be dogged with the hoax sunscreen speech forever (a real commencement speech can be found here) as well his feud over Venus On The Half Shell by Phillip Jose Farmer. His cameo in Back To School has a funny punchline, but it also gets to the heart of an interesting meta-comment on his works. Who really does understand an authors words? Every time I read one of his books, I find a new angle or an overlooked irony. You should too.

Blatant Link Mongering™: This is perhaps the linkiest post I have ever written. I intend to update and add to it as I find new items of interest. Feel free to add Vonnegut related links of your own in the comments.

Update (3/17/07): Drink at Work linked to this poignant video montage.

So It Goes

Kurt Vonnegut is dead at the age of 84. I have anticipated and dreaded this day for years. Vonnegut was a man of advanced years and engrained vices. He once threatened to sue cigarette companies for not killing him fast enough. So it goes.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of Kurt Vonnegut. The title of my blog is a tribute to his pseudo-religion of Bokononism. Unlike the wire services and newspapers, I don’t have a canned pre-written obituary to dust off. I have to fight back tears in the few minutes I have before work to sort and organize my thoughts.

I have only had personal contact with him twice in my life. In my freshman year of college, I handwrote him a long fawning letter on cheap stationery and sent it to him through his literary agent. Weeks later I received a business envelope addressed in blue magic marker with no return address. It was his reply, which was gracious, personal, and inspiring.

(Click on image for a full-screen, no reading glasses required version.)

I keep it framed on the shelf with my Kurt Vonnegut collection like a holy relic. The magic-markered signature complete with his trademark assterix has faded, but the words still ring in my ears.

For years, I hoped to meet him in person, but events always conspired to thwart me. The events and rituals of life led me away from the infrequent lecture tours he would make. Finally, I caught up with him at a book signing in Northern Virginia. The line wrapped around the block and only current copies of Timequake would be signed. Despite this assembly line affair, he kidded me about the garish shirt I was wearing and posed for a picture. That snapshot is lost somewhere in a giant plastic box of photos, but that moment is burned into my memory.

His works have been assimilated into the canon of modern literature, but it was not always so. For years he toiled unrecognized destined for the paperbacks-with-lurid-covers fate he heaped on his alter ego, Kilgore Trout. It wasn’t until the counter-culture latched onto his words expressing the absurdity of war and ridiculing the hypocrisy of society that he earned his moment in the sun. His reputation has faded and tarnished since the hippy-dippy era, but his messages have transcended that age. Like Orwell and Huxley, his cautionary warnings are more relevant today than when they were written. The satire of ‘Harrison Begeron’ has become public policy and “Vonnegutian” is a deep and complex adjective.

Much of what gets written about him in the next few days will be wrong. His cynicism and bleakness will be emphasized. People will miss the deeper meaning. Under his simple style he hid complicated ideas. He is the type of thinker that religious zealots fear. He teaches that we should be kinder and gentler to each other than any god or prophet would ever have us be. He is a Humanist of the transcendent variety. He sees humanity as frail and misguided creatures, and under the cynical pitch-dark humor, there was always hope.

While he did not believe in the comforts of the afterlife, I hope he is out there somewhere, laying on his back, grinning horribly, and thumbing his nose at You Know Who.

Update (3/17/07): I also have a meta-tribute with lots of links to other articles about and memorials to Kurt.

Vonnegut Without A Country

Kurt Vonnegut's new book, A Man Without A Country, is the kick-off point for a very good retrospective essay in the Washington Post by Bob Thompson. The essay is very complimentary, but also fair and balanced (in the literal, not the FoxNews, way) about Kurt's entire body of work. The one new great insight is that Vonnegut's World War II novel Slaughterhouse-Five pointed out at the height of the Vietnam War that even in the good wars, we are capable of inhuman attrocities. Maybe the current world situation is part of the reason behind a minor Vonnegut revival.

Thompson sums up Vonnegut's career with this synopsis:

He's seen "Slaughterhouse-Five" get the Hollywood treatment. He's seen it selected No. 18 on the Modern Library's list of the hundred best English-language novels of the 20th century and "Cat's Cradle" anointed by Yale critic Harold Bloom as part of the "Western canon." And he's written more than a dozen additional books, among them "Breakfast of Champions," "Slapstick," "Galapagos," "Hocus Pocus" and "Timequake," which have been published -- this is putting it gently -- to diminishing critical acclaim.

As reporting, this accurate. Slapstick in particular unleashed an enormous critical backlash against Vonnegut by the literati. Vonnegut himself admits that Slapstick was at best a D- effort. Some of the later works have been very unfairly ignored. Galapagos is very interesting and ahead of its time with evolution in the hot seat as it is. And Bluebeard is one of the most under-rated works of the last 25 year.

My love of Vonnegut has been mentioned on this blog before, and I have been avoiding a real review of A Man Without A Country because it is a collection of essays that have been told better in other places. The Post article states:

He has also said he did his best work before he was 55, and "my life is essentially a garage sale now of stuff I wrote a long time ago." This is an accurate assessment.

If Vonnegut were a rock star, Cat's Cradle would have been his indie label masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five his mainstream breakthrough, and Breakfast of Champions the big selling hit that has all the early fans say, "Well I have been reading him since Mother Night."

Unfortunately, the metaphor can be stretched to the breaking point. Slapstick was a near career ending mess that nearly made the label drop him. Bagombo Snuff Box was the collection of demo's and outtakes. Timequake was released with too much filler, and A Man Without A Country is an EP of live acoustic remakes. Most of the riffs have been done better earlier, but it's good to hear the melodies again.

However, even in this uneven mix he does throw off some great lines as sharp and insightful as anything he produced earlier. My favorite completely new line is

I think novels that leave out technololgy misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

No one could have said it better, Kurt.

Karen at Read-Think-Live has also weighed in on the new book.

Technorati tag:hummingbird rump, Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Washington Post, Bob Thompson

Vonnegut on Comedy Central

Here I am with a blog named after a Vonnegut-coined word and I am about the last blogger in the world to see Kurt's appearance on The Daily Show. The video is available on their website.

For an 82 year old guy he can still zip out the zingers. He hits evolution, Bush, Iraq and a few other topics. If you can't get the video to work, some good quotes are here. He only got six minutes of airtime but left behind a list of Liberal Crap I Never Want To Hear Again. Once again he has proven that he is the grand master of the art of pointed sarcasm.

Technorati tag:hummingbird rump, Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Daily Show

Vonnegut Links

Since the name of this website is a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, I figured it should have some Vonnegut related material on it. In researching this post (read googling "Vonnegut"), one site complained that most Vonnegut pages are just lists of links to other sites with a list of links. I think that's true of most fan-based web pages no matter who the subject is.

This site is not now and never will be a Vonnegut fansite. Way back in the mid -90's when I first wanted to do a website, Vonnegut seemed to be a natural topic. I had read all his books as well as several books about him. I had great bibliographical information on him from researching first editions of his books. Then I found a web page by Chris Huber that was on a Duke University web site and all the wind went out of my sails. His site did everything I had hoped to do and more, so I abandoned the hope of ever becoming the web's foremost authority on Kurt Vonnegut (the web was a lot smaller back then).

I recently stumbled upon a link to that duke.edu site that was dead and felt a little loss. Lo and behold, the author of the site had moved it to a new domain and had continued to update it. The Vonnegut Web is really the premiere site for anything Vonnegut. It's got biography, bibliography, chronology, and the most up to date FAQ. Most KV FAQ's on web stop at 1996 when George Cooley quit maintaining it. It's nice to see Huber carrying the torch.

I added a few other links to the sidebar link list that merit attention. It would be pretty negligent not to include his Official Web Site even if it mostly justs hawks his silkscreen designs. I love the "assterix" in the URL line. Great minds think alike. I'll continue to add some more links as I find unique sites that add to the knowledge base, but anyone can do a search and pull up all sorts of minor sites if they care to.

I also found a link to an essay KV had written recently called Cold Turkey. It's good to see he hasn't lost any of his vigor in his old age. He also has a book coming out this fall that collects his "post-retirement" writing titled A Man Without A Country *. I'm afraid it will be a little like the endless repackaging of greatest hits rock groups like The Who do with their fans. Still, recycled Vonnegut is better than most other writers.

* The book link is to Amazon, but I am not an affiliate and won't get any money from you if you buy it from them. I would prefer you buy it from an independent bookstore like Atomic Books, but I can definitely understand if you only have big box retailers in your area.

What are Foma?

This post was last updated February 9, 2006.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote Cat's Cradle which described the fictional religion of Bokononism. To find out more about Bokononism, you can either read Cat's Cradle or visit this site, which has all of the canonical quotes from the Book of Bokonon. While the full precepts and principles of Bokononism are fairly technical, yet satiric of all organized religions, there is truth in the lies of Bokononism.

Foma are the harmless untruths that get us through our life. The only canonical foma in Vonnegut's writing is from his essay collection Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons where he uses as an example, "Prosperity is just around the corner."

Other statements that might qualify as foma include:

Hard work gets rewarded.
Anybody can grow up and become President.
Your mother really likes the art you bring home from summer camp.

These lies are different from the three biggest lies (check's in the mail, etc.) because we need these lies. In a world of six billion people, who thinks their job, family role, social position, is unique and necessary? No one is irreplaceable, yet we all deserve some dignity and mutual respect. Even if that is just a foma as well.