A Visit to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library

In the middle of Indianapolis is a lovely little museum devoted to the life and works of a brilliant and crazy author of more than a dozen novels and a dozen more works of non-fiction, plays and short-story collections: The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.

Among the displays in the museum is a shelf of books with Vonnegut novels published in many, many languages around the globe.  With novels set all over the world including a million years in the future (Galapagos), Vonnegut is very much a man from Indiana. He loved Indiana and expressed that love all of his long life. 

And this darkly funny man could also include his Indiana roots in messages from a coming Armageddon.

The third floor of the museum is devoted to Vonnegut's most famous work, Slaughterhouse Five.

This strange novel is in part the story of Vonnegut's survival of one of the terrible fire bombings during World War II. He was a prisoner of war in an underground slaughterhouse in Dresden which is how he survived a five-day raid in which 150,000 people died. 

Vonnegut was captured in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge.

Later in life his face became well-known as one of America's great artists.

For me, Vonnegut is one of the great examples of people who transformed the pain of war into art.  

At the end of his life he admired Jesus deeply and openly at the same time he was a noted atheist. He said that being kind was the greatest thing a person could do with their lives.  

Contradiction?  Life has a lot of contradictions. I am so glad Kurt Vonnegut shared his contradictions with the world. 

  

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut: Book 25 of 2022

In 1986, the human race was wiped out, except for a dozen people who escaped from Ecuador to the Galapagos island of Santa Rosalia.  From those dozen ill-matched survivors, after a million years, the human race was reborn as something close to fish.  

The end of the human race in 1986 was the direct result of our brains being too big.  Page after page throughout this very funny story, we learn that our oversized brains lie, are prone to self-deception, to self-regard and all sorts of self-destructive behaviors.  

The Virgil in this tour through the self-created Hell of modern life is a Vietnam War veteran who is the child of a terrible science fiction writer who has one fan in the entire world.  And that fan, a Swedish doctor in Thailand, treats the Vietnam War veteran for syphilis--and sends him to Sweden to be cured. He lives there until he is decapitated in a boatyard and becomes the ethereal guide of the book.

 To quote my last Vonnegut book, "If This Isn't Nice, What Is?"  

You could run out and buy or download the book.  

I got my copy of the book from a barista named Joe who works at The Coffee Bar in Avenel, NJ.  

Thanks Joe! It was as good as you said it was.    

First 24 books of 2022:

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? (Much) Expanded Second Edition: The Graduation Speeches and Other Words to Live By --Kurt Vonnegut Book 23 of 2022

 This short book is exactly what the subtitle promises in the inimitable style of Kurt Vonnegut.  The title quote is also the theme of the book:

“My Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, "If this isn't nice, what is?

So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, "If this isn't nice, what is?”

Vonnegut puts being kind at the center of a good life: 

“There’s only one rule I know of—Goddam it, you’ve got to be kind.”

But he is quite aware that for most people, hate motivates:

“It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall and as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.”

Vonnegut loved growing up in Indiana, the schools he attended and the teachers he had:

“A show of hands, please: How many of you have had a teacher at any stage of your education, from the first grade until this day in May, who made you happier to be alive, prouder to be alive, than you had previously believed possible? Good! Now say the name of that teacher to someone sitting or standing near you. All done? Thank you, and drive home safely, and God bless you all.”

In his many books and articles he fulfilled what is my favorite quote from the book:

“The function of the artist is to make people like life better than before.”

For the rest of us, art is good for our souls:

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories.”

First 22 books of 2022:

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

"Go Take a Flying F#ck at a Rolling Doughnut!" -- Kurt Vonnegut

  

In a touching scene in the movie “Ford v Ferrari” Carroll Shelby, a Texan, tells a boy who lost his father in a racing accident, “Your Daddy thought you was finer than fur on a frog.” I was watching the movie in France in English with French subtitles. The translator said something like “Your father thought you were a very good boy.”

Metaphor, like poetry, does not translate easily or well.

The moment brought me back to trying to figure out military metaphor when I first enlisted.  The American military is more than 60% southern and western, so for a Boston Yankee like me, I had trouble understanding what some of the sergeants were saying. 

One of the first metaphors that confused me was hearing a sergeant say of a soldier struggling hopelessly with the wrong wrench for the job, “He looks like a monkey trying to fuck a football.”  I have a literal mind, so I could picture what he was saying, but could not understand why he was saying it.

But those ten words hold lots of meaning. A monkey, at least in popular culture, is extremely sexually active and so might try to have an erotic relationship with almost anything.  The monkey is presumed to have great energy which it will use even in pursuit of an impossible goal. So, a soldier trying with great energy to do something impossible is like that monkey. 

In that era, the American military was trying to reduce the amount of swearing by sergeants. When one soldier was disagreeing with and rejecting another soldier, he could say, “Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”  This, like suggesting intercourse with one’s self, is an impossible task, and one that would be peculiarly painful in the likely event it failed or even if it succeeded. This insult had been in circulation at least since World War II. Many years later, I was reading “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and smiled when I read the rolling doughnut metaphor.

But before I heard the traditional version, I heard my crew chief use the non-swearing variant using bureaucratic language to say the same thing. He said: “Please attempt aerial intercourse with a motivated, perforated pastry.”

After a while, the Army use of metaphor came easily to me. You could say I caught on, “quicker than chicken on a June bug.”