Paul Bond

A signature by Kurt Vonnegut that he turned into a doodle of his own profile, with the words "And so it goes..."

Finally! Someone willing to tell it how it is!

“The swimming pool looked less like a facility for sport than like a punchbowl in hell.“

Another Vonnegut list, this time the contents of Malachi Constant’s pool bottom after a 56-day party: ““broken glass, cherries, twists of lemon peel, peyotl buttons, slices of orange, stuffed olives, sour onions, a television set, a hypodermic syringe, and the ruins of a white grand piano.”

Vonnegut shared with economist John Kenneth Galbraith a sociological understanding of wealth and labor and the “priestly class” between them. And he shared with Thorstein Veblen an appreciation for how much of economic activity is for show and status.

In American Cornball, a study of mid-Century cornball humor, the author noted the middle initial used with a unique name is a kind of running joke. Like there were a lot of other “Ransom Ferns”!

The type found its fullest presentation in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, in the description of how the employees of the Rosewater Trust ingeniously siphoned the Money River.

Ransom K. Fern in The Sirens of Titan is a Vonnegut type — minor or background characters, professional representatives of great fortunes, supremely well-adjusted to the world as it is.

Or at least, those who teach us how to live with them.

Is it just Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football all the way down?

It makes me wonder what Vonnegut really did think about the scope of individual choice. In the preface to Slapstick, he said he loved Laurel and Hardy because despite insurmountable odds, they kept bargaining in good faith with the universe. What’s the bargain?

I’m not up to the later novels yet, but Billy Pilgrim is famously unstuck in time, the whole conceit of Timequake is that the whole world lives through several years a second time, unable to change anything….

On free will and determinism in Vonnegut: in Player Piano, Paul Proteus let external events kick him along; even when others led a revolution, the future failed to change.

In Sirens of Titan, Constant Malachi and Bee Rumfoord run from their destiny only to meet it…

I guess we’re right on schedule….

Per a fraudulent prophet in Sirens of Titan, by the year Ten Million AD, the first million years AD will be summed up by a single sentence in the history books: “Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years.”

Sirens of Titan, Beatrice Rumfoord: “What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She had overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.”

Roomford — can’t edit posts on Bluesky?

Anita Proteus, Player Piano: “Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a creditable counterfeit of warmth. Paul could only suspect that her feelings were shallow…”

Are all women in Kurt Vonnegut books unhappy? Starting a list…

But Vonnegut also described these as highly dangerous: “ The discovery of the chrono-synclastic infundibula said to mankind in effect: "What makes you think you're going anywhere?”

A chrono-synclastic infundibulum! So that’s what I’m stuck in!

Actually I should be so lucky: apparently Vonnegut means a time funnel, “These places are where all the different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy's solar watch. ”

“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”

The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut

What I mean by the mysticism: “Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women…could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.”

These didn’t appear in Player Piano, anyway. Maybe in earlier short stories I’ll re-read those after the novels.

One chapter into The Sirens of Titan and there are first sightings of Vonnegut trademarks left and right, from the patrician Roomfords, to a man unstuck in time, to alien breeding zoos with a mating pair of humans, to introspective, supremely confident mysticism.

I’m doing a re-read of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. Next up is Sirens of Titan (1959).

I’ve finished Player Piano now. Human nature wins. The machines have been smashed; people can’t help but recreate them. Proteus and the other leaders have a drink before surrender to the authorities. They toast “To the record”, that they tried their best against hopeless odds. It’s not nothing.

“venders, vibration meters, viscosimeters, water heaters, wheels, X-ray spectrogoniometers, zymometers …”

“toasters, torquemeters, traffic controls, transitors, transducers, transformers, turbines, vacuum cleaners, vacuum gages, vacuum tubes, ”