Lonesome No More!

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1922-2007 

A lot will be written about Kurt Vonnegut, today.  Because that's what we do when people who are important, who were important to us, stop living.  We have to figure out just what they meant to us, figure out what they gave us.  Figure out if we still need whatever that was and figure out where we're going to get that, now.  We need to figure out what we're giving others, and what they'll do when we're gone.

Somewhere along the line we started figuring these things out in words.  It's probably no better a way than tears, or wrestling matches, or parades, or origami.  But we make it work, for the most part.  Words aren't particularly real, but they can be shared.  So hooray for that.

A lot will be written about Vonnegut because he was a writer.  Nature tells people to make babies, lots of babies, whenever a horrible disaster takes away a lot of lives.  Today, we've lost someone who gave us words.  Some of us always wanted to give a few words back.  Both out of respect, and because there's a void to fill, it's time.

I was about to say that they'd better be some pretty great words, because he was a pretty great writer.  But I'm sure whatever everyone comes up with will be just fine.

*

I didn't read any Vonnegut until my second?  third? year of college.  A friend of mine had been shocked, insistent.  When I finally picked one up I could see why.  I'm pretty sure the first one was Breakfast of Champions.  Which is a horrible place to start(*).

But nothing about it was difficult.  It fit my head perfectly.  The text came in small chunks.  There were hand-drawn pictures!  Of assholes, and whatnot.  It got meta- without getting clever.  It was sad and silly.  Vonnegut had a very strong and sure and simple writer's voice, especially when he was writing about unsure and complicated things.

I bought most of his books from the used booksellers who set up in front of Bobst library or on University Place.  And that felt right.  Listen:  These aren't happy books.  They are often apocalyptic.  But they're reassuring, too.  He would find reasons to love humans so very much while hating so many of the things they are capable of.  His pessimism was really a perverse optimism.  Biology, and society, and technology don't really give us too much in the way of free will.  But they still probably give us way too much.  We have so many ways to make ourselves unhappy.  We will find a way.  We shall prevail.  We're good at that.

There is something wise about Vonnegut's work, and wisdom doesn't get doled out in bullet points.  It gets shared.  So hooray for that, and for used books.

My brother has that copy of Breakfast, now, if he hasn't passed it along to someone else.  I now have a hardcover copy.  I think it once belonged to a library.

*

I read Hocus Pocus on a single, long, overnight bus ride from Palm Springs, California, to Oakland, California.

*

I have read Slapstick at least a half-dozen times.  I read it again last summer.  Really love that one.  I have not read Sirens of Titan or Mother Night.  Or Jailbird.  But that's okay.  I've got time.  And it's not like he's going to keep churning them out.  Hi ho!

*

People, today - and forever, probably - are going to have more insightful things to say about Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., than all that.  They will cite examples, and pull quotes, and thank goodness for them.  My memory's not all that great.

*

It's not too hard to find a bit where he says something about death, though.  This is from the collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons:

"When I think about my own death, I don't console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on.  Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by.  I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again.  This moment and every moment lasts forever."

Vonnegut was not a happy person, but he helped find reasons to be happy.  Is there a higher calling?

He did a radio series for WNYC, collected in print as God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, where he was a "reporter on the afterlife."  Someone should air those!  Now!  How perfect would that be?

*

There's a section in the essays-and-errata compendium Palm Sunday where Vonnegut talks about this song:

The Statler Brothers - The Class of '57 (mp3) (buy)

He reprints the lyrics in full.  I don't have to do that, of course, because you can just listen.  But here's part of the song's refrain:

And the Class of Fifty-Seven had its dreams.

But we all thought we'd changed the world

With our great works and deeds;

Or maybe we just thought the world

Would change to fit our needs.

The Class of Fifty-Seven had its dreams.

"I would actually like to have ‘The Class of ‘57' become our national anthem for a little while," Vonnegut writes.  "Everybody knows that ‘The Star Spangled Banner' is a bust as music and poetry, and is as representative of the American spirit as the Taj Mahal.

"I can see Americans singing in a grandstand at the Olympics somewhere, while one of our athletes wins a medal - for the decathlon, say.  I can see tears streaming down the singers' cheeks when they get to these lines:  Where Mavis finally wound up/is anybody's bet."

("The authors," he notes, "are Don and Harold Reid, the only actual brothers in the country-music quartet that calls itself the Statler Brothers.  Nobody in the quartet is named Statler.  The quartet named itself after a roll of paper towels."  He was a fan.)

*

I do not own a Statler Brothers CD, myself.  I found that file here.  That's not a music blog... It's a genealogy page!  Someone from a small town who graduated in 1957 was inspired by the song to dig around through photos and memories.  And they put it up online for everyone to see.   You should go look.  Their student body officers held positions like President, Treasurer, Fire Chief and "Yell Queen."  HOORAY!!!

*

I don't really have an ending to all this.  That's okay.  Graceful exits are overrated.  But when I first read about Vonnegut's death, The Goldberg Variations started running through my head.  George Roy Hill used Glenn Gould to score parts of his adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five, and I guess for me Bach has long been the sound of someone floating out - of their body, of their time - and crashing back.

I prefer the eccentric 1981 Gould recordings to the more straightforward '55 ones.  And I'm sorry, but the humming makes total sense.

Below are the piece's opening parlay and a variation which, according to the überreliable Wikipedia, was used in the film.  You should, of course, own this.

Bach - The Goldberg Variations - Aria - Glenn Gould (mp3) (buy)

Bach - The Goldberg Variations - Variation 18 (Canone alla Sesta) - Glenn Gould (mp3) (buy)

(*)Actually, no, wait.  The first "Vonnegut" I read was Venus on the Half-Shell, a science fiction sex-and-philosophy novel by some guy named "Kilgore Trout."  It was recommended to me by the guy who co-owned the cheese shop in which I was working.  I was fourteen.  I thought it was confusing and embarrassing.  He thought it was hilarious.

Venus' real author - Trout was a recurring character in Vonnegut's books - was a sort of mystery, then.  Supposedly it was Philip José Farmer, who was supposedly working on a series of books authored by other authors' alter-egos.  It's probably all been sorted out since, but I'd rather not Google it all up.  We can find out too many things too easily, now.

And, while I'm down here, I might as well mention that I saw the film for Slaughterhouse Five before that, even.  On TV.  I spent most of the movie thinking about the parts of Valerie Perrine Channel 17 didn't see fit to include.

tags: kurt vonnegut jr  statler brothers  glenn gould  rip  

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