Kurt Vonnegut Book Club, Indianapolis Division, July 28, 2011
Warning: This could be long.
Summer vacations be damned. Seven showed up for the 7/28/11 examination of KV’s 1973 Playboy interview. We were (1) Phil Watts;(2) Bill Briscoe; (3) Julia Whitehead; (4) Janet Hodgkin; (5) Dave Young; (6)Janet Deetz ; and (7) Alvin Sangsuwangul. Janet has recently worked with disadvantaged children in Freeport, Il and Alvin is a recent graduate who has returned to Indianapolis after a year in Thailand with The City Abroad program.
Before our deliberations, Bill passed around the two page introduction to the Playboy interview, which appears only in the magazine and not in the various KV collections. The interviewer, David Standish, discovered KV in 1962 when he was a college student riding the hound from Chicago to Ohio with a stop in Indianapolis. Somewhere along the way he bought a copy of “Mother Night” and was hooked.
Googling him, I discovered that he was an editor at Playboy for 10 years and he also attempted a doctorate in American Studies at Indiana University. His most recent book “The Hollow Earth” is a history of all the crazies who think that there is some kind of civilization in the center of the planet Earth. Bill also passed around a thick folder of magazines that featured KV on the cover. KV did not make the “R” rated cover of the 1973 Playboy, but probably would have had something to say about it. Was that lady really Montana Wildhack?
Phil, per usual, had some thoughtful observations to get us going and read froman interview in “Stop Smiling” Issue 27, August 2006, under the heading “The Melancholia of Everything Completed”. KV was asked about his opinion that our political leadership in the Viet Nam era was ruthless. His answer, 33 years after the Playboy interview, was that it was a “calamity”. The only real political party, he says, is called “People With Money”. He goes on to speak of his last book “A Man Without a Country” which ends with a poem he would like to think was important. Janet H. furnished the name of the poem “Requiem” which is just about as pessimistic as you could imagine. Here it is:
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Requiem”
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
Hah! The Hollow Earth Speaks!
We then drifted into our discussion by way of a dialogue between Bill and Janet H. about that model community, Carmel-by-the-Interstate. Bill spoke of the enjoyment he had moving from community to community as part of the managerial class and the new friends and experiences that mobility brought him. Janet, who taught English in Carmel, recalled that her affluent students were very well grounded in Carmel and did not want to move on when their parents were transferred. The kids seemed to have that sense of community that KV thought was so important. Someone mentioned KV’s barroom conversation with a UMW official who was amazed at the miners in a small Pennsylvania community who refused to move after the mine had closed because their churches and the church music was so much more important to them than finding a working mine. Phil observedthat KV’s idea of the best club, in terms of community needs, was Alcoholics Anonymous where the desire to share was so strong that even non-alcoholicslied in order to participate. Dave tried to establish so me connection betweenKV’s expressed love of communitarianism and the failed communities in KV’s novels and short stories. Then he remembered that KV said that everything he said was “horse shit”. A perfect out.
Much was made of KV’s concern about the cost of the space program, or as he put it, the “tremendous space fuck”. That was his term for it after he saw and felt a lift off that rattled his organs. Janet H. lamented with him that more of that money wasn’t available for more immediate purposes. Alvin resonated with this and objected to all of the waste in the race for military arms. Bill looked at the positive and saw that many non-space benefits were spun off from the space program.
Janet D. expressed her belief that KV was in love with paradox and everyone agreed. Bill noted that KV loved to raise questions and that lead into a discussion of KV’s convoluted ideas about Christianity. Phil segued from KV’s admiration of Christian values to his observation about Charlie Manson and family. KV thought that young girls were drawn to the crazed Manson because he was willing to be the father they never had.
Janet D. held forth on the unresponsiveness of parents. In her experience working with disadvantaged children she noticed that parents, even when well-intentioned, seemed to have exhausted their resources and had given up. That led to remarks about KV’s relationship with his own biological and adopted children. As a struggling writer, he apparently did not spend a lot of quality time with his kids.
His oldest child, Mark, told Phil that after the family moved to Barnstable, MA,he spent most of his time in New York City. Julia recalled that KV looked to his Uncle Alex as his father more than he did to KV, Sr.
Phil brought us back to KV’s literary craftsmanship by talking about KV’s view of his professional writing as being in the joke business. His works were a mosaic of jokes and he spent a lot of time trying to make each joke work. KV seemed to use humor as comic relief, particularly in Slaughterhouse Five. KV, like Shakespeare, called in the fools or clowns to offset the heaviness of murder and violence.
Then, without losing our civility, we descended into politics. KV believed that the common people sensed that the government didn’t listen to them or understand them. That seems to be the situation this very week as the people are asking their representatives to compromise on the US deficit imbroglio and the political players seem determined to take the economy to the brink of disaster if they don’t get their way. Phil referenced that part of the interview where KV said that he supported George McGovern in the 1972 presidential contest. McGovern lost because he had failed as an actor. No one cared about his personal story or his inner life.
All that mattered was his botched communication with the American people. Coincidentally, Janet D. and KV were both living in Barnstable, MA during that crucial race. Massachusetts was the only state to vote for McGovern.Alvin started the segment that ended the meeting. He had seen the movie “Schooling the World: the White Man’s Last Burden” and was outraged thatthe education programs that the West is pushing abroad seem to be destroying local industries and cultures in favor of a globalized capitalism that demeans the individual. Education develops through three stages. First the goal is the acquisition of wisdom; then the accrual of knowledge; and finally the absorption of information. Our efforts to educate are now in that third stage. We are no longer teaching people to think but only to regurgitate certain pieces of information when so required. Julia, who taught English in Thailand, could see this process at work and noted that KV’s chosen academic field was anthropology. Janet H. recalled that not long ago the emphasis in teaching was on problem solving. Now the emphasis seems to be on filling the minds of children with information. Janet D. observed that today’s children seem to be bored with education and there is a general lack of curiosity among those being educated. And so it goes!
We decided to dispense with rating this interview on the 1-10 scale. On that glum note we adjourned. The next meeting will be Thursday, August 25, 2011at the KV Memorial Library. The target is KV’s novel, “Deadeye Dick”.
Dave Young
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