Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library

Jay Carr, “a card carrying member of The Rat Race,” shares his views on “Look at the Birdie,” last month’s Vonnegut Indianapolis Book Club selection. 

From the 2009 NY Times review of this collection:

“For the last many decades of his life, Vonnegut was our sage and chain-­smoking truth-teller, but before that, before his trademark black humor and the cosmic scope of “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse-­Five,” he was a journeyman writer of tidy short fictions.”

I read this collection for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library book Club meeting here in Indy later this week. Just when I think our group has pretty much read everything ever written by Vonnegut, a new book seems to pop up. This collection of stories was probably the weakest (only by Vonnegut standards, though) of the ones I’ve read, but it still contained several gems, some that I will likely re-read someday.

“Look at the Birdie”

“I use the cat-over-the-wall technique, a technique I recommend to you.” – Felix Koradubian, the “murder counselor” in the story Look at the Birdie.

The title story in this collection was quite humorous. It begins with the narrator sitting in a bar telling “rather loudly” about a man he hates. He unwittingly draws the attention of a self-proclaimed “murder counselor.” Is this man insane, or just a drunken fellow bar patron? A former psychiatrist (albeit one practicing without a license), this murder counselor’s “cat-over-the-wall” technique is quite effective, both for murder AND blackmail, as our narrator finds out.

Another favorite was the somewhat long-ish Ed Luby’s Key Club. In it, two honest and hard-working, salt of the earth citizens, Harve and Claire Elliott, run afoul of … (read the rest at Bibliophilica).

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Part 2 (of 3): University of Detroit-Mercy history chair and published author of Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels, discusses the iconic writer as a “broken-hearted American dreamer.” By Jeff Milo, used with permission.

“The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries …”

When Dr. Gregory Sumner, a local author and U-D Mercy history professor, joins me for coffee in the Ferndale Public Library’s break-room, these words quoted above are the first thing he notices, scribbled lovingly on our dry-erase board. It’s fitting, since the well-traveled lecturer and cultural columnist is here to discuss his favorite subject – the man who wrote those very same words: Kurt Vonnegut.

“(Kurt Vonnegut) was always a lover of libraries,” said Sumner, who researched the man’s life and works extensively for his recently published book Unstuck In Time, a hybrid biography/literary overview. “He thought they were a miracle, that they represent America at its best.”

America at its best comes up often during my discussion with Sumner.

“Vonnegut was an ardent defender of the first amendment,” Sumner points out, citing the rustbelt-raised author’s tendency to raise a bit of hell when it came to irreverent social/political/religious satire, throughout his career. “So sometimes he uses a shocking, vulgar style, as he does have a tough message, but he coats it with a sugar pill.”

He’s referring almost exclusively to the man’s most famous work: Slaughterhouse-Five. This experimental half-sci-fi, half-slapstick, half-protest folk ballad is an odyssey that defies conventional narrative and epitomizes kaleidoscopic evocation by having you laugh out loud on one page, scoff on the next, perturbed at one paragraph but won over by whimsy and wit in the very next sentence.

Slaughterhouse-Five did, indeed, administer some jagged pills – It deflates “war stories” of all heroism, in fact- goes as far as to indict the romantic delusion of heroic-ism and patriotism by imprisoning (and thereby almost infantalizing) his framed soldier(s). But our “hero” is someone who stands still upon a hill after being fired upon (narrowly missed) so as to give his enemies another fair shot at him; marching along epitomizing aloofness with his uneven boots and thin coat and, oh yeah, he – Billy Pilgrim that is – happens to be unstuck-in-time and sporadically skipping (like a quantum-stone) across time into different scenes of his life.

Sumner’s eyes beam through a squint caused by a smile as he speaks of Vonnegut, an artist whom he’s studied and written about extensively. Now, he says, he feels as though he’s come to “understand his Midwestern vibe,” and, not just because the two share a birthplace, (i.e. Indianapolis, IN).

As surreal as he could be, at times, Vonnegut struck the tone of an old friend rambling at the barber shop. “(We Midwesterners) are much more informal. Vonnegut was our modern social critic, like our own modern Mark Twain, with that sort of sense of humor, that satire stung with a certain pessimism about the country and the world, but still, truly, at heart, a patriot.”

Mark Twain bled America, says Sumner. And so does Vonnegut.

Yet…

(Read the rest at the Ferndale Patch.)

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Teaching the Unteachable by Kurt Vonnegut, published in The New York Times on Aug. 6, 1967.
Excerpted here with permission from The New York Times.

You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. Most bright people know that, but writers’ conferences continue to multiply in the good old American summertime. …

… Nothing is known about helping real writers to write better. I have discovered almost nothing about it during the past two years. I now make to my successor at Iowa a gift of the one rule that seemed to work for me: Leave real writers alone.

I haven’t mentioned the poets … because I don’t know much about them. The poets talk all the time, like musicians, and this drives prose writers nuts. The poets are always between jobs, so to speak, and the prose writers are hung up on projects requiring months or years to complete.

The idea of a conference for prose writes is an absurdity. They don’t confer, can’t confer. It’s all they can do to drag themselves past one another like great, wounded bears.

One thing I’m glad about: I got to see academic critics at Iowa. I had never seen academic critics before. They are felt to be tremendously creative people, and are paid like movie stars. I found that instructive.

When I saw my first academic critic, I said to a student, “Great God! Who was that?”

The student told me. Since I was so shaken, he asked me who I had thought the man was.

“The reincarnation of Beethoven,” I said.

Mr. Vonnegut is working on a new novel, “Slaughterhouse 5.” A musical version of “Cat’s Cradle,” an earlier novel, will open on Broadway this year.

Read the full article at NYTimes.com

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by Jonathan Kelley, Program Coordinator, Freedom to Read Foundation
Originally posted at the FTRF blog

Today (April 11) is the 6th anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut’s death.

You may not be surprised to learn that the Freedom to Read Foundation and Vonnegut go way back. In fact, Slaughterhouse-Five was the book involved in FTRF’s first court case.

In 1971, the FTRF provided a grant to the Rochester, Michigan, school system to fight an attempt to remove Slaughterhouse-Five from classrooms because it dealt in “religious matters,” and thus using it in curricula was a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

In May of that year, a state trial court agreed with the plaintiff, calling Slaughterhouse-Five “valueless” and suggesting that it could be obscene:

“The court did read the book as requested for determination of factual matters and issues of law alike, and unfortunately did thus waste considerable time. At points, the court was deeply disgusted. How any educator entrusted during school hours with the educational, emotional and moral welfare and healthy growth of children could do other than reject such cheap, valueless reading material, is incomprehensible. Its repetitious obscenity and immorality merely degrade and defile, teaching nothing. Contemporary literature of real educational value to youth abounds, contains scientific, social and cultural facts, of which youth need more to know, today.”

The judge subsequently ordered the book removed, basing his decision on the Establishment Clause rather than the question of obscenity (although citing several words that underscored his obscenity concern).

On June 12, 1972, the Michigan Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision. Clarifying the book was not obscene, the court found that just because a book discussed religion does not mean that it can’t be used in a public school setting. Such an idea was, in fact, “repugnant”:

“By couching a personal grievance in First Amendment language, one may not stifle freedom of expression. Vigorously opposed to such a suggestion, we stand firm in rendering plaintiff’s theory constitutionally impermissible.

“If plaintiff’s contention was correct, then public school students could no longer marvel at Sir Galahad’s saintly quest for the Holy Grail, nor be introduced to the dangers of Hitler’s Mein Kampf nor read the mellifluous poetry of John Milton and John Donne. Unhappily, Robin Hood would be forced to forage without Friar Tuck and Shakespeare would have to delete Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. Is this to be the state of our law? Our Constitution does not command ignorance; on the contrary, it assures the people that the state may not relegate them to such a status and guarantees to all the precious and unfettered freedom of pursuing one’s own intellectual pleasures in one’s own personal way.”

That was, of course, by no means the last challenge to Slaughterhouse-Five. In 1973, it was burned by school board members in Drake, North Dakota. It was one of the books involved in the seminal 1982 Pico v. Island Trees Supreme Court case.

Most recently, in a highly publicized incident, the Republic, Missouri, School Board in 2011 banned the book, along with Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer, from schools. They voted to retain Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (perhaps in part because of the viral #speakloudly campaign that the removal effort generated). A few months later, the board modified the ban, allowing parents to check out the books in person.

In response to this, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to Republic high school students. At least 55 students took them up on the offer!

Also that year, FTRF provided a Judith Krug Fund Banned Books Week grant to the Springfield-Greene County Library to help bring Ockler to Springfield (she also appeared that week at the KVML!) and to support a program with KVML board member and Vonnegut scholar Dr. William Rodney Allen appearing via Skype. (Republic is located in Greene County.) Last year, Slaughterhouse-Five was one of seven titles featured in the Lawrence, Kansas, Public Library’s “Banned Books Trading Cards” set, also made possible by the Krug Fund.

Applications for the 2013 round of Krug Fund grants are open through the end of this month.

Which brings us to today! This evening, in a coincidence of timing (though not of substance), the Freedom to Read Foundation will hold a Meet & Greet at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library for attendees of the ACRL 2013 National Conference and other FTRF supporters in the Indianapolis area. We hope to see a nice crowd there to explore the library, learn more about the Freedom to Read Foundation, and have a nosh.

And, of course, to celebrate the remarkable legacy of Kurt Vonnegut.

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It was decided that someone should travel to New York to interview [former Vonnegut student] Suzanne McConnell, [Vonnegut attorney] Don Farber, and one notable celebrity – Grammy-winning comedian Lewis Black.

Andrew Neylon was a lucky guy. He’d been selected to travel to New York City for an immersive learning project at Ball State University to create something for the Vonnegut Library.

Follow Neylon’s journey: Part 1 and now, Part 2.

We remain grateful to all that Ball State University has done for the library!

Here’s the project unveiling.

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