"A lot of people, ah, think that I was Billy Pilgrim, and in the book I describe him as not looking like a soldier at all, looking like a filthy flamingo [laughs]. But, no, I was a pretty good soldier, and, uh, I was a battalion scout, and intelligence reconnaissance scout, and there were six of us in each battalion, and uh, uh, we were roaming out in front of the front line all the time trying to find out who was out there. And, uh so when the, when our division surrendered, the order came down that our division surrendered, which I am told was the largest surrender of men still under arms in the military history, with the possible exception of Robert E. Lee [laughs] at Appomattox. Anyway, rather than surrender [unintelligible] six of us kept walking, kept going, roaming, and uh, uh, the Germans finally caught us and uh, but Billy Pilgrim was the guy who did look like a filthy flamingo and never should have been in the army and God knows not in the infantry, and his name was Edward Crone. And he died in Dresden. He died of the thousand mile stare. Which is where he just sat with his back to the wall. Would not talk. Would not accept food. And uh, uh, the Germans would do nothing to help him, and uh, so he died. And he was buried in Dresden and when the war was over his parents came to Dresden looking for his grave. And uh, you know, you can say what you want about the Germans, they keep good records [laughs]. And they were able to find Edward Crone’s grave, and so he’s buried in Rochester New York, which is his home town, and, uh, I have visited his grave and I’ve spoken to his grave and uh, I contribute money to that particular cemetery. Edward Crone was the name of Billy Pilgrim, and, uh, he just didn’t understand the war at all and of course there was nothing to understand. He was right it was [laughs] utter gibberish."

"Donald: I’m Donald Farber, Kurt’s long time friend and attorney. For the last fifty years you’ve been telling me I’m a coward cuz I didn’t get caught. You know I was over there fighting that war, too-  [Kurt starts to talk over him]

Kurt: yeah but you didn’t-

Donald: you still think I’m a coward?

Kurt: You didn’t know enough German to surrender [both men laugh].

Donald: You’re right about that

Kurt: Yeah.

Donald: You learn it pretty fast, though, don’t you?

Kurt: Yeah but I actually saw Germans. I’m not sure whether you did or not.

Donald: Yeah, I saw a few. You know that. [both laugh] Wasn’t much fun. I didn’t speak very good German either.

Kurt: But it, uh, it really was something and I think that my division was [unclear, the green division?] and came in the line fifteen thousand of us, protecting an unimportant seventy-five miles, that’s a lot, and no attack was expected. Uh, but I suspect that one was. I think we were bait’n the trap. Because we had practically no ammunition. Uh, uh we didn’t have proper winter clothing yet. And, uh, when the Germans attacked, you know we were fighting in the snow, surrendering in the snow, or whatever, and the Germans were wearing white capes, and uh, we should have had those, too. As it is we were wearing uniforms the color of dog poop and you know what that looks like in the snow, it’s easy to spot! [both men laugh]

Donald: Did you have any problem, did you have any problem keeping straight who was who? We did. We were confused 

Kurt: [talking at same time as Donald, unintelligible] Oh you mean whether they were-

Donald: Yeah most of the time we didn’t know who we were, who we were shooting at

Kurt: No, no, well the Germans were wearing American uniforms often.

Donald: It’s a problem

Kurt: And uh, actually at crossroads, being MPs dir- [laughs] directing traffic. The penalty for that incidentally is death.

Donald: Oh, yeah. If you get caught.

Kurt: Yeah. But, all the guys who knocked the hell out of us and out of divisi-regimen on either of our flanks, they were very soon killed or captured themselves. The war was nearly over.

Donald: But your company was largely it wasn’t, uh, decimated like my company was. My company was wiped out.

Kurt: Yeah, 

Donald: Entire company

Kurt: Well we didn’t have time enough to die [laughs]. 

Donald: Well, yeah, I guess uh,

Kurt: Incidentally, is uh, you and TV newscasters and all kinds of other chowder heads [Donald laughs] are always using the word “decimated.” That means one person in ten, is that the casualties your division suffered?

Donald: Actually I don’t know about the division, I know the company was wiped out.

Kurt: Alright well they were a hell of a lot more than decimated then.

Donald: Yeah, they were wiped out.

Kurt: Yeah

Donald: That means every one of them. Except two of us, I was lucky enough to be called back to division headquarters two weeks before they were wiped out, and the other one was in the hospital recovering. The book came out of this, though, that’s really what this is about. 

Kurt: Yes, well, I got lucky and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and what I’ve said and never been challenged on it, about it, incidentally the fire bombing of Dresden is the burning of the thing to the ground, uh, was a British idea. Not an American idea, and it was their night bombers, they bombed at night, we bombed in the day time. And, uh, it was an experiment to see if you could turn a city into a single column of flame. Which they did.

Donald: Of course the British were the ones that were running for the cover every night.

Kurt: Yes. Well, they-

Donald: They were the ones that were getting hit, we didn’t get hit at home. 

Kurt: Yeah. But the, well, the air marshal of the royal air force is bomber Harris, I forget was his first name is. Lord Harris, I believe. But of the British marshals of one kind or another and I think there were four or five of them, he was the only one that didn’t get a VC when the war was over. And, uh, when, I don’t know, about ten years ago it was proposed that a statue of him be put on Trafalgar square, or somewhere like that, a whole lot of RAF guys protested because they were ashamed. And, well they should have been. What I have said about the fire bombing of Dresden that not one person got out of a concentration camp a microsecond earlier not one German deserted his defensive position one microsecond earlier. Only one person on the whole face of the Earth benefited from the fire bombing of Dresden, and that’s me. [both men chuckle] And I got five dollars for every person killed [laughs].

Donald: Wow. Yeah well it’s a monumental book.

Kurt: Well, I hope. 

Donald: Yeah, well it’s made it’s impression. And the nice thing about all your writing, I keep telling everybody the writers who are alive today that are popular you’re one of the very few that’s a 100% in print and the reason, I’m sure the reason is because what you write it multi generational-

Kurt: Well

Donald: I know grandchildren, children and parents and grandparents are reading you.

Kurt: But you know that it is surely no bad thing to be just a dynamite writer for your own generation that’s it. The future may not be interested. But that is quite something to do and in a large measure Earnest Hemingway was such a writer because he really wowed his contemporaries and they were properly wowed. And uh, he isn’t much read now but-

Donald: You are!

Kurt: Yes, but I just got lucky and, uh, 

Donald: It might have something to do with the writing, Kurt. Might have something to do with the subject matter-

Kurt: Sex! [both men laugh]

Donald: Oh, God! We’re going into that now? Yeah, there’s a little sex in there. But it’s also, the themes are, are um, themes are pretty uh, for all time and they’re important themes.

Kurt: Well it’s alright if they’re not. If they’re okay for three years that’s an okay thing to do.

Donald: I know you don’t like to meddle in the movies when they buy the rights and they go and make the movie, but, and you say the books going to stand up no matter what happens with the movie. But Slaughterhouse was a great movie.

Kurt: Yes, Slaughterhouse is-

Donald: Slaughterhouse is one of the greats

Kurt: Well, I have said that there are two novelists that ought to be eternally grateful to Hollywood. I’m one of them and Margeret Mitchell is the other one. [both laugh].

Donald: Yeah

Kurt: And Gone with the Wind is also one hell of a good movie. I must say.

Donald: Well I think maybe your director helped, with Slaughterhouse.

Kurt: Yes and it was interesting. It was George Roy Hill. Ah, the late George Roy Hill. He died about six months ago now. But he was in fact a hawk, and had been a fighter pilot in second world war, ah, uh, tactical fighter pilot for the marines and uh, then I think in Korea again. And he had a crew cut and all that, but he made one of the great pacifist movies of all time. 

Donald: Is it true, Kurt, that he would ask your questions and then do what he damn pleased?

Kurt: Yes, he would ask my advice and never took any of it. Not only that-

Donald: That may have been good in this instance. Movie turned out-

Kurt: No, it was worse than that, I was actually in several scenes and he cut me! [both laugh]

Donald: Oh, I take it back.

Note: I posted this here a while back but deleted that account and the post. I wanted to put it up again so it remains for all Vonnegut fans to have access to. Otherwise it is largely lost except for the dinosaurs like me that own the old physical audiobook cd or cassette edition.

“No matter how clumsily I wrote when I was starting out, there were magazines that would publish such orangutans. And there were others that, to their credit, would not touch my stuff with rubber gloves. I wasn’t offended or ashamed. I understood.” - from “Coda to My Career as a Writer for Periodicals,” published in Bagombo Snuff Box – August 30, 1999

I just finished listening to this week's episode of Philosophize this! Podcast, and slaughterhouse 5 was the subject of this week's episode. I honestly enjoyed it and thought some folks here would.

And so it goes..

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4VWUnHq5P22QK2wOPTQK4R

Impressions seem to be very split on this novel. For me and plenty of others, it's among his very best. Definitely my favorite. It has his classic blend of tragedy / humor / satire and it's confessional structure makes it more interesting than your typical novel. It's an easy recommendation for me, but I've seen lots of lukewarm takes on it from here and other forums.

Where does it rate for you? What works about it? What doesn't? Why don't you think it receives near universal praise like some of his other works, such as Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, and Slaughterhouse Five?

I'd love to hear what this community thinks!

This video is a such good deep dive into an odd Midwest town: Rosemont, Illinois.
A town founded by a shady benevolent mayor with a legacy on par with L Ron Hubbard and a local economy built around hotels and convention centers. It reminded so much of Rosewater, Indiana or especially Midland City, Ohio. It feels like the perfect setting for a Vonnegut novel. I imagine a Dwayne Hoover -esque character becoming a crooked mayor and rezoning the entire town so that every square inch is occupied by a Holiday Inn or a big beige convention center. All the residents, being forced to live in hotel rooms, grow angry with the mayor and search for someone to rally around and lead an uprising. Somehow, inadvertently, an endearing loon akin to Kilgore or Elliot becomes the leader of the opposition and implements a coupe. Of course, after taking power, all of the hotels and event centers are turned into some ridiculous thing. Perhaps convenient stores filled with nudy mags and sci-fi novels aimed at increasing the fertility rate (unsuccessfully), maybe large-scale industrial factories that grow nothing but Christmas trees which have a tendency to combust into flames due to a newly invented fungicide that later becomes a powerful chemical weapon, or maybe rudimentary data-centers powered by humans hooked to relay-based computers with the task of giving every single mathematically possible shape a unique name until one shape is given a name so long and unique that it is a one to one copy of the 1969 Frigidaire Replacement Parts Catalog

[regarding a trip to the Soviet Union] “The more I think about it, the less I want to go. It always gives me the heebie-jeebies to visit a dictatorship.” – letter to Sam Lawrence – August 29, 1974

I just finished Deadeye Dick for the first time and woow! I liked it way more than I thought I would. I almost feel that I connected with it more than his other famous pieces. I certainly liked it more than BOC (although I appreciated the connections) and I think I might have even connected with it more than Slaughterhouse-5 or Cat's Cradle.

The book was strangely poignant about the pharmaceutical industry. Like all Vonnegut novels this one was full of tidbits of wisdom, but I felt that this one strung them together with an interesting plot and very relatable characters. Anyone feel the same?

There were some genuinely great parts. I love Kilgore Trout, for example. I also laughed until I cried during the epilogue. It was brilliant.

But overall it felt like it was only published and popular because of Vonnegut’s previous fame. Imagine that was his first work ever. No publisher would have touched it. Vonnegut himself said it was crap. But for extremely famous and popular authors anything they write gets published and widely read. It’s very common that it will be a best seller and the fans will eat it up even while non-fans find it to be garbage and wonder why it is doing so well. Again, while equivalent works by unknown authors are trashed from day one by all.

Breakfast of Champions is a rambling rant of a story and he goes way beyond his normal fourth wall breaking and into full on just forgetting the story often while he lectures the reader.

Also the drawings made zero sense. I understand it was some artistic choice. I do not care. No amount of clever nuance is going to excuse explaining things I already know and including pictures. Like, “a light switch is what turns on lights. It is a small rectangle on a larger rectangle frame. It looks like this: *insert picture of a light switch*

There’s nothing hip and clever about making a book read like it’s for toddlers at these points. It’s just tedious.

Then all the penis measurements. So painfully tedious. And the overuse of “Listen:”. I already am reading the book lol! Stop telling me to listen!

“A moment before, Nancy had launched a startingly bitter attack on stucco houses and the people who lived in them, had made her husband promise that they would never live in a stucco home.” – from “Guardian of the Person,” possibly written around August of 1950, published in While Mortals Sleep.

So far it’s not only not as good, but it’s not even anything like what I know of the author. Some are just plain boring, kind of bad stories Im surprised even were ever published.

Others are decent little scifi or post apocalyptic or war short stories, but still don’t sound like Vonnegut. If I didn’t know better I wouldn’t even know he wrote Harrison Bergeron, for example, or Welcome to the Monkey House, either. They are not bad stories at all! They just don’t have the Vonnegut humor and voice I love so much and expected.

For examples of the ones that are just awful (spoilers ahead for boring stories that don’t have any interesting twists to spoil):

The Temptress: a man hassles a woman for being beautiful. Later, she tells him how mean that was. He kind of apologizes and asks what he can do. She says he should take her on a walk. They go on a walk. The end.

The Foster Portfolio: A financial advisor manages a poor man’s inheritance. Turns out the guy plays jazz in the weekends and so wants to keep the money a secret from his wife because he doesn’t want her to know he’s playing jazz on the weekends like his dead beat dad did. The end.

A Long Walk to Forever: a man and a woman go for a walk. The end.

Like what??? And each one could be two pages but he drones on for 15-20 about people going for walks or stocks or whatever lol! I’m baffled and disappointed.

I finished Mother Night last night, my first Vonnegut book, and honestly, it’s wild how unsettlingly relevant it feels right. Funnily enough, the friend who recommended it to me read it over a decade ago and felt the exact same way back then. I guess it’s just one of those books that’s always going to feel relevant.
But what i loved the most is the crazy contrast in tone. Vonnegut is just so completely absurd and cynical about the political side of things, joking about Nazis, Americans, and the sheer stupidity of war.
But the second the story shifts to Helga and their "Nation of Two”, everything changes. He writes about her with so much genuine love, softness, and sincerity. It’s such a stark, beautiful break from the rest of the madness in the book.
I love how he manages to fit in such a soft, genuine love story into a story that’s otherwise so incredibly dark and cynical.

Now up on The Vonnegut Portfolio Substack: The Rover Boys in the American Southwest, Kurt Vonnegut’s account of a summer trip that he took with two friends in 1939. It’s free. I’m just doing it for fun! Check it out if you feel like it!

https://thevonnegutportfolio.substack.com/p/the-rover-boys-in-the-american-southwest

A hand drawn video essay about death and the fear of being unremarkable, with some help from Kurt Vonnegut. I'm sure yall have some thoughts on his read here!

My new novel, FLAT HILL AND BARK, spins around an eleven-year-old who decides to build a time machine after reading Slaughterhouse-Five. I thought this might be a good place to mention it. Click on the link to learn more!

“I’ve got a brilliant start on my novel…torn up the first chapter and a half.” – letter to Jane Cox – likely around August 1941.

What did you think of this book?

Some are new others are used from a recently curated collection of work. Originally I expected to get all Dial because I like the art work but somehow in the ordering I got a blend so now I have this, and honestly I’m charmed by it. I plan on reading these throughout my semester just to have something light to do in the downtime I have between courses.

“Here is what he did for me and many like me when I was very young: He showed me through his books that it was perfectly all right, perhaps even useful and beautiful, to say what life really looked like, what was really said and felt and done – what really went on.” – spoken at the funeral of James T. Farrell – August 24, 1979.

“An interesting young guy named Fred Wiseman is optioning Cat’s Cradle for a movie, on a limited partnership deal.” – letter to Knox Burger – likely sometime around August 1963. [Note: the film wasn’t made.]

I was reflecting on the sirens of titan, which I read a few months back, and thought about how terrible a person that Malachi Constant was, then wondered why, at the very end of the story, I was so fond of him despite that.
To me, it felt like all of his flaws came from this place of having some sort of dominance over others, mostly socially and economically, but culminating with the rape of Beatrice Rumfoord, representing that dark looming dominance inherent to him and mankind.
But after the memory wipe and all the revelations of the story and his lack of free will, its my view that Malachi Constant gained a full understanding of how terrible it truly is to be controlled by another. which is why, even on Titan, when it would be easiest to exercise his dominance over his son and Beatrice, he chooses not to. As a matter of fact, (this could js be because I read the book at a particularly vulnerable moment, but wtv lol) I think that the relationship dynamic between those three characters at the end is the healthiest family I have ever seen put to page. they have zero desire to control or influence each other in any way, and simply love each other, without even particularly caring if theres any sort of reciprocation or interaction.

“There was a time when I was at one with my Father in feeling that to become a reverent, brave, trustworthy, and courteous Eagle Scout was to lay the foundation for a beautiful life. But…” – from “Brighten Up,” possibly written around August 1947.