Vonnegut's Last (Published) Story

Since Vonnegut's death in 2007, four volumes of unpublished work have been released, three of which are primarily or exclusively comprised of short stories.  Fans of Vonnegut know that his last published short story appeared in 1972 in the second installment of Harlan Ellison's genre-defining Dangerous Visions anthology series.  In his introduction to "The Big Space Fuck," Ellison claimed that it might be the last piece of fiction anyone would ever get from Vonnegut.  At the time, Vonnegut was working on Breakfast of Champions, but claimed he was abandoning the project. Many reviewers and fans took Breakfast of Champions, published in 1973, as Vonnegut's declaration of retirement.  While fans of Vonnegut know that he published seven more novels, and plenty of non-fiction, they also know that he never published another short story during his lifetime.

Except for "Merlin."

It was published in 1996, and appeared exclusively on the label of a specialty beer in Denver.  (Making Chipotle's cups a couple decades late to the party.)  This wouldn't be worth remarking on if it weren't for the fact that this was the only short story Vonnegut published for the last thirty-five years of his life.  The best background on the beer (called Kurt's Mile High Malt) comes from sports columnist Woody Paige's obituary of Vonnegut for the Denver Post.  The recipe is Vonnegut's grandfather's from before prohibition.  And while it seems the beer is being brewed again, there's no indication that new bottles/cans include the story.

As with the few other blog posts I've found about "Merlin," I'll end by requesting that anyone out there with the text of the story please send me a copy (or tell me where to find it).

Going All the Way by Dan Wakefield (1970): review

On the occasion of its re-release as an ebook, I was asked to review Dan Wakefield's debut novel Going All the Way.  One of the major themes, as the title suggests, is sex, but more specifically in the context of the social milieu of 1950's Indianapolis. In his foreword, Vonnegut compares it to the previous year's best selling novel, Portnoy's Complaint, claiming that though Wakefield's novel has "wider concerns and more intricate characters, the sexual problems are pretty much the same."

Going All the Way focuses on Willard "Sonny" Burns, who starts the novel on a train back to Indianapolis after spending his service in the Korean War in the public information office in Kansas City.  On the train home, he meets Gunner Casselman, one of the "big rods" at Sonny's high school in Indianapolis, returning home from the war a hero.  Their friendship develops from here, with Sonny, the insecure, out of shape loser who enlisted only to discover that serving in the Korean War was was like "being on a team in a sport that drew no crowds, except for the players' own parents and friends," and, perhaps more distressing from his point of view, that "Korea wasn't the kind of war that got you laid for being in it," now being taken under the wing one of the town's golden boys.  But Gunner has started to realize that this golden boy status is meaningless when the society he's in is so limited.  

Vonnegut describes the book as "a period piece," which is only somewhat accurate.  There are certain plotlines that are very specific to a certain place and time, for example, the huge social stigma about growing a beard, and Sonny's mother shouting "My Sonny shaves, like a good American."  But other aspects remain, maybe not to the same pervasive extent of the midwest in the 1950s,  Sonny's mother, much to his chagrin, has become a member of the "Moral Re-Armament Movement," and is trying to get him back into the church.  This movement, as much interested in complaining about desegregation and social progress as it is in evangelism, can be seen later in Falwell's moral majority, or even today in any number of organizations, usually with the words "family" or "values" in their names.  Maybe the two most popular public figures in Indianapolis at this time are Jesus Christ and Senator Joseph McCarthy.  As Gunner laments "anything different is pinko. Anything you ask, if you really want to figure things out, that's pinko too."  It is in this repressive social setting that Gunner and Sonny try to have an active sex life, which makes for great comedy until the pressure gets overwhelming.  

On another level, this book is about a period of aimlessness for people in their twenties, especially when self-discovery and independence are actively hindered, when "anything different is pinko."  This isn't a beat novel, though Wakefield had contact with the major beat authors.  Rather a novel of disillusionment, detailing the frustration of young men fighting against the hypocrisy and disappointments of their society, realizing that maybe they're wasting time waiting around for "the perfect combination of sex and intelligence that every man is supposed to find, that is his rightful due," It focuses on a period between the clearly marked path of childhood and high school and college, and the rest of adult life.  While there is a lot of humor in this book, there is a solid core of angst, which can range from earnest to, well, angsty.  

All in all, I enjoyed Going All the Way.  

Vonnegut's Novels: A Personal Ranking

I'm a pretty big Vonnegut fan, and I felt I might as well get around to ranking all 14 of his novels.  So here goes.

1. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1969)

No surprise here.  Slaughterhouse-Five combines Vonnegut's direct style, unconventional techniques, and personal tragedy into a masterpiece.

2. BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (1973)

Despite Vonnegut himself giving this novel a C grade (in Palm Sunday), it is here that Vonnegut takes his technical experimentation to its greatest heights.

3. MOTHER NIGHT (1961)

The memoir of Howard Campbell Jr., an American dramatist in Germany during the outbreak of WWII, he is asked  by the Nazis to be a propagandist, and U.S. asks him to take the position so he could transmit encoded messages.  The novel deals with Campbell's guilt and his attempts to justify personal neutrality in a morally disastrous world.

4. CAT'S CRADLE (1963)

A parable for the Mutually Assured Destruction, Cat's Cradle lampoons mankind's self-destructive nature, as well as inventing Bokononism.  Is it any surprise this novel was accepted as a Master's thesis in Anthropology?

5. THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959)

Part space opera, part investigation into the nature of free will, The Sirens of Titan is one of the great works of the Golden Age of sci-fi.

6. GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER (1965)

Eliot Rosewater is the rich heir of a rich and politically connected family.  But the town that bears his family's name is a slum.  This novel asks a question that's only becoming more and more relevant as our economy becomes more and more automated and digitized:  What do we do with people our economy doesn't need?

7. TIMEQUAKE (1997)

Vonnegut's last novel describes a timequake: time jumps backwards and everyone, though conscious of the future, is forced to relive the past on autopilot.  Meanwhile, Kurt Vonnegut is writing Timequake.

8. GALÁPAGOS (1985)

A disease has wiped out mankind's ability to reproduce.  The only people who aren't affected are a group of tourists stranded in the Galápagos Islands.  But, as natural selection takes it course, what exactly constitutes 'human' is about to change.

9. PLAYER PIANO (1952)

Vonnegut's first novel, briefly published under the title Utopia-14, Player Piano presents a dystopian future where almost all jobs are handled by machines.  Similar to God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, it asks just what our society will do to those it no longer needs, and what, exactly, is the end goal of capitalism?

10. BLUEBEARD (1987)

The autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, avant-garde abstract painter first seen in Breakfast of Champions.  While I know it's almost counter-intuitive to complain about lack of agency in a Vonnegut protagonist, the protagonists in this and the last four novels on this list seem to be almost completely apathetic to their own lives.  Even Billy Pilgrim, who believed everything he did was predetermined, spent time trying to convince people of that fact.

11. HOCUS POCUS (1990)

Eugene Debs Hartke is a teacher and Vietnam vet at a private school for wealthy but educationally challenged youngsters.  The novel takes the form of hundreds of scraps of paper written on while Hartke awaits trial for helping perpetrate a jailbreak at the nearby penitentiary. 

12. SLAPSTICK (1976)

Slapstick seems like Vonnegut took every SF premise that was floating around in his mind and tied them all together in one novel.  There are plenty of individual passages and ideas I like, but the novel as a whole seemed aimless.

13. DEADEYE DICK (1982)

Rudy Waltz accidentally shoots a neighbor as a kid, leading to a lifelong trauma.  The entire novel is Rudy flashing back and forth from his present to scenes throughout his life (or, rather, the lives of people around him.  Waltz seems more of a documentarian than a character) and hinting at the complete destruction of Midland City.

14. JAILBIRD (1979)

To me, Jailbird's protagonist, Walter Starbuck, was a ghost.  After serving many years as a minor accessory in the Watergate scandal and released from minimum security prison, and finds himself in the middle of a mega-corporation conspiracy.  The parts of this novel that deal with the Red Scare are good, but come few and far between.  Overall, I just couldn't get myself to care about what was going on when the protagonist clearly didn't.

The Shapes of Stories (Part 2)

A while ago I posted a video from Kurt Vonnegut's famous "Shapes of Stories" lecture.  In the decades following the lecture, we've seen the rise of what's been dubbed the 'digital humanities.'  This doesn't refer to hyptertext fiction or anything like that, but rather the use of mathematical algorithms to process data, often from thousands of books at once.  The Paris Review has a great write-up on Matthew Jockers' process of doing what Vonnegut tried to do when he was studying at the University of Chicago: figure out how plots are shaped, and just how many different shapes there are.  A more technical write-up can be found on Jockers' blog.

                                                                                                                                                                from matthewjockers.net

Review: Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut (1997)

Timequake is Kurt Vonnegut's last novel.  Vonnegut himself is the narrator, alternating between personal anecdotes, descriptions of the process of writing Timequake, and scenes from the timequake and the last few years of Kilgore Trout's life.  A Timequake is a brief contraction of the universe, that causes a preceding interval of time (in this case 10 years) to be played over again, exactly as it had been before.  Except everyone has their memories of the last time round.

Timequake is one of the two post-Breakfast of Champions novels I'd recommend to anyone who isn't a die-hard Vonnegut fan  (the other is Galápagos). Vonnegut's career is interesting because there is a very clear midway point (or perhaps an apexe) in the form of Breakfast of Champions (1973).   It was around this time that he published his last short story, "The Big Space Fuck" in the Harlan Ellison edited anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (1972).  If you're familiar with the ending of Breakfast, it isn't that surprising.  Technically, stylistically, and philosophically, his first six novels all built up to Breakfast of Champions.  His remaining novels, even the ones I recommended at the beginning of this paragraph, fit into an identical mould.

For one, the characters are all completely passive.  While this is true of his earlier novels, it's taken to a new extreme in his later. As Vonnegut himself advised "Every character needs to want something, even if it is just a glass of water."  Generally speaking, his later protagonist/narrators don't even want that. They just want to be left alone, but not badly enough to do anything about it.  Additionally, the format of the novels is 'written record left by the protagonist.'  This is not inherently bad (cf. Mother Night and Cat's Cradle), but it just retreads a lot of the same ground.  The structure of the novels is the same as well, a non-chronological cycling back and forth between the time of the character's writing the story and the events narrated, each time adding a little more while constantly hinting at some mystery/cataclysm just over the horizon (e.g. what's in Bluebeard's shed? What happened to Midland? Why was he arrested? etc.).  Galápagos and Timequake succeed despite this, the former because of an clever and engaging premise, the latter because Vonnegut can be at his best when he writes about himself.  

While I would still recommend any of the first seven novels to Timequake, it's definitely worth a read if you have a copy lying around.

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut

NOTE: The review of Allen Drury's Advise and Consent will run next Monday, at which point the bestseller reviews will resume their weekly update schedule.

I'm a pretty big Kurt Vonnegut fan.  I've written about him on my blog before.  I recently finished reading a collection of articles, essays, and speeches, titled Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974).  The title comes from his novel Cat's Cradle, specifically from the imaginary religion Bokononism.  If you didn't already know that, this collection isn't for you.  The collection contains five speeches, nineteen articles, and one short science fiction script.  While some are worth reading even if you've never read a page of Vonnegut before (especially "There's a Maniac Out There", Biafra: A People Betrayed, and In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself).  But many of the articles and speeches assume a knowledge of Vonnegut's work, history, and philosophy on life, or, at the very least, are weakened without it.

One of the great things about Vonnegut is that his works illuminate each other.  Though they often tread similar ground, they take different paths.  So, frequently when reading Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, I'll come across sections that illustrate or define a concept dealt with in one of Vonnegut's novels, often there will be long passages explicitly about the novels themselves and their backgrounds.  

One thing that surprised me about this collection was it's cynicism.  Don't get me wrong, I don't read Vonnegut when I'm looking for an uplifting, optimistic outlook.  But a couple of the pieces in the collection were very cynical, nihilistic even.

Overall, I'd recommend this book to fans of Kurt Vonnegut's other work, but I'd argue against this as an introduction to Kurt Vonnegut or even to his non-fiction specifically (for that, I'd recommend Palm Sunday (1981).

Overall Rating: 3.5 stars

Kurt Vonnegut on Cat's Cradle, Technology, and Truth

Kurt Vonnegut couldn't write Kurt Vonnegut fan fiction

My thoughts on fan fiction are mixed.  There have been a few good examples of works directly based on extant fiction (e.g. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Robert Coover's A Political Fable, John Gardner's Grendel), but these are almost always professional, talented writers using the existing worlds and characters to go in a new direction.  And, in the examples mentioned above, two are based on works no less than 400 years old, and the other uses a children's book character to emphasize satire.  Furthermore, these were artists who felt that the best way to say what they had to say was through these characters.

Amazon's concerns are purely monetary.  That's to be expected; it's a business.  Here's a quote from the L.A. Times article on the subject:    

"We've been very pleased with the success of the Kurt Vonnegut backlist on Kindle," said Donald C. Farber, a trustee of the Kurt Vonnegut Trust, in a statement. "With Kindle Worlds we have an opportunity to further his reach with today's readers." 

Referring to the protagonist of "Slaughterhouse-Five," Farber continued, "Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time, is going to quickly become a Kindle Worlds favorite."

Slaughterhouse-Five is on Modern Library and Time Magazine's lists of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.  This may sound silly to the people at Amazon, but Vonnegut's works are, quite frankly, art.  More than that, they have become a unique and important part of our literary heritage.  I'm not saying that his ideas or even his characters should never be used, but there is a difference between considering the merit of a submitted work and actively soliciting fan fiction.  Simply put, if it were good enough to find a publisher, it wouldn't be published through your fan fiction program.  If you write a story about Tralfamadorians and, after changing the name of their species and physical description, you can't sell that story to as SF magazine, it's not good enough to be published.      

In case you were wondering, here are the rules for the Vonnegut fan fiction project.  Pretty much anything the man ever wrote would be prohibited under these rules.    

One rule is: "We don’t accept offensive content, including but not limited to racial slurs, excessively graphic or violent material, or excessive use of foul language."

This is a man who has  a story called "The Big Space Fuck."  Breakfast of Champions  has a drawing of an asshole on page five.  From God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: "Now Eliot came out of the lavatory, all naked and hairy, drying himself with a tea towel... Eliot now began to play unconsciously with his pubic hair.  It was nothing extravagant.  He would simply uncoil a tight spring of it, let it snap back into place."    

Vonnegut's books have been burned because people have found the content offensive!  His novels frequently end with the protagonist committing suicide!  He routinely draws assholes in his books! And what counts as offensive content?  He writes about World War 2.  One of his novel's main characters is a Nazi propagandist.  Try that without risking offending anybody.  You've figured out how I feel about this, but maybe I should let Vonnegut speak for himself.   

From Palm Sunday (page 221):

"I did want to make the Americans in my book talk as Americans really do talk.  I wanted to make jokes about our bodies.  Why not? Why not, I ask again, especially since Riah Fagan Cox [his ex-mother-in-law], God rest her soul, assured me that she herself was not wobbled by dirty words.  

"If I had gone to Riah's friends...they would have insisted that the words should not be published anyway.  It was bad manners to use such words.  Bad manners should be punished.  

"But even when I was in grammar school, I suspected that warnings about words that nice people never used were in fact lessons in how to keep our mouths shut not just about our bodies, but about many, many things -- perhaps too many things."

The Shape of Stories

I'm a big Kurt Vonnegut fan.  Here's a little bit of a lecture he gave about the shape of stories: