Another Vonnegut list, this time the contents of Malachi Constant’s pool bottom after a 56-day party: ““broken glass, cherries, twists of lemon peel, peyotl buttons, slices of orange, stuffed olives, sour onions, a television set, a hypodermic syringe, and the ruins of a white grand piano.”

Ransom K. Fern in The Sirens of Titan is a Vonnegut type — minor or background characters, professional representatives of great fortunes, supremely well-adjusted to the world as it is.

On free will and determinism in Vonnegut: in Player Piano, Paul Proteus let external events kick him along; even when others led a revolution, the future failed to change.

In Sirens of Titan, Constant Malachi and Bee Rumfoord run from their destiny only to meet it…

Per a fraudulent prophet in Sirens of Titan, by the year Ten Million AD, the first million years AD will be summed up by a single sentence in the history books: “Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years.”

Are all women in Kurt Vonnegut books unhappy? Starting a list…

A chrono-synclastic infundibulum! So that’s what I’m stuck in!

Actually I should be so lucky: apparently Vonnegut means a time funnel, “These places are where all the different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy's solar watch. ”

“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”

The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut

One chapter into The Sirens of Titan and there are first sightings of Vonnegut trademarks left and right, from the patrician Roomfords, to a man unstuck in time, to alien breeding zoos with a mating pair of humans, to introspective, supremely confident mysticism.

I’m doing a re-read of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. Next up is Sirens of Titan (1959).

I’ve finished Player Piano now. Human nature wins. The machines have been smashed; people can’t help but recreate them. Proteus and the other leaders have a drink before surrender to the authorities. They toast “To the record”, that they tried their best against hopeless odds. It’s not nothing.

I love that Kurt Vonnegut will truly commit to a bit, like the Dr. Seussian enumeration of broken machinery lying around the town after the revolution at Ilium…“bits of air conditioners, amplidynes, analyzers, arc welders, batteries, belts, billers, bookkeeping machines, bottlers, canners…”

In Vonnegut’s Player Piano, the state provides universal healthcare, dental, food, housing, clothing, and pensions, paid for by taxing largely automated corporations. 1952’s dystopia is today’s hopeless pipe dream. #vonnegut #playerpiano

Vonnegut has a Miami Beach barber describe, while giving a haircut, how lawyers were replaced by lie detector tests and punchcards. As a practicing attorney, I welcome our new vacuum tube overlords! #vonnegut #playerpiano

The protagonist is the character who, by the end of the story, either changes or refuses to change. So, Vonnegut’s naming of Dr. Paul Proteus is pretty on the nose. But maybe not so much as his needy wife Anita. #vonnegut #playerpiano

Re-reading all of Kurt Vonnegut’s work, starting with the novel Player Piano (1952).