Finally! Someone willing to tell it how it is!

“The swimming pool looked less like a facility for sport than like a punchbowl in hell.“

Vonnegut shared with economist John Kenneth Galbraith a sociological understanding of wealth and labor and the “priestly class” between them. And he shared with Thorstein Veblen an appreciation for how much of economic activity is for show and status.

In American Cornball, a study of mid-Century cornball humor, the author noted the middle initial used with a unique name is a kind of running joke. Like there were a lot of other “Ransom Ferns”!

The type found its fullest presentation in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, in the description of how the employees of the Rosewater Trust ingeniously siphoned the Money River.

Or at least, those who teach us how to live with them.

Is it just Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football all the way down?

It makes me wonder what Vonnegut really did think about the scope of individual choice. In the preface to Slapstick, he said he loved Laurel and Hardy because despite insurmountable odds, they kept bargaining in good faith with the universe. What’s the bargain?

I’m not up to the later novels yet, but Billy Pilgrim is famously unstuck in time, the whole conceit of Timequake is that the whole world lives through several years a second time, unable to change anything….

I guess we’re right on schedule….

Sirens of Titan, Beatrice Rumfoord: “What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She had overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.”

Roomford — can’t edit posts on Bluesky?

Anita Proteus, Player Piano: “Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a creditable counterfeit of warmth. Paul could only suspect that her feelings were shallow…”

But Vonnegut also described these as highly dangerous: “ The discovery of the chrono-synclastic infundibula said to mankind in effect: "What makes you think you're going anywhere?”

What I mean by the mysticism: “Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women…could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.”

These didn’t appear in Player Piano, anyway. Maybe in earlier short stories I’ll re-read those after the novels.