Look, I'm writing again! Mike inspired me to start writing my creative writing thing again, but then I looked at Timequake and was like dammit... I've got to get this done too. Worst of all, I'm ripping through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies faster than a Vonnegut book so yeah, I really need to get this done. Let's start, then?
It's actually sort of funny that I should have decided to read Timequake, of all the Vonnegut books I could have picked--this is, from what I understand, the last book he wrote before he wrote A Man Without A Country. So, it was his last fiction work (A Man Without A Country is actually a collection of a few of Vonnegut's short essays), and even then, there's more Vonnegut in there than fiction. It's about a time quake--that is, everything that occurred in the last ten years goes on repeat, and afterwards things progress as normal, with people in charge of their own destinies again. This the description on the back of the book: "At 2:27 P.M. on February 13th of the year 2001, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?" The story is a combination of what I've just explained and Kurt Vonnegut being Kurt Vonnegut. Hi ho!
Here is what Trout said when he realized that the ten-year rerun was over, that he and everybody else were suddenly obligated to think of new stuff to do, to be creative again: 'Oh, Lordy! I am much too old and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will again'" (XVI).
"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'" (1).
"Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you're sorry" (5). / "Love means never having to say you're sorry"--Love Story, a movie from the seventies.
"[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with someone that cracked? 'Anything interesting happen at work today, Honey-bunch?' 'Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?'" (5).
"Hooray for firemen! Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies. Hooray for firemen" (7).
"A reporter asked [my son] what it had been like to grow up with a famous father. Mark replied, 'When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who couldn't get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College'" (16). I love this. I love how down to earth Mark is. This is definitely the attitude my more favourite relatives have, and I love it.
"I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J.D. Salinger of John Cheever or John Collier or John O'Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O'Conner or whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few days. No more" (17) This made me sad--not for the fact that that was what I was planning on being my safety net (I wouldn't mind just having a parakeet for company)--but for the fact that... Well, it got me all excited at first. You know--I love Ray Bradbury, I like JD Salinger, I've only read 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson, but that's one of the best short stories I've ever read, no lie... But I just got it excited because of that, and the realization that this wasn't the situation anymore--forget the short stories building a rep, but that in general this was no longer the way. Everything about Vonnegut's statement is no longer the way, not really, and that's pretty damned sad, if I do say so myself.
"[Trout's] long-term relationships with women had been disasters. In the only love story he ever attempted, 'Kiss Me Again,' he had written, there is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.' The moral at the end of that story is this: 'Men are jerks. Women are psychotic'" (22).
"'God created the heaven and the earth,' the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer went on. 'And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn't say anything at first. But Satan began to worry about God when He said, "Let there be light," and there was light. She had to wonder, "What in heck does He think He's doing? How far does He intend to go...?"'" (29).
"'The Garden of Eden,' said Trout, 'might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games'" (29).
A Man Without A Country, too.
So, Trout, as we know, was a bum. He was pretty poor to begin with, but after his son died, that's when he took to being a real bum, with no home but the streets and the homeless shelter. The shelter he is in during this book is next door to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "'Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper... Wonderful! As though the planet weren't already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!'" (71).
"Are [humanists] enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought it was too much to lose" (82). Vonnegut goes on to say that he didn't have faith like Bernie did because of how he was raised, he was raised by skeptics--intelligent folks but skeptics nonetheless. He ends this bit with: "But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable. Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much" (83).
"I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife. I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games" (83).
"Yesterday... I received a well-written letter from a man who never asked to be born in the first place, and who has been a captive of our nonpareil correctional facilities... for many years. He is about to be released into a world where he has no friends or relatives. Free will is about to kick in again, after a hiatus of a good deal more than a decade. What should he do? I, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, wrote back today, 'Join a church.' I said this because what such a grown-up waif needs more than anything is something like a family" (84).
He goes on: "I couldn't recommend Humanism for such a person. I wouldn't do so for the majority of the planet's population. The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche... said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't. Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the Humanist's Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them" (84).
Kurt Vonnegut, talking about what happened to him during the time quake: "I myself was zapped back to this house near the tip of Long Island, New York, where I am writing now, halfway through the rerun. In 1991, as now, I was gazing at a list of all I'd published, and wondering, 'How the hell did I do that?' I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described, who didn't talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they could ever say" (91).
"I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can't get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz" (96).
"'Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful'" (121).
So you remember how back in the day I read Psalm 23 and was all, "This is worded so differently than the version I know, maybe it's the translation, blah blah blah..." Well, Kurt Vonnegut starts a chapter by saying Shankspeare is not the greatest writer (so far) of the English language but it was Lancelot Andrews. It includes his more poetic rewrite of Psalm 23, and there we go! That's the version I know. So... thank you, Kurt Vonnegut, for solving that mystery! Also Lancelot Andrews for making Psalm 23 even more badass.
"All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this" (133). Like James Joyce!? LIKE JAMES JOYCE!?
"Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy years at Swathmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her" (136).
"While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free"--Eugene Debs. This is the third time I have quoted this quote here, and I don't think it's any less meaningful than I did the first time, in July/August (fun fact, I definitely just wrote Augustus), or the second time in January. He goes on to add this after the quote: "In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap. Which it is not" (143).
My only addition is to mention that Debs ran for the presidency and this sentence was in every one of his speeches, according to Vonnegut. How could he have not gotten far? The problem, of course, was that he was a socialist.
"I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of those three things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters" (161). The last bit comes from the fact that that was exactly what Kilgore Trout was doing with the short stories he wrote.
The most disturbing part of the book is when he writes about two people that he knew that killed themselves. Kurt Vonnegut talks about one of his first literary agents and how one time he asked the man how to end a story. The man answered: "'Nothing could be simpler, my dear boy. The hero mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset'" (161-162). He says that many years later, the man shot himself. "Another friend and client of his said he couldn't possibly have committed suicide, it was so out of character. I replied, 'Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun'" (162).
He continues: "Many years ago, so long ago that I was a student at the University of Chicago, I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the arts in general. At that time, I had no idea that I personally would go into any sort of art. He said, 'You know what artists are?' I didn't. 'Artists,' he said, 'are people who say, "I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"' About five years after that, he did what Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and his wife and their kids did at the end of World War Two. He swallowed potassium cyanide" (162).
That scares me. These are the sort of people you'd expect to be happy, you know? I mean--their attitudes, okay, that scares me too, because that's how I am like, at least the artist guy is like. I mean you know, be happy about what you can and all. But the first guy--I can imagine the suicide happened because he realized that that wasn't how it went--the hero rarely wins and doesn't ride off into the sunset... And he didn't have the heart to fool himself anymore. And the advisor fellow? Sure, he realized he had control of that little thing, but he realized how minuscule that thing was against everything else he named, state, city, marriage, et cetera--and that realization killed him. It made him realize how unimportant he was tenfold than it was at the beginning.
Vonnegut also cares to mention that homeless and HIV-positive patients of his friend are insulted if someone asks if they ever want to kill themselves.
"Happy days! We thought we'd live forever" (173).
"Old beer in new bottles. Old jokes in new people" (173).
"And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution: Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcome and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage" (176).
Kurt Vonnegut imagines at one point in the book--the part that's more a story--that he has lived to 2010. He died in 2007. It's sort of eerie to read that bit then, at least to me.
"'You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do'" (196). I just want to say that Kilgore Trout says this. It doesn't seem right to attribute this to Vonnegut.
"Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone" (202).
"If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it. My mother and Ernest Hemingway and my former literary agent and Jerzy Kosiniski and my reluctant thesis advisor at the University of Chicago and Eva Braun all come to mind. But not Kilgore Trout. His indestructible self-respect is what I loved most about Kilgiore trout" (211).
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone'" (221).
So the last scene of the original draft of Timequake sans Vonnegutian interludes was a clambake at Xanadu. In Breakfast of Champions, it's made pretty clear that Trout resembles Vonnegut's late father and is meant to represent him in some way. Earlier in the book Vonnegut says that he, if he could, would not bring his dead relatives and friends back. However, at this party, there are people who resemble his friends and relatives that have passed. Monica Pepper looked like his sister, a bakemaster looked like the man who had originally published Slaughterhouse-Five--and as always, "Kilgore Trout looked like my father" (227).
"Not merely the club and the household staff at Xanadu, and the chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous, which met in the ballroom there, and the battered women and children and grandparents who had found shelter there, were grateful for his healing and encouraging mantra, which made bad times a coma: You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. The whole world was" (228).
"Nobody was a near double for Uncle Alex. He did not like my writing. I dedicated The Sirens of Titan to him, and Uncle Alex said, 'I suppose the young people will like it'" (232). This makes me so sad. Uncle Alex appears to be Vonnegut's hero; that must have been so sad to hear his uncle say that.
Vonnegut also urges the reader to read Catch-22. I agree!
"I told Borden what [Joseph] Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he feared death. Heller said he had never experienced a root-canal job. Many people he knew had. From what they told him about it, Heller said, he guessed he, too, could stand one, if he had to. That was how he felt about death, he said" (238). Okay, I quoted this out of liking it, but also, what the hell is going on with those commas?
So then Vonnegut describes a play by George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah is its name. The scene described is God visiting Adam and Eve: "Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know it was going to end sometime" (238).
"You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were" (239). / "Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals"--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country.
"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place" (249).
"I was the baby of the family. Now I don't have anybody to show off for anymore" (249).
So... This book was more Kurt Vonnegut being awesome in general than anything else. So it was definitely different in that respect from Player Piano, but to be honest, Vonnegut was a fairly static writer. His voice doesn't change in leaps and bounds--Player Piano and Timequake certainly read differently, but it's not to the point where you couldn't recognize the fact that the parentage is the same. It's more like he just comes through more and more--his voice was always there, I mean the style he writes of course, but then he just gets past that and appears himself. It just becomes more real... If you see what I'm trying to say...
Look, I like Vonnegut. This isn't maybe what people would usually expect of him, and maybe it'll feel cheapened to them (I didn't like this book a bit the first time I read it), but I say, go ahead and read it. Vonnegut is really great.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Timequake. Penguin Group: New York, 1997.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Machinehead by Bush
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Let's do the time warp again!
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