Part 3 (of 3): University of Detroit-Mercy history chair and published author of Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels, discusses the iconic writer as a “broken-hearted American dreamer.” By Jeff Milo, used with permission.

Kurt Vonnegut called Slaughterhouse Five ”… the war book,” or his “famous Dresden book.”

He also called it a failure. “Short, jangled and jumbled…” and written as though by someone suffering a similarly salty fate as Lot’s Wife.

“People aren’t supposed to look back,” wrote the famed writer who defied labels such as social commentator, sci-fi-invested satirist or humanistic-dark-humorist … (even whilst flirting coyly with each category).

Whatever Vonnegut was, says one of his numerous biographers, Dr. Gregory Sumner, (a local Professor of History at U-D Mercy,) he was also not a “literary type.”

“He’d say: I’m a…scientist, or a mechanic. He came from a very unorthodox background and I think he felt an inferiority complex about that, because he hadn’t read all the great books you’re supposed to read.”

He eventually did read all those “classics” like Madame Bovary and what-not, even if it took him until his 40′s. Just the same – he eventually did write his “famous Dresden book” and lo and behold, it became his most famous work, to date.

Sumner strikes me when he uses the phrasing: “Accident of time.” It echoes. “… a Coincidence.”

Slaughterhouse Five is the wobbly and horrific, charming and disconcerting tale of Billy Pilgrim. Our “hero” has, somewhere along the line in his life, become mystically detached from from time-itself and is now stringing his way across a quantamly kinked-up web of his own personal history. Neither in this moment of his life or another, be it birth, death or somewhere in-between, like, particularly, as a malnourished, mal-equipped soldier in the middle of the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1943.

“Here’s a guy,” Sumner says, speaking of Vonnegut, “who actually lived through the apocalypse,” Sumner said of Vonnegut, who often sprinkled in countless self-metaphors into his character’s lives or mannerisms, thereby giving the aloof Billy Pilgrim a similar fate, witnessing the mad and senseless desetruction of a beautiful city like Dresden.

“He survived…by accident. Through it all, though, (Vonnegut) retained his humanity. He saw monstrous things and did not become a monster.”

This book, Slaughterhouse Five, was potentially the most important work he ever set down to write, Sumner said.

“I think he had a higher standard for this book,” Sumner said. “And that’s why it took him 25 years to write.”

Read the rest at the Ferndale Patch

Jay Carr, “a card carrying member of The Rat Race,” shares his views on “Look at the Birdie,” last month’s Vonnegut Indianapolis Book Club selection. 

From the 2009 NY Times review of this collection:

“For the last many decades of his life, Vonnegut was our sage and chain-­smoking truth-teller, but before that, before his trademark black humor and the cosmic scope of “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse-­Five,” he was a journeyman writer of tidy short fictions.”

I read this collection for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library book Club meeting here in Indy later this week. Just when I think our group has pretty much read everything ever written by Vonnegut, a new book seems to pop up. This collection of stories was probably the weakest (only by Vonnegut standards, though) of the ones I’ve read, but it still contained several gems, some that I will likely re-read someday.

“Look at the Birdie”

“I use the cat-over-the-wall technique, a technique I recommend to you.” – Felix Koradubian, the “murder counselor” in the story Look at the Birdie.

The title story in this collection was quite humorous. It begins with the narrator sitting in a bar telling “rather loudly” about a man he hates. He unwittingly draws the attention of a self-proclaimed “murder counselor.” Is this man insane, or just a drunken fellow bar patron? A former psychiatrist (albeit one practicing without a license), this murder counselor’s “cat-over-the-wall” technique is quite effective, both for murder AND blackmail, as our narrator finds out.

Another favorite was the somewhat long-ish Ed Luby’s Key Club. In it, two honest and hard-working, salt of the earth citizens, Harve and Claire Elliott, run afoul of … (read the rest at Bibliophilica).

Part 2 (of 3): University of Detroit-Mercy history chair and published author of Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels, discusses the iconic writer as a “broken-hearted American dreamer.” By Jeff Milo, used with permission.

“The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries …”

When Dr. Gregory Sumner, a local author and U-D Mercy history professor, joins me for coffee in the Ferndale Public Library’s break-room, these words quoted above are the first thing he notices, scribbled lovingly on our dry-erase board. It’s fitting, since the well-traveled lecturer and cultural columnist is here to discuss his favorite subject – the man who wrote those very same words: Kurt Vonnegut.

“(Kurt Vonnegut) was always a lover of libraries,” said Sumner, who researched the man’s life and works extensively for his recently published book Unstuck In Time, a hybrid biography/literary overview. “He thought they were a miracle, that they represent America at its best.”

America at its best comes up often during my discussion with Sumner.

“Vonnegut was an ardent defender of the first amendment,” Sumner points out, citing the rustbelt-raised author’s tendency to raise a bit of hell when it came to irreverent social/political/religious satire, throughout his career. “So sometimes he uses a shocking, vulgar style, as he does have a tough message, but he coats it with a sugar pill.”

He’s referring almost exclusively to the man’s most famous work: Slaughterhouse-Five. This experimental half-sci-fi, half-slapstick, half-protest folk ballad is an odyssey that defies conventional narrative and epitomizes kaleidoscopic evocation by having you laugh out loud on one page, scoff on the next, perturbed at one paragraph but won over by whimsy and wit in the very next sentence.

Slaughterhouse-Five did, indeed, administer some jagged pills – It deflates “war stories” of all heroism, in fact- goes as far as to indict the romantic delusion of heroic-ism and patriotism by imprisoning (and thereby almost infantalizing) his framed soldier(s). But our “hero” is someone who stands still upon a hill after being fired upon (narrowly missed) so as to give his enemies another fair shot at him; marching along epitomizing aloofness with his uneven boots and thin coat and, oh yeah, he – Billy Pilgrim that is – happens to be unstuck-in-time and sporadically skipping (like a quantum-stone) across time into different scenes of his life.

Sumner’s eyes beam through a squint caused by a smile as he speaks of Vonnegut, an artist whom he’s studied and written about extensively. Now, he says, he feels as though he’s come to “understand his Midwestern vibe,” and, not just because the two share a birthplace, (i.e. Indianapolis, IN).

As surreal as he could be, at times, Vonnegut struck the tone of an old friend rambling at the barber shop. “(We Midwesterners) are much more informal. Vonnegut was our modern social critic, like our own modern Mark Twain, with that sort of sense of humor, that satire stung with a certain pessimism about the country and the world, but still, truly, at heart, a patriot.”

Mark Twain bled America, says Sumner. And so does Vonnegut.

Yet…

(Read the rest at the Ferndale Patch.)

Teaching the Unteachable by Kurt Vonnegut, published in The New York Times on Aug. 6, 1967.
Excerpted here with permission from The New York Times.

You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. Most bright people know that, but writers’ conferences continue to multiply in the good old American summertime. …

… Nothing is known about helping real writers to write better. I have discovered almost nothing about it during the past two years. I now make to my successor at Iowa a gift of the one rule that seemed to work for me: Leave real writers alone.

I haven’t mentioned the poets … because I don’t know much about them. The poets talk all the time, like musicians, and this drives prose writers nuts. The poets are always between jobs, so to speak, and the prose writers are hung up on projects requiring months or years to complete.

The idea of a conference for prose writes is an absurdity. They don’t confer, can’t confer. It’s all they can do to drag themselves past one another like great, wounded bears.

One thing I’m glad about: I got to see academic critics at Iowa. I had never seen academic critics before. They are felt to be tremendously creative people, and are paid like movie stars. I found that instructive.

When I saw my first academic critic, I said to a student, “Great God! Who was that?”

The student told me. Since I was so shaken, he asked me who I had thought the man was.

“The reincarnation of Beethoven,” I said.

Mr. Vonnegut is working on a new novel, “Slaughterhouse 5.” A musical version of “Cat’s Cradle,” an earlier novel, will open on Broadway this year.

Read the full article at NYTimes.com

by Jonathan Kelley, Program Coordinator, Freedom to Read Foundation
Originally posted at the FTRF blog

Today (April 11) is the 6th anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut’s death.

You may not be surprised to learn that the Freedom to Read Foundation and Vonnegut go way back. In fact, Slaughterhouse-Five was the book involved in FTRF’s first court case.

In 1971, the FTRF provided a grant to the Rochester, Michigan, school system to fight an attempt to remove Slaughterhouse-Five from classrooms because it dealt in “religious matters,” and thus using it in curricula was a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

In May of that year, a state trial court agreed with the plaintiff, calling Slaughterhouse-Five “valueless” and suggesting that it could be obscene:

“The court did read the book as requested for determination of factual matters and issues of law alike, and unfortunately did thus waste considerable time. At points, the court was deeply disgusted. How any educator entrusted during school hours with the educational, emotional and moral welfare and healthy growth of children could do other than reject such cheap, valueless reading material, is incomprehensible. Its repetitious obscenity and immorality merely degrade and defile, teaching nothing. Contemporary literature of real educational value to youth abounds, contains scientific, social and cultural facts, of which youth need more to know, today.”

The judge subsequently ordered the book removed, basing his decision on the Establishment Clause rather than the question of obscenity (although citing several words that underscored his obscenity concern).

On June 12, 1972, the Michigan Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision. Clarifying the book was not obscene, the court found that just because a book discussed religion does not mean that it can’t be used in a public school setting. Such an idea was, in fact, “repugnant”:

“By couching a personal grievance in First Amendment language, one may not stifle freedom of expression. Vigorously opposed to such a suggestion, we stand firm in rendering plaintiff’s theory constitutionally impermissible.

“If plaintiff’s contention was correct, then public school students could no longer marvel at Sir Galahad’s saintly quest for the Holy Grail, nor be introduced to the dangers of Hitler’s Mein Kampf nor read the mellifluous poetry of John Milton and John Donne. Unhappily, Robin Hood would be forced to forage without Friar Tuck and Shakespeare would have to delete Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. Is this to be the state of our law? Our Constitution does not command ignorance; on the contrary, it assures the people that the state may not relegate them to such a status and guarantees to all the precious and unfettered freedom of pursuing one’s own intellectual pleasures in one’s own personal way.”

That was, of course, by no means the last challenge to Slaughterhouse-Five. In 1973, it was burned by school board members in Drake, North Dakota. It was one of the books involved in the seminal 1982 Pico v. Island Trees Supreme Court case.

Most recently, in a highly publicized incident, the Republic, Missouri, School Board in 2011 banned the book, along with Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer, from schools. They voted to retain Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (perhaps in part because of the viral #speakloudly campaign that the removal effort generated). A few months later, the board modified the ban, allowing parents to check out the books in person.

In response to this, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to Republic high school students. At least 55 students took them up on the offer!

Also that year, FTRF provided a Judith Krug Fund Banned Books Week grant to the Springfield-Greene County Library to help bring Ockler to Springfield (she also appeared that week at the KVML!) and to support a program with KVML board member and Vonnegut scholar Dr. William Rodney Allen appearing via Skype. (Republic is located in Greene County.) Last year, Slaughterhouse-Five was one of seven titles featured in the Lawrence, Kansas, Public Library’s “Banned Books Trading Cards” set, also made possible by the Krug Fund.

Applications for the 2013 round of Krug Fund grants are open through the end of this month.

Which brings us to today! This evening, in a coincidence of timing (though not of substance), the Freedom to Read Foundation will hold a Meet & Greet at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library for attendees of the ACRL 2013 National Conference and other FTRF supporters in the Indianapolis area. We hope to see a nice crowd there to explore the library, learn more about the Freedom to Read Foundation, and have a nosh.

And, of course, to celebrate the remarkable legacy of Kurt Vonnegut.

It was decided that someone should travel to New York to interview [former Vonnegut student] Suzanne McConnell, [Vonnegut attorney] Don Farber, and one notable celebrity – Grammy-winning comedian Lewis Black.

Andrew Neylon was a lucky guy. He’d been selected to travel to New York City for an immersive learning project at Ball State University to create something for the Vonnegut Library.

Follow Neylon’s journey: Part 1 and now, Part 2.

We remain grateful to all that Ball State University has done for the library!

Here’s the project unveiling.

by Mitchell Hall

Kurt Vonnegut, born in Indianapolis on Nov. 11, 1922, published his first novel, Cat’s Cradle, in 1963. Vonnegut contributed to the American literary scene right up until his death, producing novels that bulge at their spines with satirical, haunting humor. His novels explore the various themes of American culture, while imposing his critiques on war, poverty and family.

This summer’s seminar, Teaching Teachers to Teach Vonnegut, provides an opportunity for high school and college lecturers to gather in Indianapolis to learn how to better introduce and teach Vonnegut’s writings in their courses.

It’s a pretty great opportunity. It’s free, and the library brings in highly respected scholars. Here is this year’s panel and what they’ll cover:

Rodney Allen, a retired Vonnegut scholar, professor and author, will lead the weeklong seminar, using a selected number of Vonnegut’s writings while sharing his insight with attendees.

Professor Jon Eller, director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at IUPUI, will focus on teaching two themes in Vonnegut’s early fiction that have had an enduring appeal through generations of readers: the search for meaning in life, and the sanctity of the human soul. Vonnegut reminds us that individuals, rather than institutions, offer the most meaningful answers to such questions, rising to his cautionary admonition in Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” How does he build to this conclusion?

In his writings and speeches, Vonnegut frequently mentioned his family and Indianapolis. As part of a tour of the IUPUI University Library Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives, archives specialist Greg Mobley will look at the activities of the Vonnegut and related families in the city’s German-American community, and how their actions and ideals shaped the milieu that Vonnegut grew up in and was influenced by.

Professor Greg Sumner, chair of the University of Detroit-Mercy history department, says his aim is to highlight the themes that connect Vonnegut’s novels and make them relevant to young people in the 21st century: the complexities and dangers of technology, the need for community and planetary citizens, and the critical importance of free, creative expression in a healthy society. He will refer to the novels as well as his own work, Unstuck in Time, to illustrate how Vonnegut conveyed these messages with unpretentious simplicity and wit.

Teaching Teachers to Teach Vonnegut is made possible in part with support from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

I once wrote an essay on the medieval mystic Margery Kempe that mentioned having a dream about Vonnegut appearing at my bedside, like Marge’s vision of Jesus. I think I made it up, but I’m not really sure.

My ties to Vonnegut go back to high school where one of my more prescient friends suggested reading Slaughterhouse-Five. It was probably Emfinger, who wrote various pieces of advice on random pages in my senior memory book, including, “Always read Vonnegut.” I did what I always do when I find a writer or musician I really connect with: I seek out everything they’ve ever done.

Of course seeking ‘everything’ at that point in my life meant combing the library and local second hand bookshops for any Vonnegut titles. His name was usually in those big white letters across the top. On the cover of Cat’s Cradle the comma before Jr and the period after it look like an exclamation point. It seemed like a good idea. I devoured them all. Eventually I found everything, even Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which I recall as the most elusive of the volumes.

I never got to meet him. I envy those who did. I suspect we would have both lapsed into Midwestern diffidence and sort of shrugged while looking at our watches.

When he died, I had that strange sensation of mourning someone I’d never met who nonetheless had a profound impact on my life, my thinking, my writing. I live in expectation that my literary creations will one day run after me like Kilgore Trout did in Breakfast of Champions, making demands, wanting to be young again.

I thought how awful it was that there would be no more sad, funny books from him and I thought maybe I should do something about that. Like the person who takes the last cookie, I figured having noticed the vacuum, I would have to try to fill it. So I thought about what sort of things to throw in the mixing bowl, so to speak, and came up with aliens attacking and the end of the world and of course, war. I sought the voice of a narrator who was smart enough to see the mess the world was in but absolutely clueless about how to deal with a problem that big.

I started writing the novel Owl Stretching that day. I didn’t know it would be called that. I just thought of it as the ‘sad funny’ book. Of course I made the aliens ridiculous: if you read carefully you may realize they are actually one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eaters (thank you, Sheb Wooley; the song went to #1 in Finland but it was Barry Cryer’s version).

It’s hard to tell if it actually turned out Vonnegut-ish. It stayed sad and funny, I think. Novels take on a life of their own, characters too. I think he captured that so vividly in Breakfast. There are so many things that come to me in Vonnegut’s voice. He looks down on me as I write this in my office from a postcard image, mostly black, sandwiched between Alan Moore and Tony Hancock. I mosey around, bumping into members of my karass in unexpected places and whenever possible, I stop to say, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t  know what is.”

Wherever the dancing lessons come from, I’m usually ready for the peculiar travel suggestions.

Gods bless you, Mr. Vonnegut. You’re indelible.

France during World War II: A survivor remembers

By Michelle Donovan

Michelle Donovan was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and grew up with her grandparents in Riom during World War II while her father was in a Nazi concentration camp. In 1968, she and her sisters immigrated to Canada. She now writes fiction and non-fiction stories for children and teens. Her latest book, “Joshua, Helmut and Bethlehem,” aims to explain the camps to youngsters.

A quiet, fertile land in the heart of France known as l’Auvergne, nested near the city of Clermont-Ferrand and crowned by volcanoes, was invaded in 1940 during World War II. I was born in that city, but raised in the lovely bourgeois/judicial, paved-stone-streets city of Riom.

Clermont-Ferrand and parts of France from Riom to Vichy were known as “Nazi France” during World War II. Now, the area is famous around the world for hot mineral springs and beauty products.

How times have changed.

During the German occupation of France in World War II, the Vichy Government set up a supreme court of justice. For a long time, I reflected on the painful and unforgettable memories I had as a frightened little girl, holding the hand of my grandmother and following the long lines in front of shops that were sometimes under the supervision of German soldiers who patrolled in their “Kubelwagen” or on foot.

Sadness, fear and anguish were on the menu every day. Food was scarce, rations small. Saccharin was replacing sugar, and chicory (known in the U.S. as endive) was the substitute of coffee.

At the sound of sirens, we would run off the road to find refuge and escape the deadly weapons used on the French by Nazi allies. Men wearing long, dark coats from the secret police force of Nazi Germany (called the Gestapo and known as “S.S.”) would come knocking on my grandparents’ door to terrorize us. I was told to sit quietly and try not to speak.

Then, in 1945, the Red Cross freed survivors from the concentration camps, sending them home to their families.

As if it happened yesterday, I vividly remember Riom’s train station. All around us, people were crying. Suddenly, my grandmother seemed to yell, “This is your dad!”

I recall screams of joy mixed with horror. I was petrified into stillness by his frail appearance. My grandmother pushed me toward him. I stopped in front of that skeleton standing on the platform and felt two arms surrounding my shoulders.

The Red Cross put my father on a stretcher to take him to my family’s home. He didn’t survive the journey.

I pray that history will never repeat itself and that no child will ever again have memories from a world that simply has gone mad.

By Jeff Milo (Pictured right. Originally posted on the Ferndale Patch, reused here with permission.) 

I’ve heard some music in the works of Kurt Vonnegut .

In. Out.

Perspective altered. That was Vonnegut.

One word: Resonant.

One (further) superfluous word: Succinct.

Whatever it was, Kurt Vonnegut struck it; whatever it wasn’t, Kurt Vonnegut found a way to say it.

“What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” -Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (Chapter 5).

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is this year’s Ferndale Reads book – which FPL is encouraging everyone in Ferndale to read this March.

This year’s keynote speech will feature local Ferndale resident and author, Gregory Sumner. His recent publication, Unstuck in Time, is a journey through Kurt Vonnegut’s life and work. Sumner will speak about Slaughterhouse-Five’s popularity and sign copies of his book.

Survivor’s Tale / “Responding to Time…

Vonnegut’s voice resonated with me immediately. I was 14 years old and I’d plucked his book, Slaughterhouse-Five, from a list of 50 titles xeroxed-and-passed-out to my Sophomore English class. “The 50 Greatest Books of All-Time,” read the heading. I zeroed-in on the most provocative-sounding title.

This unassuming author’s voice, dry yet zippy, purred and wheezed with refreshing frankness. It honked and slunk along like a trumpet, bleating and blaring at key points and then sliding, somberly, throughout; sleepy eyed yet still stung with caffeine.

His voice was like an old-time radio show beamed down from a stratospheric wormhole, heaving these indelible melodies that could always hook you as they wafted their way into the backrooms of Great Literature’s cozily lamp-lit lounge. Fuzzed with a charming grumpiness and warmed by a disarming, if quirkily-toned fawn of empathy. His voice wrung with a wisdom that wobbled into facetious winks but never minced words.

He approaches you and blurts and his words fall like timeless turquoise tomes on oak tables, sonorous and succinct and echoing up into prophetic, neon-blazed plumes of dust.

My first favorite author.

Likely, still.

And I’ve learned so much more about him, through such an engaging and refreshingly unconventional study, by reading Unstuck In Time: A Journey through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels by Gregory Sumner (pictured in B&W), a metro-area based author and Professor of History at U-D Mercy.

Obviously, I’m a fan. Sumner, however, far surpasses my ardent appreciation, indeed, having attained a much more scholarly surveyance of Vonnegut’s whole essence, in life and in literature.

Sumner calls Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut’s “survivor’s mission,” transcribed piece by piece over a difficult 20-year-long writing process.

“Here’s a man who lived through the apocalypse,” said Sumner, speaking of SH5‘s autobiographical elements tied to Vonnegut’s experiences during WWII and his firsthand account of the Dresden bombings.

Says Sumner: “He survived by accident and it came to be his report on, just, what he had seen. It took him almost 25 years just to figure out the language and how to convey the disorientation of a soldier’s experience.

“The artist’s job,” said Sumner, paraphrasing Vonnegut, “is to respond to his time.”

And time is a big factor when it comes to SH5. It’s main character, Billy Pilgrim, has come unstuck …

“Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun.”

And I’ll leave it right there. Stay tuned for further installments in my special Vonnegut/Sumner series, including an extended interview with the author.

Mark your calendars:

Wed. March 27 – Gregory Sumner, Professor of History, University of Detroit Mercy will speak on the life and writings of Kurt Vonnegut – Ferndale Library – 7 p.m.

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