 Good afternoon everybody. Take your seats. Let's come to order. That's how I would feel like we should be saying. Welcome to the 19th Annual John Howard Burst Junior Memorial Keynote Event. I'm Betsy Pecklerna, Dean of University Libraries, and I'd like to thank you all so much for coming, and I'm sorry that we had to be here in this courtroom today instead of in the Mary Tuft White Center, but somebody else beat us out, so that's why we're here. This evening's keynote panel, along with the exhibition currently mounted in the library's exhibition cases, a satellite exhibit at Rogers Free Library in Bristol, and the two reading group discussions that were held there yesterday comprise the University Libraries John Howard Burst Junior Program. The program celebrates a milestone anniversary of a publication of an important work of literature. This year's selection, Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut, is celebrating its 50th year of publication and was selected by the Burst Committee, a group of Roger Williams faculty, staff and students, and a representative from Rogers Free Library in Bristol. This committee is chaired by Professor Adam Braver, our library program director. And when we selected this book, Adam wrote up a little summary of why we thought this book was relevant to today, and I just wanted to read a little bit of that to give you a sense of why the committee selected the book. Slaughter House Five was the perfect anti-war novel of the 60s, mixing deep concerns about human conflict with the kind of experimental writing for which that era is so remembered. It's a remarkable work that reads as freshly now as on its publication day 50 years ago. Vonnegut, who began his writing career with more traditional science fiction writing, all the rage and publishing in his formative years of the 50s, blends sci-fi and literary writing into a truly beautiful and timeless work. Any reader of Vonnegut cannot help note his natural gift for humor, his flights of inspired imagination, and his world weary love of his fellow human beings with all their faults and foibles. I thought that was a good reasons for selecting the book. So tonight we have three Vonnegut enthusiasts up here in the panel. Rick Moody, Ginger Strand, and Nanette Vonnegut, whom Professor Adam Braver will introduce in a moment. I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the BERS program, which we celebrate, this is the 19th year, so next year's the big one, the big 20 years. We're hugely grateful to Robert Blaze, an alumnus, who with his gift to the university in the year 2000 made these events possible. Unfortunately, he could not be here tonight, but we're honored that his daughter, Jennifer Murphy, raise your hand, is here to represent the family. Mr. Blaze's gift to the university was in honor of his mentor and friend, Professor John Howard Burs Jr. Professor Burs was a scholar of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and a collector of first editions. The gift supports the annual commemoration of a book, celebrating an anniversary of its publication exhibition, a library book fund for collecting works related to the exhibit, and a keynote lecture. The donation also supports travel this year for Christine Fagan Collection Management Librarian and curator of the exhibition, along with two BERS student fellows from the honors program, Nicole Anderson and Zachary Santoro, who visited the Vonnegut archives at Indiana University Bloomington to select items for the exhibition. It's such a great experiential learning opportunity for our students, and we really appreciate the support from our honors program. For those of you who have not yet seen the exhibition, I encourage you to please come to the library to the exhibit cases on the first floor. It will be up until the end of March, so you have plenty of time to come back if you don't have time this evening. I'd also like to point out that we have prepared in the library, we've prepared a research guide and selected images of the artifacts, which are available on the library's website at the BERS page. There's a link from the library's homepage to the BERS page, but if you just want to simply Google RW Library BERS, you'll end up at that page. And now I'd like to invite Professor Adam Braver to introduce our panelists and moderate the panel discussion. Thank you. Thank you Betsy. And I would feel, I wouldn't sleep well tonight if I did not note that the Ted Delaney's hand was in more of that description than mine. Do you see quite yours? Yes. I think what I'm going to do just to get started, because you probably would like to hear more from the panelists than from me, is refer you to the program for the BIOS, because the BIOS are all in this program. If you didn't get one, you can grab one on the way out. So just to get started, to my left is Rick Moody, writer, author, novelist, educator, ginger strand, mostly non-creative nonfiction writer these days, who wrote this book, Brothers Vonnegut, which was a tremendous book if anybody has not had a chance to read it, particularly in understanding, a lot of things in understanding about Kurt and Bernard, their relationship, the way they inspired each other in many ways. And then Annette Vonnegut, who is daughter of Kurt Vonnegut. And also, I know you've done some writing about your father as well, and I also want to not reduce you to just being daughter of Kurt Vonnegut, but also quite a prolific artist yourself. Thank you. I'm going to start off with a couple of, with some general questions. I'm hoping that many of you out there have questions. I'm prepared to do all the talk, to do all the questioning if we need to, but please feel free to jump in with questions that you might have as we go along. There's a microphone down here, which is probably better to come down and ask the question at the queue so that it can be heard by all. So I want to start more generally to all of you, because we're talking about Slaughterhouse 5 on the 50th anniversary. And really, since it was published, it's been part of our culture and part of our literary culture and discourse, and it's brought meaning to people in many different ways for many different reasons. For some, I suppose it's the message or theme of the book, which we often hear talked about as an anti-war book. For some, it opens hidden worlds and wounds of the psyche. And for others, perhaps those in my particular camp, it opened up ways of thinking about what you could do with writing and or art, a type of freedom from the conventions of conventional narrative or storytelling in order to get at the heart of something different. But I want to start with you and ask all of you what it's meant to you over the years, and when you think back on it, why you think of the book as being meaningful for yourself, not in the whole sphere. Shall I start? You want me to start? Am I close enough to Alexa here that everybody can hear me? I mean, I actually came to the book and to Vonnegut generally rather late after college. I wasn't one of these youthful Vonnegut obsessives. And someone commented, an editor commented on something of mine by saying, I don't like this line. I want you to take it out. It references Slaughterhouse 5. And I was like, well, I didn't mean to. So I went and read the book. And in fact, I thought it was the most brilliant anti-war novel I'd ever read. And so I said, leave it in. I want to reference Slaughterhouse 5. Thank you very much. But then becoming more and more familiar with the book over time, I think that, I mean, it's definitely an anti-war novel, but what it really is to me or what it personally means to me is it's a book about death. And nobody ever talks about the subtitle. Everybody talks about the children's crusade, but there's also the duty dance with death. And it's not just about war. It's about how we all deal with this miserable thing, this miserable way that we have to exist in the world, which is on a trajectory of time where we move from birth to death and how we deal with absence and loss and the pulsed-ast pageant of misery that is human history. I was 14 when Slaughterhouse came out. And my father, I knew him as a struggling writer. I don't think any of us saw it coming, the impact that this book would have, but it came into the world in a most powerful way personally. In some ways, I say it's like the aliens took him away, because he became a celebrity, but my father would give me his writing to read since I was young, and he really cared about how I was responding to it. Even when I was 10 years old, if I would laugh, he'd come running into the room. What are you laughing at? Really, he was working it out as if he wanted to entertain. I think that was Cat's Cradle. I remember reading that. But Slaughterhouse 5, to me, I knew he was wrestling with something. That's what I understood as his daughter, as somebody who lived with him. I know what it is to live with a writer, how hard it was every day, to get going and doing it, and being happy when he was somewhat happy when he came out of my mother cracking the ice to get the drink going so he could get relief, but I didn't read that. I think I read the book because I felt like I had to understand what's all the big deal. For me, it made me very self-conscious because I was the daughter of suddenly this famous person. I came to Slaughterhouse 5 later in life because I was ready to look at it. I would say it was maybe 10 years ago. When I was 50, I read Slaughterhouse 5 and I'm reading it and I throw it on the ground. Sorry, that's my father. I got it. What I saw was a brilliant work that was magic. How he cut up time and such a small book. I'm still reeling from it in a way, so I'm here to share my coming to it late and also what it was like watching him do this thing, which was practice, practice 20 years. I want to share that with anybody who, if you want to be a writer, that's what it is. It wasn't a total joy, but it was such a beautiful gift to the world. I'm happy to be here and talking about him as the man and as the writer and how I had to come at it later in life because it was too big a thing. Am I understanding any of you? The first time you read it was just 10 years ago. I'm sure I did read it, but it was so self-conscious about it. In some ways I resented it a little bit, but now I can handle it. I'm in it with everybody who loves it. I tell people it sort of reminds me of Fred Astaire, you watch him dance. You can't fathom that type of grace and beauty, but what it takes to get there is a lot of practice. I'm just a guy. I'm one of the youthful Vonnegut fans that Ginger alluded to. I read the entire body of work as a teenager. Every single word that was available then I read in the middle 70s. I started oddly enough with a book that has a more mixed, critical status, namely Breakfast of Champions. I read that because that was the one that I'd most recently come out when I began my unquenchable need to have read everything that Kurt Vonnegut wrote. I felt then and I still feel that Breakfast of Champions is a great, great book. The aspects of Breakfast of Champions are genuinely revolutionary, the way that art works in the book, for example, and also the sort of mixed idea about protagonist that's in that book. I further greatly, greatly admired and continue to admire the way that the character called Kilgore Chout worked through multiple novels by Kurt Vonnegut as a kind of alter ego. Upon finishing that book I then went and read every other book by Kurt Vonnegut. It relates to the discussion of Slaughterhouse 5 in the following way. As a writer of somewhat experimental work, who later on as a writing student was studying with sort of lionized experimental writers of the 60s and 70s, I had this odd journey that I made that I was talking about with Ginger and Nanette earlier in which I found myself among experimental writers who frequently, systematically suppressed the role of Kurt Vonnegut in American experimental writing. And this was really odd for me because these works had been so systematically important and fundamental to my own development. So as a writing student I found myself sort of furtively wanting to go back and think about the ways in which these various works sort of challenged our ideas about well-made orderly narratives, realism, storytelling, et cetera, et cetera. In Breakfast of Champions it's what I just cited to you some of the ways that it's highly interruptive of normal novel writing procedure. But it's impossible not to have that discussion without going back to Slaughterhouse 5 and especially without talking about how time works in Slaughterhouse 5. Ginger's book is so important about physics and the way in which the Vonnegut brothers sort of digested ideas of science and what science meant at the time that these works were being written. And one aspect of that is that Slaughterhouse 5 becomes a book that's slipped out of time in a way, right? So that's incredibly interesting. I always say to writing students that there's no story without time. Time is the element. And really what story is is time being worked out on bodies. That's what a story is. But this idea that the war is a thing in Slaughterhouse 5 that's so traumatic and has such an impact that orderly time is ruptured in the reconsideration of the war and its effect. That's just incredibly powerful and interesting and in putting human subjectivity and the kind of chaos of human subjectivity so at the center of the book that the book is bent by that experience. It's sort of how we think about time now as we approach black holes. So time as we approach black holes slows in this way and becomes sort of spaghetti thin if you read Hawking and so on. But in this book, Slaughterhouse 5, it's subjectivity and memory that are distorted because of the war. The war is sort of the black hole into which the narrative falls. So for me as a writer then, this experience of these books sort of made me who I am. And it just became really super important at a certain moment developmentally to say and remember how imperative Vonnegut's influence was to me. I think Adam was saying the same thing at the outset. These works are gateway drugs to thinking about narrative structure and thinking in new ways about narrative structure. And it was all done in a way that was so organic and so human that you can't see the joins. You can't see how structurally candy they are because that voice is so warm and so human. The other thing I'll say about it, and then I'll shut up, is that as I was preparing to come, I reread the introduction to Mother Night where he talks about the Dresden firebombing prior to Slaughterhouse 5. So it's almost like a dry run for talking about memory and his own experiences of the war that become absolutely fundamental and baked in. Wrong word. But become fundamental to the structure and the conception of Slaughterhouse 5. And the description is so devastating in Mother Night. So devastating that it's impossible not to think of that sort of distorted time field in Slaughterhouse 5 as not being his own attempt to reckon with what he saw and had been through. Absolutely. And we've talked about this earlier, but have been prior to this panel. Can you understand why it took 20 years to write the book? I mean, yeah, I totally can. What Nanette is saying is that writers have to write through material, as you or I would say, to get to the kind of life experience that enables the really incredible great book sometimes. Which is not to say that I love Sirens of Titan, that's a novel I deeply love. And Mother Night and many of those short stories that were written prior to Slaughterhouse 5 are still incredible to me. But sometimes the subject and the writer and the moment in history meet. And then something really incredible happens. I have to say, in reading Slaughterhouse 5 there was one part that made me, it just took my breath away. When he said that was me, that was then, that was me. He put himself right there, you know, in the telling and as his daughter, you know, and that was my father, you know, at what, 20, 21. And I just, it was just an incredibly moving moment. And that was, I don't know whether to call it a trick, it was magic. And I think that was kind of groundbreaking, that type of writing. I want to ask, why are people so snotty about my father? It's such a simple answer, want to know what it is? What? Too successful. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, even when I was working on Brothers Vonnegut, every now and then I would run across, you know, someone at a college, some literary professor. And they'd say, what's your next book? And I'd say, I'm writing a book about Vonnegut. And they'd be like, oh, good luck. But yeah, I think it's pure and simple jealousy that he was able to do something so profound. And yet, something that could reach out to anybody, you know, could reach out to a 14-year-old. That's a story I hear a lot, people like you, you know, 14, 15. The first stuff that's what brought them to reading was my father's work. So in that way, it's made a huge impact on young people. Yeah, but I have no patience for this snotty-ness. Neither did my father. Although it did bother him. It did. Yeah. Yeah. I have a question, and then I have a question for all three. And then please feel free to join in with some questions. And I'm really channeling some of the discussion that's come up from students. And also there was a reading group last night at the public library in Bristol, which many people who were there last night are here. And this question seems to come up in different contexts, specifically about the book. And that is particularly about when it goes into Trafalmodore and the aliens and whether it in fact is doing that or whether this is part of the so-called PTSD of it. And actually somebody, I don't know if she's here right now who was at the discussion last night, was a therapist who specializes in PTSD, working with people with PTSD. And it was brought up that that is a sort of a modern phenomenon in terms of diagnosing it and understanding it as opposed to people of say my generation, whose grandparents or parents served in World War II and we just understood it as silence. You know, or reticence whenever anything related came up. And I guess, Nanny, I'll start with you when you look back. And I'm not asking you to diagnose your father, but at least not in public. But when you went back and read the book, did you see that as your father? I guess it's the person in the book, someone that you recognize, that when you think back at the person, do you think back to the person you knew growing up was that person in the same person in the book, in particular the trauma of the war? Well, you know, he had a way of speaking and it was so much him in the book and the way he moved, the way he talked. And that's what I was so touched by because he was revealing himself in this book in a way that I hadn't, he had never would speak to us directly about what, there was no time. He was taking care of all these kids. It was a crazy house. And this is what he was doing behind the doors while we were, you know, scampering around. And, no, it's taken me, being older now to look back and see, I totally recognize that as his writing to save his own life, really. I mean, he's lucky because he could write, because that's how he worked out that. Well, he said to me that all writers, artists are working out their neuroses in their work. And so that was his thing that he was, and I think he wouldn't have done so well in life had he not been able to write. So it's just at the time, you know, I don't know, it was like that's all I knew, you know, living with this man who went behind the door and wrote, he was grumpy, very grumpy a lot to tell you the truth, but it would be very manic and sometimes he would be happy to be playing the piano and singing and then he, it looked like a really hard life. It didn't look like it was, but I see that as recovery or dealing with all this stuff, not just the war, you know, it was that being the big thing, but losing his sister and taking on four kids and it was just one thing and another and that was a theme in his books was, you know, that life is pretty much out of control, you know, and he had this story about a woman who lost control of her car going through the bushes in people's yards and they said, why didn't you put your foot on the brake and she said, I was too busy steering and that's a metaphor he used all the time, that's what he felt his life was like, he was just too busy steering and so he would always say that you should write, do the art, it will say, do it even if you're not good at it, you know, whatever you want to do, sing or write or whatever, it's going to help you in life. Make your soul grow. It will make your soul grow. Yeah, so unfortunately all these kids have taken that route. I think, I'm sorry, I was going to say that your question, I think is a pretty common one which comes out of a sort of, we have this sense with a book that there's a truth to it or a meaning to it and we can go in there and do our new critical activities and pull out all the symbols and come up with, okay, so this is the big answer. This is the key, the key is, like if it was a movie, the key is he's actually in bed dying and all these things are his hallucinations and he's going, but I think that people forget that Kurt lived in the two worlds, right? He was, as you were saying, he was both, he was conversant in literature, very, and he was conversant in science and science doesn't really work that way. Physics doesn't work that way. I don't know if anyone read the article of The New York Times recently about how the universe is expanding faster than the physicists thought it was and it's like, oh no, and now we have no idea why and it could be the end of the world is coming or it could be that our measurements are wrong but science is comfortable in that world of infinite possibility of this is what we know and this is the way we kind of can read it but it also could be this way and I think that Slaughterhouse 5 as a book, as a literary production operates that way. Well that takes me to part two of the question because the other way of reading it and the sort of the binary way of talking about it is that it's completely real and that this is, you know, this fourth dimension and so on. You know, at least in the case of the book. Where do you think that science world came from? I mean, obviously, I know you have thoughts about where it came from but maybe you could talk about, you know, was it the influence of GE on that time of GE on the thinking of what Bernard was engaging and where do you think of that? Well, Kurt had a very good, unlike me, he had a very good primary education, right? And then he went to college and majored in chemistry at Cornell. So he was conversant with science from very early on. His older brother was a PhD, MIT trained physicist and chemist and the family was very comfortable in scientific discourse and Kurt read science all his life in addition to reading fiction and novels and things. I mean, it's clear from his early work that he read Norbert Wiener's book, Cybernetics which nobody really knows about anymore but was it a highly influential book at the time and very complicated and he included some of that in much of his subsequent work. I mean, the whole notion of there being a different kind of time one that moves backwards and forwards comes out of physics. It's not just like loopy sci-fi stuff. It's real. So I think that, and he was very close to Bernard who was a scientist and worked at the GE Research Lab. So he's, and when he too was working at the GE Research Lab in public relations, he had a front row seat for all this kind of crazy science that was going on at GE at the time. So he was very much involved in the scientific world for quite, you know, a good portion of his youth. Can I add though that he hated chemistry? Yes. He didn't want to be a scientist. And he felt a lot of pressure from, because Bernard was so successful, he felt like he had to follow and then he just was relieved to get away from that. But I remember how close they were and what they talked about. And he would listen, Bernard would talk at length about the possibility of Ice Nine, for instance. I saw that conversation. And, you know, it was like, I was like 11 and Bernie was trying to open the carton of the milk. I remember on the wrong end of it. He's a brilliant guy. Classic Bernie. And trying to listen to my mother's there. Oh, give me that thing. And they're talking about, I remember it, about is this possible? So Bernie gave him a lot, a huge amount. And I think he was a voracious reader of everything. And one of his favorite books was The Mask of Sanity. Uh-huh. You know that book about sociopaths? Yeah, I've read that book. That's quite, yeah, that's interesting. That was something he was interested in. But yeah, Bernie was huge. Was he inspiring Bernie? When that conversation was going on, and I know we're testing memory for 11. I think Bernie just adored him, you know, just loved giving him what he needed and was entertained by him. But I don't think he, I think he appreciated what his little brother was doing. But I don't think he quite, he didn't have, he didn't have the artistic spirit that my father had. But I mean, they meshed beautifully. But his sister also had a huge influence on him. Allie was very, not at all sciency, was just very ethereal and an incredible artist and very, very funny. And, you know, I never met her, but she's like this huge, she's like an angel in my life, the way he talked about her. And I think, you know, speaking of influences, it's not like there's Bernie who taught him about science. And then there's Allie who taught him about timing and humor. So. Does anybody have any questions before I come? The first one's always hard. Yeah. I've been a ceremony of life for everybody in this space. But I do have a question. The humor of the fit, the humor that you would have created including the verb. Right. He was a funny person too. He was physically very funny. I mean, he had a body humor. Yeah. What's the question? How the group fits in with the creativity of the humor. Oh, so how the humor fits, how the humor of the family fits in with the creativity of the humor. Yeah. Something from another angle, the way the humor often does or maybe just loosening yourself up or awesome. I don't know. I just, I've read a lot about her body's sense of humor and some of the practical jokes and all those things that I've talked about and I know that fits in it. I can tell one funny story just because it's so fun. He had a Bernie's sense of humor when he and Kurt were driving home to visit the family at one point and the car broke down and they got out and decided to hike to the nearest gas station and opened the hood and left it open and Kurt said to Bernie, is there anything else we should do to show that we haven't abandoned this car that we're in distress and Bernie said, we could slash the tires. Well, Rick, what are your thoughts? There's a lot of humor, but not necessarily satire, but with humor, what do you think that the humor opens up or I mean, in writing, but maybe if you're also thinking about Vonnegut or Slaughterhouse 5, about the humor inspired, you know, it allows the narrative to go to certain places. There's a way that I don't think Vonnegut is funny at all and that's because I think it's, the work is very sad and so I feel like it's that kind of humor and it's the kind that I really, really often love, that sort of W.C. Fields' tragic comedy kind of humor, you know, where it's really wrapped up in character and wrapped up in voice and not surface comedy, you know. So for me, it's really hard to not see the work as having a highly melancholy cast, but you know, sometimes that kind of melancholy can have a hilarity wrapped into it, you know, which is about seeing the world as sort of often tragic and often sort of throwing up surprises that are the grimest possible surprises and the only way to contextualize that so that it's not annihilating is to find humor in it, you know. So for me, you know, a lot of times the comedy in Vonnegut has a sort of real melancholy kind of Weltschmerz aspect to it that's really rich. I did also want to go back to the Tralfamadorians for a moment and just say that it's impossible for me to not think of Vonnegut as digesting and responding to the science fiction of the 40s and 50s and therefore to reduce Tralfamador to a merely allegorical vehicle or to say just that it's PTSD-oriented robs the work of imagination for me, you know. And the science fiction that he knew of was the guy's name who killed her because Tralf's based on somebody's salmon or something like that. There's an actual guy. Yes, yes, yes. I'm not going to be able to think of it on the spot. You know, so somebody's muttering it, I can tell. Somebody know. Yeah. Or anyway. Alexa. Killer child is based on an actual science fiction. Richard Sturgeon. Sturgeon. Salmon Sturgeon. You know, real ideas and aspects of science fiction were getting processed through this highly experimental denier and some of that was celebratory. Not like a let's burlesque science fiction but, you know, real idealistic and carefully considered philosophical ideas are being presented in science fiction. Vonnegut's going to refract that through this lens that was his. And so I feel like, yeah, okay, Tralfamadorians are post-traumatic. Sure, that's an idea that you can definitely get to. But I don't think that you should inhabit that idea so as to reduce possible levels of the work. I think it should be able to function on multiple levels. And one level that's of real interest is let's not make them allegorical at all. Let's just say this character, this narrator, is having this experience and sort of come at it from that direction and see what are the emotional ramifications of that. Like to me, that makes the word richer and gives it a more of a polyphony. That actually happened recently, right? In the movie Arrival, which is basically Tralfamadorians come to Earth and, you know, there's this encounter with this way of, I mean, I think it was totally ripped off from Vonnegut with this different way of viewing time and the Earth is saved from destruction because this woman learns to understand and to see time backwards and forwards and see all moments at once and to embrace the death of her own child, which is kind of in a way what all of this is about in Slaughterhouse 5 is sort of how do we get to a point where we just see it all as one big whole instead of life and then the end of life? Absolutely, and I'm guessing 14-year-old Rick Moody was not thinking of allegorical. It was just reading it and having the experience and being affected by it. Was it Slaughterhouse 5 at 15? Sure, definitely. All of them. There is a relief, a comic relief aspect to the humor, though, I think, that just functions on a very, very simple craft, like the book would be so such a slog, if you were just, and when you get to those British prisoners of war putting on Cinderella and then being so upset that the Americans are so disgusting that they dig a whole new loutrine the next day, that is like a set piece that's hilarious and poignant and melancholy but allows a little bit of a change of texture in the prose. Jimmy had a question? When Slaughterhouse 5 comes out, we're in another war, a much more controversial one than the one presented in the novel. And I wonder if Vietnam shaped inspired the novel in any way? Well, I remember how angry he was. He was working on the book, you know, for 20 years. He was already going, he was almost done. But, you know, he had sons who were up for the draft and he was, my mother was screaming at the television, you know, the news, I remember that. And, you know, I didn't know it then, but he was back in it in the rage of what was happening to these young men. So, I think the timing of the book coming out was maybe luck, but I don't think he finished it up on it because of the Vietnam War, but he was certainly involved. I mean, one way to think about that is about sort of theory of reception, right? Which is always so interesting. What does it mean to the audience to be reading it at that moment, you know? I'm a keen fan of the novel called Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pinchon. And for me, Vonnegut led directly to Pinchon. Like, there's a real connection between those two writers for me, partly because of the science and the fixation on science in both those writers. But Gravity's Rainbow is also a book that's really a kind of crypto novel about Vietnam. And I think you can sort of make the same case about Catch-22 as well. So, here's this environment where we're reading these books with the war that's at hand, and there's no way not to see war commentary as a kind of critical apparatus that's gonna be funneled into how we consume them. So, once the book is your property in 1970, let's say, Vonnegut isn't gonna change it again, it's definitely gonna be read through that lens. And that becomes a fact of sort of how it does what it does. So, a book that advertises itself as kind of being against war, but also with a real kind of weariness about whether that's even an effective thing to do, that's definitely gonna bear on how you think about Vietnam. Unless I miss my guess. Well, I'm a hardliner when it comes to this nonfiction fiction question. I think if you stray at all from the facts, and I know there are nonfiction writers out in the world who would disagree with me, but my conviction is that if you stray at all from the facts, you're writing fiction. But it's highly influenced by history and autobiography and all those other nonfictional things. But I have no problem just calling Kurt Vonnegut's work literary fiction. He was happy with fiction. But it's also a magpie form, right? The novel's a magpie form. It wants to engulf and devour. So it does, you know? And especially in the late 60s, you know? It's like that's the thing that the novel did at that moment is pirate and sort of systematically vivisect other forms. They're kind of a cruel mockery to the novel of American life with his optometrist career and his optometrist son and his overweight wife and his Cadillac. And he's very cruel to his characters. I mean, it hurts. Was he unhappy living the American dream in the 50s? He's dealing with his Midwestern Indianapolis life. That's what he left. He and my mother left that it was very conservative. But there was a lot of hate relationship. So he would make fun of people quite a bit. He could be cruel, but I think writers can be cruel. And, you know, sometimes I would see people in his writing that I recognized. And I think as a writer, you know, that's the thing you have to deal with, hurting people a little bit. But yeah, he was kind of mean about the Indianapolis Midwestern thing, the Hoosiers. He was really funny about Hoosiers. He would probably, if he were alive today, would be a Democratic Socialist, right? He was skeptical of the so-called American dream. And, you know, at the time that he was working most on Slaughterhouse 5, he had taken a job in Iowa City that turned out wonderful for him, but that he didn't want to take originally so much, because it was going to take him away from his family, but he needed to support his family. He was having a hell of a time making a living. He had made... You're saying things very differently than I do. Well, money was a problem, is what I'm trying to say, right? That it wasn't easy to make a living, and in particular he'd been making a living as a short story writer, sort of, you know, struggling along as a short story writer. Television came along and killed the short story market. So there's a kind of reason behind this sort of critique of... Yeah, yeah. But also a desire, a constant desire, and correct me if I'm wrong, Nanny, but I think that throughout his life he was skeptical of the aspect of the American dream that is where everything is about money and keeping up with the Joneses, right? Because he had a different ethic. We didn't fit in at all on that tape. Oh, man. Yeah, Howard. I'm curious, without the public, there were people out there who hated to welcome the ban of groups of people that... Especially in Indianapolis. His own people. Yeah. I never heard of that happening to him personally, but he would get wind of his book being burned in North Dakota. 1974, thrown in the fire furnace. Did you hear about that book burning? Mm-hmm. And that keeps happening now. But I would say he got more support than not, but early on he'd go to Indianapolis to sign books and nobody would sign up. Even his own relatives wouldn't come because the swear words... Yeah, that was a big... I mean, he was very ahead of his time because my mother warned me that I was going to get people saying things about your father writes dirty books. She warned me that you might hear that in fifth or sixth grade. And I was really excited. I went for the dirty books. But yeah, he got a lot of trouble for a long time, and then suddenly he became famous for this work. So I don't really feel badly for him. I think he did very well. But it was so offensive to him when the book banning and the book burning completely knocked him out. And I will add, we heard last night in 2000... In Coventry. In Coventry, Rhode Island, the book was banned. So this is not a historical discussion we're having. In the name of time, it's been just about an hour. Part of the impetus for choosing the book was that it was the 50th anniversary of the book. And why do you think we're still talking about it 50 years later? Why is this book a book we're talking about 50 years later? Because it's timeless. It stands the time. I don't think my father knew what he was doing, but it stands the test of time. I mean, anybody can pick it up and read it at any time. And it's an incredible piece of art. And what do you think makes it timeless? Because it... Oh, God, ask somebody else. Well, the theme's obviously, but I think it's important to continue recognizing that it is an incredibly well-crafted book. The more you read it, I mean, I reread it on the train up from New York this morning. And I was just like, every time I read it, I see more into the artistry, the repetitions and the way he carries out threads. It seems to do it so effortlessly. And it seems so. There'll be a wealth of detail, like someone's eating a three musketeer bar when he's talking to her on the phone. And then the three musketeers come into the book. There's this brilliant juggling act of using all of these metaphors and these seemingly casual sides and things to circuitously come at this huge thing. So hence the frustration of it not being taken seriously. It has a book when it has that level of artistry. No, to write like that, to write so brilliantly with such craft and then to be dismissed as a popular genre writer for 14-year-olds must have been galling. Yes. But I just, I mean, just great art stands a test of time. I keep bringing up Fred Astaire because he reminds me of my father. He even looks like my father. But how can you ever say no to that? And that's how I think of Slaughterhouse 5 as just a perfect piece of art. I was talking in class before I came over about the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. I've taught the novel A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick occasionally. And it's a book that's dated, really dramatically dated and it's much harder to engage with it now because it has this sort of kind of hipster drug culture thing that just feels super of its moment, you know? That Slaughterhouse 5 somehow managed to completely evade that problem is of great interest, you know? And I think maybe it does have to do with the fact that time as an agent in the book is so kind of strict out and reconstituted that it doesn't fall into an epoch of a particular period or articulation of a particular period. It wants to be outside of time somehow or only in subjective time, you know? And maybe that allows it to sort of be less preoccupied with sort of contemporary detail in a way that would date terribly, you know? So I think that its innovation structurally makes it timeless but also that, as Ginger was saying, sort of what it's about is on its face timeless. Which, it's interesting, we were watching with a group of students an interview that had run on PBS that this was actually after he died, but they were replaying it. And he was talking about being baffled by the one mistake humanity keeps making. You know, the one thing humanity got wrong and that's that it keep engaging in wars that they keep, you know? And he sort of goes to this litany of starting from, you know, ancient times all the way through now and he says it almost with this wonderment of just how come humanity can't figure this out? It must be our flaw. And I wonder if that's part of that same timelessness because it doesn't Dresden, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, what, you know, pick your place. That it still resonates. That core issue still resonates. In the introduction to Mother Night, he says, Mother Night has my most obvious moral and it's not that it's such a great moral, but it is a moral, which is what I pretend to be I become. But what's of interest to me in that introduction is that Vonnegut announces himself as a writer with moral vision, you know? And what you've just described is a person having a moral vision, you know? And I think maybe timelessness is the thing that adheres to moral vision because it means that contemporary detail is less important than the ability of the work to have an aboutness, to really be about something. And, you know, that's even leaving out the fact that this is a man who served in the war. So it's not that he's just saying, it's really worth a bad idea as an ethical position. Like he has the experience to have gravity in that comment. And to take it to the larger issue of what's wrong with humanity. I think one of his least read novels is the very late novel Galapagos, which is actually, I think, pretty underappreciated. But it's set, you know, in millions and millions of years of the future where humanity has evolved into these seal-like creatures who've gotten rid of their big brains that caused all the trouble in human history and are just happily cavorting in the sea. I want to make them laugh. They just clap their hands. Yes. All right. Well, I want to thank Nanny, Ginger, and Rick for being here. I'm going to thank you all for coming as well there. When you leave the door, there's a table full of cookies and things to eat and snack on. So I hope you'll stick around and gather and talk and talk with each other. We'll be here as well, too. I was remiss in not introducing you to Professor Christine Fagin, who's our curator of the exhibit. She's been giving tours. I think she's toured out for today. But if you have any questions, when you do, you'll be able to answer them.