Kurt Vonnegut har været mere ambitiøs end de fleste forfattere er med deres opsamlingsbøger. Palm Sunday samler en række taler, tekster og en enkelt novelle fra hans hånd. Det ambitiøse er, at han rent faktisk har skrevet nye tekster, der forbinder trådene mellem de forskellige småtekster. Det giver en mere helstøbt oplevelse, end denne type bøger ofte byder på.
Desværre er det er ret tydeligt gennem hele bogen, at Vonnegut er allerbedst i romanform. Hans tekster handler om de samme emner som romanerne, men de kommer desværre ofte til at virke afstumpede og forenklede her. Palm Sunday er dog bestemt værd at læse, hvis man som mig er glad for den sortsynede kæderyger. Den giver et indblik i hans privatliv og tanker om at være en litterær personage. Derudover er romanen oprigtigt sjov. Jeg grinede højlydt adskillige gange undervejs, hvilket altid er en præstation: at få de små knudrede tegn på en hvid side til at fremkalde latter.
Læs Slaughterhouse Five, Mother Night eller Cat's Cradle først og hvis du bliver bjertaget af den Vonnegutske charme, så kast dig også over denne.

“Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears…I myself choose to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward…”

Education is the foundation for personal and professional growth. It empowers individuals with knowledge, skills, and values, shaping their future and opening doors to endless opportunities. From early learning to advanced studies, education nurtures critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving abilities. It plays a vital role in building informed, responsible citizens who contribute positively to society. Lifelong learning keeps minds curious and adaptable in a constantly evolving world. Education truly transforms lives, making dreams achievable and fostering a brighter tomorrow.

Sucks. Boring. Rare L for Kurt

Hi ho!

A mixed bag of the author's previous writings, including speeches, letters, articles, short fiction and other odds and ends. Vonnegut also adds a fair amount of new "connective tissue" and attempts to assemble everything according to broad themes (what he calls an "autobiographical collage"). Most of the pieces range from somewhat interesting, to actually pretty dull. Scattered throughout, however, are enough great observations, ideas, and one-liners to make this worth checking out - but only if you're already a big Vonnegut fan.

It's a little disingenuous to imply that I've read this, as I only hopped around a bit, but, as if there was any doubt that Vonnegut spitting on a napkin would be deserving of the full five stars, I'm giving it to this book on the strength of one piece alone: the 'self-interview,' which was (apparently) first printed in the Paris Review.

Let's take a minute to examine the brilliance of a self-interview. Oh, wait! We don't have to, because Kurt has gone ahead and examined it for us:

Sentences spoken by writers, unless they have been written out first, rarely say what writers wish to say. Writers are unlucky speakers, by and large, which accounts for their being in a profession which encourages them to stay at their desks for years, if necessary, pondering what to say next and how best to say it.... The only way to get anything out of a writer's brain is to leave him or her alone until her or she is damn well ready to write it down.

Genius! Want some more? Here's a bit from the interview itself:

INTERVIEWER: Did your sister try to write for money, too?
VONNEGUT: No. She could have been a remarkable sculptor, too. I bawled her out one time for not doing more with the talents she had. She replied that having talent doesn't carry with it the obligation that something has to be done with it. This was startling news to me. I thought people were supposed to grab their talents and run as far and fast as they could.
INTERVIEWER: What do you think now?
VONNEGUT: Well — what my sister said now seems a peculiarly feminine sort of wisdom. I have two daughters who are as talented as she was, and both of them are damned if they are going to lose their poise and senses of humor by snatching up their talents and desperately running as far and as fast as they can. They saw me run as far and as fast as I could – and it must have looked like quite a crazy performance to them. And this is the worst possible metaphor, for what they actually saw was a man sitting still for decades.

I hope you all find that as hilarious as I did. But anyway, it's just astoundingly beautiful, the whole interview. Vonnegut is such a genius dialogue-ist, and to watch him play around like this, asking himself questions and picking up on the subtext beneath the answers in order to ask slightly more probing questions, or even veering off into totally unexpected territory... Well really, it's just wonderful.

I haven't gotten my hands on Wampeters, so this was my first foray into Vonnegut's nonfiction/memoir-ish collections. I found it fantastic from first page to last and also a bit heartbreaking. Heartbreaking because KV "jokes" throughout about how unappreciated his work was, not only by literary critics (about whom he has provided the reader with several brilliant observations), but also by his own large and extended family with whom he clearly wished to be closer. By example, a bookstore- owning aunt who declined to stock KV's novels!

Perhaps it was "internalized criticism" or KV simply attempting to be authentic when he included a report card of his writing over the prior 30 years up to the publication of Palm Sunday. Here is the excerpt from my favorite chapter, "The Sexual Revolution,":

"I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat’s Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda. June D
Breakfast of Champions C
Wampeters, Poma & Granfalloons C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A
Palm Sunday C"

This collection was certainly no "C." And, again, most would agree that neither was Breakfast of Champions. Palm Sunday includes everything about KV that I love and admire:
Religious (non)Beliefs A-plus
Readability A-plus
Humor A-plus
Anti war Observations A-plus
Decidedly anti Bullshit Attitude toward undue Praise A-plus

I actually think, having recently seen Nick Offerman's stand up about the content of his book Paddle Your Own Canoe, that Vonnegut and Offerman (aka Ron Swanson) may be (or have been, given that Vonnegut is no longer with us) similar men with similar points of view. So for readers who aren't sure about whether they would appreciate the observations and humor of a novelist with some of his most important work published in the 60s and 70s, but who may be more familiar with intelligent comedy of the 2010's, I give you: Kurt Vonnegut.

This book is about Kurt Vonnegut. It’s all about Kurt. It is a Kurt deep cut. You will learn everything about Kurt. Probably a little too much. There’s not much of a plot or themes. Only Kurt. Maybe that’s cool: Kurt is the narrative.

It can be boring sometimes. I didn’t really need a whole chapter on the Vonnegut family history, but it’s here. I now know a lot about Germans and Indianapolis. Reading speeches isn’t always fun either, and that’s mainly what this book is. But Kurt is still a very good writer, so there’s plenty of fun and cool ideas to find here.

There’s not much else to say. In Kurt’s self-assessment, he gave this book a C. I feel like that might be a little harsh. Perhaps a B- might be more appropriate. There was a really funny Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde play in here, though. That part was good. Five stars for The Chemistry Professor.

I recommend this book to you if you are a chicken. You will get very good representation in here and not in the form of a nugget. What is sadness, even, to a chicken?

You know how sometimes you get home from work too tired to cook so you throw open the fridge and pull out all the leftovers? That is this book. It's a smorgasbord of family history, speeches, observations, and work rejected for publication elsewhere. Some of it is edible, some even enjoyable, but a few dishes should have been thrown away months ago, before they sprouted legs and eyes.

So it goes.

Kilgore Trout Fishing in America

Vonnegut and Gary Coleman died within three short years of each other and both due to brain injuries sustained from falling down a flight of stairs.

I suppose death is another sort of karass.

*

Now, I'm going to share a joke that Vonnegut tells in this book...

There's this guy in a restaurant. He gets his food, looks at it, shouts, "Waiter! Waiter! There are needles in my soup!"
The waiter comes over, looks, puts his fists on his hips, tsks, shakes his head and says, "That's that damned autocorrect for you - those should be noodles!"

I've fussed with it a bit, to tell it my own way, changed the wording a bit.

But the most damning change speaks a lot towards how times and technology have done a drunken watusi.

In Vonnegut's original, the waiter places blame for the hot needle soup on a, and I quote, "typographical error".

Here, I changed it to "autocorrect".

Funny how past errors are now corrections

*

Vonnegut provides us with his treatment for a (sadly unproduced) Jekyll and Hyde inspired musical entitled The Chemistry Professor which takes place at, and I quote, "Sweetbread College, a small liberal-arts institution outside Philadelphia".

Vonnegut's son, Mark, went to a small liberal-arts institution outside Philadelphia: Swarthmore!

Hmmmm. I wonder. I wonder!

(Synchronicity: Just as I typed "wonder", Elmo on Sesame Street said he "wonders" about, of all the damned things, dinosaurs.)

*
Vonnegut playing dumb, thumping the censorship drum, as to why schools might not want to have Slaughterhouse Five is kinda uncool.

He knows why: the subplot about Billy being in an alien zoo exhibit with a blue movie star. I mean, it's not super explicit, but it puts thoughts into your head.

The sequel to the bestselling smash Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons contains an unholy amount of Vonnegut’s semi-profound public speeches (semi-profound as a good thing), hewn together with a great deal of amiable rambling and autobiographical detail. For a thorough account of Vonnegut’s impressive lineage—descended from prosperous Germans, no less—and illuminating accounts of his early life (far less torturous than the gloss he gives in some of his prefaces), this is an indispensable collection. A self-interview, as quoted in Oriana’s review, and several contentious digressions about the writer’s life are of interest to eager MFA students who want to slurp up his brilliance, and for anyone less who can listen to Vonnegut lovingly for hours and months and years. (Me). On a less interesting note, I read this book entirely on a Sunday. Next up, John Barth’s The Friday Book entirely on a Friday. Go tedious conformism!

"Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears."

This nonfiction collection is a mishmash of speeches, essays, interviews, and family history with a healthy dose of his inherited "heart-felt moral code." A must-read for KV fans.

I love his nonfiction because it's very conversational. If I could have dinner with an author, dead or alive, I would certainly choose him.