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Slaughterhouse Five
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Hello book lovers and fascism haters! Today's Barred Book Episode features host Kelly Swails and guest Bryan Young discussing the classic book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The author mentions Irish Whiskey in the first chapter, and since both Bryan and Kelly are writers, we paired this discussion with Writer's Tears. Cheers!
Hey everybody, welcome to Bard Books, the podcast that combines banned books, cocktails, and conversation into one delightfully chaotic mix. I'm your host, Kelly Swales, and we've got a great guest with us today to talk about Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Buckle in, gang, because today's discussion is going to be full of anti-war rage. Before we get going, I've got a guest in the house today, and I'm gonna let him introduce himself.
SPEAKER_00And uh uh you can find more about me at swankmotron.com. But the short version of it is that I'm a filmmaker, I'm a journalist, uh, I write novels in universes like Battletech and Shadowrun and places like that, and I've worked in uh Star Wars and I've worked as a journalist, and I do a lot of community building in literary spaces, and I was the president of the League of Utah writers, and I'm a teacher, and really, really, really vehemently dislike book banning. I teach classes about Kurt Vonnegut and uh uh writing through the lens of Vonnegut, and uh he's been one of my favorite writers since I was in high school, and I'm really excited to talk about Slaughterhouse 5 with Kelly.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you so much for joining us. This is going to be so great. I am very excited to listen to you nerd out about this book in particular and this author in general. But before that, I want to talk about what we're pairing with our discussion today. Um, I had sent you a bunch of links to a bunch of drink recipes that are out there uh for this book, and you're like, well, he just mentions Irish Irish whiskey in the first chapter. Why don't we just go with that? And I said, sold. So uh it just so happens that because both uh Brian and I are writers, we both had a bottle of writer's tears laying around. So that's what we're pairing. So cheers, Brian.
SPEAKER_00Cheers indeed.
SPEAKER_01All right, well, let's get started. Um, so you said that you've been a fan of Vonnegut since high school. And I want to say that I absolutely know I wrote this book in high school. And I don't think I read it for a class, but I read it because it was a classic that I would that should be read. I remembered zero about this book. Like I started reading it, and I'm like, fuck, I forgot this was kind of a frame. I forgot it was, you know, time space trippy and kind of a science fiction book, but kind of not. Yeah, so so this one, whenever you read it, really stuck with you, huh?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I actually, when I was in high school, I think it was my junior year, I had joined a banned books club, which was actually, I had to get permission to join it, and it was an like uh an extracurricular sort of club that I had to go after school to, and it was um books that were traditionally banned but weren't currently banned in the district, and Slaughterhouse 5 was one, and Slaughterhouse 5 um really hit me between the eyes, and from that time forward, uh until my mid-20s, I think I just devoured every Vonnegut novel probably once a year from that point forward. And I I think Slaughterhouse 5, um, although a a masterpiece, I think, in a lot of ways, really hit me between the eyes and introduced me to the world of Vonnegut. It didn't necessarily, after I'd read the entirety of his works, didn't necessarily hit me as my favorite of Vonnegut's. Um, I have some others that that really hold much dearer places in my heart. Uh that doesn't mean I I love it any less, but it was certainly the book that put him sort of in the mainstream for a lot of people uh when it was released, uh, which which helped him a lot because before then the the the Kilgore trout treatment that he that that he gave Kilgore Trout in the book uh is very much how I think he saw himself as a writer.
SPEAKER_01Right, just sort of writing books and throwing them out there, and like five people know who he is, and but those five people like him a whole bunch.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Well, even to the point of like, if you go look at uh Sirens of Titan is is a really terrific book of his. And if you go look at the original versions of it, the cover has nothing to do with his book. Um, it's just like they slapped a really sci-fi painting on the paperback, because he wasn't even getting hardbacks at the time. You know, it was practically like the the nudie mags that Kilgore Trout was getting uh his stories published under in the book. And so yeah, no, it was really great that that this book came out and it was really important uh at the time, you know, when you know we were in the throes of the Vietnam War.
SPEAKER_01And that was interesting to me. Like as I'm reading it, and I'm like, holy shit, this is the most anti-war book I think I've ever read. Um, at least in terms of fiction, right? And like you said, it came out, it's about World War II, which the author had gone through. Like the author was actually present for the bombing of Dresden. So a lot of this is semi-autobiographical throughout the narrative, um, and having it come out during the Vietnam War. That in and of itself, like it's just the messaging of it and thematically, it's so anti-war. I can see where for that reason alone people were like, Yeah, you can't read this book.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I think that when the book came out, uh, I want to say 1967, and you know, Vonnegut very cleverly frames what I think are his opinions through the lens of everyone else. Oh, yeah. And I think that that was sort of intentional where where the book feels very much like a treatise of his own PTSD. 100%, yeah. Where he wants to hold the events of Dresden away from himself, and he he almost wants to hold his opinions away from himself, not as a way to distance himself from his opinions, but as a way for the reader to sort of digest them easier. So in the first chapter, when Bernard V. O'Hare's wife kind of says, like, you were children, you shouldn't have been fighting this war, and I want you to frame things that way. I don't know if that actually happened, right? Like, I'm not sure if that's a real thing or if that's Vonnegut inserting himself to say, that's how I want you to think about this book, because that's how I would like to frame it.
SPEAKER_01I really thought that that point was in the whole thing that he, you know, pulls out that other book or whatever and sees the words um children's crusade. And it's like, uh, yep, that's it. That's the ticket, that's that's the lens we gotta view this in. Um, I thought that was really brilliantly done because that's always true of war. Like in World War One, Europeans were like, who are we supposed to make babies with? Because all of our 20-year-olds are dead now. Perfect.
SPEAKER_00Well, and and you know, World War I was even worse because they they they were dealing with the the plague on top of or the you know the flu pandemic on top of that. And and you know, Vonnegut kind of takes that a step further with wanting to get all kinds of factual information about Dresden in there without making you feel like it's been spoon-fed to you.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, yeah, I really didn't catch that because I didn't know going into this novel, I didn't know a whole lot about Dresden, right? Um I joke with my partner because he's kind of he's got a history brain. It's more like uh ancient Greece, Rome, the Romans, whatever. He's got a good brain for that. But I always joke that I'm like the portion of my brain that has all the history knowledge is very smooth. It's that's a very smooth part of my brain. I can watch stuff like this, I can read stuff like this, but there's only a little bit that actually sticks in. So I'm sure at some point I learned about Dresden, but like I said, completely gone. So like whenever I read the book, I was like, wow, wow, America's really kind of a fucker, aren't we? You know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. No, and I think that's what Dresden was one of those massacres that occurred, and I mean, Dresden killed 135,000 people overnight.
SPEAKER_01That's nuts.
SPEAKER_00And it wasn't like in a moment, and and I think Vonnegut is very careful in the way in the closing chapters of the book where he kind of reminds you where in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki where it was sort of in a flash, and those those were like 60, 70,000 casualties in in a blink. Not to say that that's humane, right? But the firebombings killed you know almost twice as many people over a night of consistent firebombings, burning them alive, and then these these children have to come out and go through this horrifying experience of digging these bodies out. And it's interesting, I don't know if you caught this, but that the smell of the bodies sort of liquefying is an inverse of how his breath smells after he's drunk and looking up his old girlfriends.
SPEAKER_01No, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Where where he talks about how when he gets bombed and starts calling the operator to look up old friends or or lost loves, you know, his breath smells like, you know, when he's drinking the Irish whiskey, shaking the bottle like a dinner bell, um, his breath is like mustard gas and roses. When the bodies are are coming up, he compares that smell to roses and mustard gas. And it's interesting that he's sort of replicating that smell with himself, numbing those feelings with the booze, you know, in his autobiographical sections of the book. Um it's really it it's just such like just on a craft level, it's so deceptively simple. And I think part of that is just the very simple language he uses.
SPEAKER_01I was going to mention the the simplicity of his prose. It's in as you said, it's really deceptive.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And especially the way he's structured the book, where you're kind of going back and forth through time. You know, he's spending some time in as a zoo animal, essentially, on an on an alien planet. The way he moves through it, it's not like even a chapter in the present and then a chapter in the in the future, and then the chapter in the past, where two paragraphs in the present and a paragraph in the past, and then here's a here's maybe a whole page where he's in the zoo or whatever. I really found that a fascinating way to structure this story. And when you kind of pair that with the simplicity of the prose, you're like, oh yeah, no, here's a writer who's just kind of scatterbraining all over the place, and that's not the case at all. Like he's he's got a firm grip on his on his craft, I think, even at this stage.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think part of that has to do with the fact that I mean he came home from the war and started trying to write about Dresden and his experiences there almost immediately. How could you not? How could you not his papers uh I'm not sure which university ha has his papers, but they have draft after draft after draft of him struggling with how he could be approaching the story. And it wasn't until he hit upon this that he was finally able to like approach it. And that's kind of why I I really believe that Billy Pilgrim becoming unstuck in time really feels like that PTSD. Because you notice when things get stressful or too stressful for him, or too overwhelming, is when those switches seem to happen, when he goes to somewhere else. Um, when things become too overwhelming or too much, it's somewhere else that he goes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I wanted to mention that. That I it's interesting because it's never really said explicitly one way or the other in the book. It's one of those things that every I think every reader's gonna bring their own stuff to it and and see what how it lands in their in their brain or whatever. But for me, I very much thought that the whole alien planet subplot was just sort of a like a C PTSD, like this is how I'm dealing with this, right? I just go away for a while and sure, okay, sure, it's a science fiction book. Maybe he really is going to this other planet or whatever, but I'm like, no, this feels like this is a PTSD reaction to me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I think I Vonnegut always bristled at the idea that he was a science fiction writer in a lot of ways, which makes me wonder exactly that. Like, was Billy Pilgrim really abducted? Did he really go to Tralfamidor and live out his days, you know, impregnating Montana wild hack?
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00I, you know, living in a zoo uh where people like it doesn't seem likely. Uh it seems like a plot out of a Kilgore Trout book, it seems like uh, you know, a really bizarre dream, especially when you couch that with him going to New York, trying to get onto a talk show to tell people about Tralfamador and their version of time, and then ending up in a a a porno shop and finding a magazine with all of these theories about what happened to Montana Wildhack and finding out that she was not like an actress actress, but like a porno actress, right? It's it's it's like maybe this is more especially because it it ties to the to the photo that that Roland Weary had, right? Like it ties to that, like maybe this was just one of those soft places he went that uh gave him some sort of comfort in the war because he was just disassociating.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I I also caught his dissociation throughout the entire book with the uh with the phrase so it goes. Like every time a death is mentioned, it's like so it goes. It's like, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of death. We all die. What are you gonna do about it? So it goes. And I felt that phrasing was a way for him to distance himself from the horrors that he was surrounded by.
SPEAKER_00The the idea of having a book that tells the story, the idea of Vonnegut himself placing him himself in the narrative, right, not just did the book ends, right? Where he I I thought it was very visceral, um, having Vonnegut sort of in the plane near the end.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Where it's almost like you kind of get this remove where where Billy Pilgrim sort of has a very nice ending to the story with Montana Wildhack and his kid with her, and the the illustration of the the serenity prayer.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And then you get Vonnegut in the plane, and you're like, oh, that was a very nice summation. The next chapter starts. Now we've got Vonnegut giving us his feelings about what's going on, but then we get more Billy and everything. But we've also got Vonnegut inserting himself in the narrative elsewhere, right? Like he's the one showing us himself in the outhouse in Dresden. He's showing us in moments throughout, like I'm giving you the sanitized version of Dresden because it was worse for me when I was there. Which is almost more uh heartbreaking in a way. He's sanitized it for us for mobility. Yeah. Which is which is really interesting, and it's a really I mean there's a reason this book is has uh really I mean, next year it'll be what fifty something uh you know, there's a reason it stood that test of time, and there's just a reason it's uh it's just really, really great. Oh, but uh the point I was making though is that like itself is uh a philosophy of that Trollfamadorian idea of time where all these moments exist, they all continue to exist, and uh the photographs that are described in there are those same sorts of ideas, and Billy sort of gets this idea that that's how he lives, and that all of these things exist and continue to exist, and so it's a way for him to cope with all that death. Yeah, it's easier for him to cope with the death to go like, well, that's fine, you know. So it goes. They're still living in these other moments, so it's fine. Like, here's this document. That woman's always gonna be doing that with that Shetland pony because it exists here. That's fine.
SPEAKER_01That was an aspect of it that kind of popped out to me too. And as I was reading it, I thought of two things. I thought of the well, the move, I'm gonna say the movie arrival, but obviously that's based on a short story by Ted Chiang. I forget the name of the story, I think maybe Time of Our Life or something, where there's, you know, like here's this alien species that comes and makes contact with us and teaches us how essentially like time is a flat circle, right? Like we're coming here now because we're gonna need your help in 3,000 years, and we already know that because it already exists. And there's another book called uh Ona Out of Order, which you may not have seen because it was marketed, I think, as like a chiclet kind of kind of book, but it's essentially a science fiction book where the protagonist lives her life every year out of order, and on when she wakes up on New Year's Day, she's in a different year. So both of those, both of those stories have an aspect of here's like something tragic that happens at some point, and you kind of know about it ahead of time, and you could try and change it if you want, but you don't because it already exists there. My husband and I are already divorced, and our daughter is already dead of leukemia. I marry this wonderful man and I've but I've already divorced him two years from now. As I was reading Slaughterhouse 5, I got that same sort of time is we experience humans experience time as linear, but it's not really linear at all. So I really just found that kind of an interesting aspect of the story that I didn't expect going in.
SPEAKER_00He played with that a lot. He played with both of those themes, like both the aliens coming down and sort of trying to give us messages, you know, and the time thing. His last novel, I want to say, came out in 97 or so, which is about 30 years after Slaughterhouse 5, was called Time Quake. And and I don't know if you've read Timequake, but it's it's it's also really terrific. But it basically there's this huge sort of fissure in time where basically we run time backwards and then are forced to relive it again and aren't able to make choices because we've already lived it. And when we reach the point where the time quake happened and we've already lived through everything, we don't realize we have free will again, so everything just goes stupid because we don't realize we can make choices again. Uh so that's really interesting. So he's always through his career has had these moments with time and and how that that is interesting and plays out, and you know, there's been other stories throughout his career where aliens have played a part to try to deliver human beings really important messages that they didn't necessarily pay attention to. One of my favorites was a Kilgore Trout story where uh a small alien was trying to come to Earth to deliver a message about how to cure cancer, but because he only communicated with through a Series of tap dancing and flatulence, like the dude he was trying to communicate it to just brained him with a golf club.
SPEAKER_01Right, yeah. You're just tap dancing, farting alien, whatever. Like you literally have nothing important to say.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but it was the cure for cancer, but it doesn't matter because he got brained with a golf club. Which it also I think speaks speaks to like the absurdity of Vonnegut that like he would allow himself to you you kind of forget like Vonnegut's also very funny, so there is tons of funny stuff in this book where it is serious and it is vehemently anti-war, and it is a very important literary book with lots of very good stuff like that in it. It's also funny. There are really hilarious Kilgore trout short stories in it, and there are really ridiculous things in there.
SPEAKER_01I like the drawings that he that he included. I was like, okay, that's kind of fun.
SPEAKER_00This is definitely almost like a trial run for Breakfast of Champions, where he almost goes overboard with them. Almost. He doesn't, but he almost does.
SPEAKER_01He's on the verge.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's you know, the the gravestone with the epitaph that was perfect, you know, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Or even, you know, the serenity prayer between Montana Wildhack's breasts, which are so crudely drawn, it's hilarious.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um just two two big circles with little little circles.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, it's and it's it's so uniquely Vonnegut in his style of drawing, too. Like, yeah, for a writer, he has such a unique style of drawing. Like, even um, I don't know if you're familiar, like how familiar you are with Breakfast of Champions either, but like he renders an asshole that's basically an asterisk. I mean, I have one one of his asterisks uh of an asshole framed from a lithograph from the the library in Indiana on my wall, actually, above where we're recording. But they're they're like famous, and you can tell like a Vonnegut asshole anywhere, and he put them in his signature too.
SPEAKER_01Oh, really?
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, like he started once he did Breakfast of Champions when he started signing, he would put his asshole in his signature.
SPEAKER_01That's perfect.
SPEAKER_00Which is probably another reason why he started getting his books banned, because he was just I mean, that was just how irreverent he was, but he was he he really was just sort of this he came at this perfect moment in the counterculture where he was a respected, like he was he was everything you were supposed to be, a teacher, a writer, a veteran, but he was moral in the right way.
SPEAKER_01I you know what, I I really caught that as I was reading it, where like like you're saying, he's all of these things, but he also sees beneath the veneer of bullshit that all those things have. I as I was reading, I kept taking pictures of um pages so I would remember remember quotes. Uh, and one of them was uh Rumford was thinking in a military manner that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease. And that's so typical, right? Like we have to castigate somebody before we can like murder them. He yeah, he had a really pragmatic way, I think, of looking at the world, and that definitely comes through in the narrative.
SPEAKER_00I marked a bunch too, and one of the ones that I really liked, and and honestly, the first the first passage where I was like, Yeah, of course this book got banned, came on page for me, 24, is the line where he says, uh, I've told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I've also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that. In 1967, when you're dealing with companies that are manufacturing stuff like Agent Orange, and you're dealing with Vietnam and you know, major defense contractors, and this is you know a decade on from maybe less than a you know, Eisenhower and his castigation of the military-industrial complex, and you know, these are these are big things to say right out of the gate. You know, you're basically this is an indictment of everything that America's doing at this point and that America stands for. And then you know, Slaughterhouse 5 uh started seeing the peak of its banning after Breakfast of Champions, and you know, Breakfast of Champions is is it has all kinds of stuff in it. Uh, you know, he he had a side in in the etymology of why beavers became known as vaginas, and he's like, you know, what these are what beavers really look like. But when photographers in early news days meant when they said there's a beaver in there, it meant this, and then he actually illustrated a woman's vagina. Um, but you know, it would have stuff about how like ridiculous the Star Spangled Banner was, and how like our uh national anthem is meaningless, riddled with question marks. Like, what does this mean? Doesn't matter, you know what I mean? So like he questioned all of the institutions that made America America in the late 60s and early 70s, and that probably felt really threatening. And I think for a lot of people today, it feels really threatening.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, 100%. There's another quote that I wrote down that I think speaks to this. It's whenever uh Billy Paul Grimm is going to Chicago to be a speaker at a conference or whatever. The quote is, quote, he has to quit cross three international boundaries in order to reach Chicago. The United States of America has been balkanized and has been divided into 20 petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace, unquote. Like I had to read that line a couple of times because I just found it to be so timely. Yeah, it's it's kind of it was kind of wild for me to be reading a book set in World War II that came out during the Vietnam War, reading it while we're essentially in World War III, even though that's not like been named yet, but we're I, in my opinion, very much in the early stages of one. Just fascinating that it's just like just stripping it down. It's like, yeah, you know, America fucking sucks. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, so yeah, to your point, I think that's I have to wonder how much of that sentiment in the book is what's driving the bands, right? It's it's what's driving the administration or the powers that be or whatever to say you can't read this book because it's anti-American. When in reality, I think it's probably a very clear-eyed view of what America stands for and has always stood for.
SPEAKER_00And it it go, I mean, this book goes a step further, too, when you get to the Kilgore Trout story that Elliott Rosewater shows to Billy Pilgrim about the alien who comes down and is basically like, hey, the Bible screwed up. Right? Where uh Kilgore Trout's story, the gospel from outer space, where uh the visitor studies Christianity. The quote says, The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this. Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look much like uh who didn't look like much, was actually the son of the most powerful being in the universe. Readers understood that, so when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again, oh boy, they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time. And that thought had a brother. There are right people to lynch. Who? People not well connected. So it goes. And and it goes on to explain that, like, the visitor made a new Bible and things got better because the Bible sucked is also really threatening. And it was probably really threatening to people then uh who were Bible thumping Christians, and it's probably still really threatening to people now who don't even read the Bible but will misquote pulp fiction for prayers. Oh my god. Um and pass off that aggressive, threatening nonsense for the Bible, which which is a hundred percent exactly what Vonnegut was talking 50 years ago.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. The I I've got actually uh a religious quote here that I kind of want to want to mention, and I want to bring it up because and I guess also let's let's plug barred movies while we're at it. Our episode on Last Temptation of Christ just came out. So check that out if you haven't already. And there's a part of it where it it shows Jesus building crosses for other people to be executed on. Vonnegut mentions that with a quote, two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on a papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble rouser. Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work, and the rabble rouser was executed on it. I just found it interesting that that was mentioned in this book that was written in the 60s and in a movie 20 years later. I mean, admittedly, the book that that movie is based on was also written in the 60s, but the idea that you know Jesus was had a hand in crucifying other people as a counterpoint to him being crucified years later on a cross, I just found that really, really interesting that this that that quote was in this book. And it's another aspect to your point, another aspect of you can't read this because this is portraying Jesus in a way that we don't think is accurate or we don't want him portrayed that way.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Kazanzakis in his book and Scorsese's adaptation of it are amazing, and I think more Christians would probably do better watching or reading that than the Bible sometimes, but that's a that's a different conversation. Yeah, that's a different conversation, yeah. The book is just, I don't know, it's just a knockout, and I think Vonnegut was working through so much.
SPEAKER_01One of the points I wanted to hit, or one of the aspects of it that came across to me, is reading Pilgrim's recollections and experiences as a soldier, they're just told so matter-of-factly. Like there's no like emotion here, right? He's just telling you kind of what's happening or what happened. I think that makes it more impactful.
SPEAKER_00It it very much is, whether that's Billy talking about the firebombing, or Billy talking about the car accident that that that Valentia gets into, like that kills her, or the plane uh crash that he's in, or Paul Lazaro talking about killing that dog, which was horrible, or how he might kill Edgar Derby, or how he's going to get or how he knows that he's going to die at that reference.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that's that was one of those interesting things too. Like, if you notice Lazaro invokes Christ's name every time he talks about who he's going to get revenge on. Vonnegut's not doing that accidentally. He's he's really just at the the top of his game, making sure that all of this is just firing on all cylinders. It's such good stuff.
SPEAKER_01It really is. Uh, and I have a question for you. Do you and I I'm assuming that you're gonna know the answer to this. Uh, I certainly do not. Was Monica an atheist?
SPEAKER_00He was a humanist, which largely, I mean, I think he he very much identified. He identified as a humanist. I don't I don't think he had any belief in a I don't think he had no belief in a higher power or or God. It was very much just kindness to people. He used to do a lot of speeches about that, and he was the I want to say like the president or something of the American Humanist Society. But but humanism's very much just like, no, if we're gonna like we don't need be bearded sky deities.
SPEAKER_01Like we're we're just gonna be like Right, we need us to kind of take care of our own shit.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, organized religion had no real place in in his life, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the reason I asked the question is because I feel, and this is my own personal experience, I guess. I feel like people, myself and people I've known or stories I've read or whatever, like people who have gone through a really traumatic experience go one of two ways. Either there is no God or God is everything. And obviously, like just having read this book, I'm I'm feeling like Vonnegut was like, there is no God.
SPEAKER_00It's funny, he wrote a lot that one of the funniest jokes anybody could tell because he didn't believe in any afterlife, was that when he died, he he hoped that people would joke, Kurt is up in heaven now. Which is funny because look, I I wrote an obituary for him for Huffington Post when he died in 2007, and I opened it with that line because that's what if you if you'd read enough Vonnegut, you knew that that was what he said you should open his obituary with. I opened it with I know how this obituary is going to end, uh, with Pooh to eat. And that's how I ended it. But the next line was uh Kurt Vonnegut is in heaven now, and it was amazing how much there was this line of of people where some people knew enough about Vonnegut to know that he was a humanist and an atheist that were mad that I said Kurt Vonnegut is up in heaven now, and then a line of people who knew more about him that knew like, no no no, that's the joke. Like a third didn't know enough to to to care either way. A third were like, How dare you? He was he he wouldn't, you know, he didn't believe in that stuff, and the other third were like, Yeah, good one. That was a weird day. I was very I mean, 2007, I was 27, I was out working on a documentary, so I was out of town. No, I don't think we did. I wasn't I was I was working full-time as a filmmaker. I was working on a documentary, I was out of town, I was in San Francisco, um, staying in a hotel when I got the news, and I'd been on a shoot all day doing interviews, and I stayed up all night writing the piece to send into Huffington Post. I was I wasn't publishing much fiction professionally then at that point. I didn't sleep, and I had to get to the airport the next day, and yeah, no, that was just a weird night.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, it's like well for you, right? Like Vonnegut's kind of one of your inspirations and yeah, yeah. One of those artists that wanted one that made you want to become an artist.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, one of them for sure.
SPEAKER_01Whenever he died, yeah, it's like, oh hey, I think I'm gonna time it now to write this obituary, but oh wait, shit, my one of my idols is dead, and yeah, that's that's kind of trippy, for sure.
SPEAKER_00I I think his experiences shaped him to the point where it was just like you just have to be kind to people. That's like the most important thing. Like, we just need to be kind to each other because this obviously didn't work.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, and it's like it's one of those things that sounds so simple, right? And yet uh humans as a broad humanity or whatever, it's like we just fucking suck at it.
SPEAKER_00And I mean, he definitely had his moments where uh he did too, right? Like he was he was not he was not perfect, but I mean he certainly on the balance sheet, I think he was better than he was bad. And and there are definitely moments where I was interested, I didn't I didn't necessarily think to look it up, but there were definitely other autobiograph biographical cues in there where the tragedy of Billy being in the hospital and then his wife dying sort of in the car accident immediately sort of mirrored a little bit what happened with his sister. Oh, really? Um, yeah, like, and I guess it had happened about a decade before looking at I just looked up the date. But Vonnegut in in his writing, uh he talked about uh to his writing students that you really have to write to please just one person. Yeah, right. Like uh if if you uh the way he framed that and his rules for short story writers is that you if you open the window and try to make love to the world, so to speak, your stories is gonna get pneumonia. And for him, writing his his one person audience was his sister. Like, if if his stories made her laugh, that was what he really wanted to accomplish. And she died, um she was dying uh pretty tragically, and while she was in the hospital dying, her husband got in a tragic car accident. They had four kids, like very little kids.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00And without even really consulting with his wife, he just said, like, we're gonna take the kids in. All of a sudden, they've got four little new kids in the house.
SPEAKER_01Who just lost their parents.
SPEAKER_00Um, there's a really terrific documentary about Vonnegut that Robert Whitey directed. He struck up a friendship with Vonnegut way back in the day. He directed actually the uh he wrote, he wrote and directed, he was one of the people involved in the uh film adaptation of Mother Knight, but he he did this, had this really long relationship with Vonnegut, uh, and did a really terrific documentary about him and interviews all those kids as part of it, and they kind of talked about how like how bristly he could be, but how like some days he would be just the best dude in the world, and some days like the grouchyest dude in the world, and just could come out and start screaming at him because he was trying to get his work done.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And you know, I can't imagine having gone through as much trauma in the war as he did without the mental health help that or even just the knowledge that mental health professionals have now to help cope with that sort of thing that we do now. Um, that they did then, you know, but still be able to to have, you know, any sort of control on under that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_01Well, and also to come out of that with even like some little semblance of like, hey man, we've just got to be kind to each other and not just come out of it so bitter and embroiled, and it's like we should just burn everything down because it all sucks. To be present in Dresden for the bombing and to come out of that experience without wanting just to burn everything down. I think that speaks to his, you know, I don't know if it speaks to his upbringing or his character or just his nature, but I think it's remarkable that he did so.
SPEAKER_00And I mean, he was a baby. I mean, he was like 20 or so. That's it's just so crazy to me. And I sent you before we recorded, and it's something I use with my students, and you can see it, but like he he after he's out of the war, like after he gets out of Dresden and spends that time on the carriage, like right, like they really got to spend that time on that carriage they stole, carousing about the countryside until the Russians picked him up, and then they got repatriated and sent into this, you know, medical camp. He writes a letter home that's three pages long, and this is the first chance that he gets to tell his his dad um his mom has already committed suicide, died by drinking Drena or whatever phrase that he's used at this point. His mother's dead at this point, and this is the first chance he has to let his father know that he's alive. Because as far as he's aware, he's they've probably been told him that he's he's either missing an action or probably dead.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And this is his chance to tell him what what has happened to him since he's been. Listed as either MIR MIA or dead. And he has these three spare pages to tell him everything. And it's startling how this young 20-year-old, 21-year-old kid has a mastery of language and a sense of humor about everything he's witnessed and an economy of words and storytelling in these three spare pages that's that's that's astounding, where it's like everything that Vonnegut was as a writer is on display there in that letter, telling his dad, hey, I'm not dead.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Whenever you shared it with me before we recorded, and I read it over, I was really struck by the by how present his authorial vo voice is. It's like I'm reading it, and I'm like, yep, Vonnegut absolutely read this or wrote this, so much so to the point where I my brain inserted so it goes a few times within the letter. I really found that so interesting. And to your point, he was so young and had such a mastery of expressing himself through the written medium in that way. It's yeah, it's quite remarkable.
SPEAKER_00So, like to your point, though, I feel like that was probably part of his nature, that almost reckless optimism about people and things and that cynicism, like that cheery cynicism. If that it's weird that he has this that that moral optimistic cynicism, even though those terms seem as though they're they don't match almost.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it sounds oxymoronic, but as soon as you said it, I'm like, yo, yeah, no, that I would I would describe this text that way, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Because it's like, look at how terrible everything is, but you know what? Everything's okay.
SPEAKER_01But there's tits.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Sure, yeah, no, that's I mean, yeah, that's that's a facetious lowbrow look at it, but no, he is there's these things that we can appreciate around us, even though everything's terrible.
SPEAKER_00There's a piece of advice that Vonnegut gave in some of his other writings that like I still use to this day, and it really helps me just as a person, and I don't know where he picked it up. He he talked about um in some of his stories and in some of his personal anecdotes, how important it is. Just, you know, if you ever feel content at any point where something feels particularly nice, no matter how small, just take a nice breath and say, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is. Yep. And that kind of attitude is what permeates so much of his work, whether it's actually said specifically on the page, where it is a few times, right? Like he does have that in a few of his stories or works, but there are moments in Slaughterhouse 5, like the moment where Billy is in the back of the horse-drawn cart, and he's made it through the Dresden firebombing, and he's been picked up by these other soldiers, and they're out looting, and he's just napping in the sun in the back of this cart, and he's no longer a prisoner, and you know, the horses are there, and the horses are dying of thirst. But it's a nice summer day or a spring day, and the trees are flowering, and the war's over, and he's got a nap, and it's just nice. And that moment, even though it's in the middle of all this chaos and terror and ruins of a city that was once beautiful, feels so refreshing that even though Vonnegut didn't actually put the words and that breath of of that that inhalation and that exhalation, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is, I felt it there on the page.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. I'm looking at the time, and I know that you've got you've got an exit that you need to make. So I want to kind of wrap up our discussion today, just basically talking, and we've already kind of talked about it, but I want to kind of hit it again, basically about like why this book was banned, or should this book be banned? Now, obviously, I'm always going to come down on the side, like, no, this book shouldn't be banned. There's no reason to ban it. Um, but let's talk a little bit about some of the reasons why some folks would not want, you know, impressionable young minds to read this or whatever. Um, like I said, we've we've hit on some of the topics, but I I wouldn't mind, or I would like to hear more about what you say, especially because you've studied Vonnegut so much.
SPEAKER_00I think we've talked about some of them, right? Like I think it it it hammers Christianity pretty hard about how people have misinterpreted the Bible in in pretty racist classist ways. I think it hammers on America and the way it wages war. And I think in the context of Slaughterhouse 5 coming out during the Vietnam War, forcing people to recontextualize, hey, I don't like the Vietnam War, and this is making me think, hey, maybe World War II wasn't so great either. Like maybe the way we conducted ourselves in the just war wasn't so great either, was probably not so great at that time. But there's also like for for people of more puritanical thought, there's implications of bestiality in it.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00There's uh one of my favorite bits, actually, that I think would probably go almost unnoticed in the 60s that would probably send idiots today in a tizzy is this bit about um gender and and sex on Tralfamador, about how yeah, yeah. And and again, like this is Vonnegut writing in the 60s, so so the definitions of sex and gender are different, but I think the way he's intending it here is kind of how we view gender. He's like, there were five sexes on Talfamador, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual. They looked identical to Billy because their sex differences were all in the fourth dimension. Uh, one of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamidorians, incidentally, had to do with sex on Earth. They said they're flying saucer crews that identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again, Billy couldn't possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension. They told him that there could be no earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals, but there couldn't be babies without women over 65. There could be babies without men over 65, but there couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth, and so on. It was gibberish to Billy. Um but just the idea that like stuff's more complicated than people might understand, but it's okay. Um gender and sex, like it's all different, but like Billy's just like, okay, whatever, it's gibberish, it's fine. Just like it it really is just an indictment of a lot of what they hold dear.
SPEAKER_01It really truly is. Like I said uh initially, whenever I had finished the book, I had emailed you, and I'm like, this is the most anti-war book I've ever read. And in throughout our discussion, you've made a lot of good points, where it's like, oh, it's also kind of I don't want to say anti-Christian, but putting a spotlight on the hypocrisy of Christianity, um, putting a spotlight on like basically how shitty America is in terms of global politics. And yeah, for those reasons alone, I could see where school state boards might be like, yeah, you can't read this book. But obviously, should this book be banned? No. That answer is no. Well, Brian, I want to give you an opportunity to give us any final thoughts before we log off for the day.
SPEAKER_00If you haven't read Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5 is a great, easy introduction. It introduces, uh I'd almost forgotten, it's been a while since I've read Slaughterhouse 5, and I reread it again for this. I've probably read it, I've read it so many times, and there's a really terrific graphic novel uh version of it that came out a few years ago that's really great. The George Ray Hill production of the movie Vonnegut was very happy with, that is worth checking out. But I was sort of like knowing all of Vonnegut's books and and his whole bibliography, I'd kind of forgotten how much of the cast of characters of all of his other books are actually in here. So you get Howard W. Campbell Jr., who is the character from Mother Knight, and his wife Resina, which also, again, a terrific. I think that's the best adaptation of his work on screen is Mother Knight, and that book is terrific. You get Elliot Rosewater, who was in the book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and on screen in in the Breakfast of Champions adaptation, and in Breakfast of Champions, you get Vonnegut, obviously, cameoing in this, and and Kilgore Trout, tons of Kilgore Trout, who, since the Breakfast of Champions movie, I can't see as anyone but Albert Finney now. The the problem with visual media. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, like, it's to be honest, it's kind of who I saw in my head before the movie came out, anyway. But like but like he just nailed the part so well. But this is the sort of book I would hand anybody interested in checking out Vonnegut first anyway, because it opens up sort of a whole world of it. Although Player Piano, which is Vonnegut's first novel, feels almost more relevant in an age of AI.
SPEAKER_01Oh, really?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, player piano, I think, might be might be my favorite of his. I would hand this to high school students any day of the week. I'd hand this to junior high kids. At least the me of junior high would have eaten this up. I wish this would have been required reading more than some of the crap I had to read. And I feel like this is more relevant to kids today than some of the stuff I had to read. I love, love, love the great Gatsby. Love it. But like this would have felt like a breath of fresh air compared to that. I get why they teach Gadsby. I understand. It's because all of the symbolism is so easy to teach. It's so blatant and obvious. What does that optometrist's billboard like mean? Like, what could that possibly be? Like, could that be symbolism? Like, what's the green light? Like, I get it. But yeah, no, I wouldn't hesitate to hand this to a a kid in junior high. No, no question. There's no reason this should be this should be banned anywhere. I live in a place where they're banning books left and right, and I have no doubt, like they they kind of did a hard reset on the bands because their bands were I live in Utah, and they had to change the way they did book bands. Um, so they kind of had to throw out all their previous bands, and they've started over. 29 books banned in the state right now, and this isn't currently on the list, but I I I expect it'll get there soon. It's gonna get there, yeah. Just because they're they're moving through the process. It's just I don't know. Vonnegut is one of those writers that feels very relevant, and it's sad that he continues being relevant.
SPEAKER_01I agree. I think that that's a good place to end.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for letting me redirect you to this book. I I was really when you asked me to do it, I was like, oh, these are like I love all these books, but I just I I my my schedule's so busy, I don't know if I have the time to like read a verse to dive in at the level I want to. And then when you let me counteroffer with this, and you were like, sure, I was like, yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Here's the thing, here's a really great thing about working for yourself and doing whatever the fuck you want. There's no rules. You know, you're like, well, you know, Slaughterhouse 5 was on my master list. Let's go. And I'm I'm really, really glad that you counter-offered, and I'm really glad to have talked about this with you. I want to thank you so much for joining us today. And I want to thank all the listeners out there for hanging out with us. Be sure to check out our Patreon page. Subscribers get a sneak peek at our lineup and can listen to the podcast before the rest of the rest of the peons can. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And be sure to tell your friends about us. This is Kelly Swales, and you've been listening to Bard Books. Catch you all next time.