Skip to main content

Of Clouds and Men

By



Lately, I've found myself in a Vonnegut frame of mind.  Maybe it is all these X-Files episodes I've been watching with my daughter, but mostly it is the desire to read something that spurs the imagination.  I've been feeling a bit uninspired as of recent.

 The Brothers Vonnegut looks interesting.  Not exactly The Brothers Karamazov, but then there were only two of them and patricide wasn't the issue here as it was the ethical ramifications of cloud-seeding around 1947 when Kurt and his brother Bernard worked for GE.  Kurt's brother was a scientist engaged in a government-funded Project Cirrus, later dubbed Project Stormfury, in which the military hoped to redirect weather.  This was the same year, an alien ship supposedly crash-landed at Roswell.   So, one can definitely see Chris Carter trying to draw a parallel.

Ginger Strand takes a more conventional approach.  Kurt had been hired as a PR man to help promote GE projects, getting their products in major papers like the New York Times and the Boston Globe.  According to the reviewer, the author stretches her thesis a bit too far in trying to find a direct link between the brothers' time at GE and Kurt's fiction.  Still, it looks like a fun read.

Kurt's first book, Player Piano (1952) does make fiction out of his time at GE, which was met with a less than rousing review from the New York Times.  It wouldn't be until Cat's Cradle {1963) that Vonnegut established himself as a notable writer, exploring the ramifications of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the fictional Dr. Hoenikker.  Given that Project Stormfury hit its stride in the early 60s, Strand sees Cat's Cradle as being drawn upon his earlier experiences with GE, but it seems that Vonnegut had bigger fish to fry than some highly suspect cloud seeding experiment, which was never determined to have actually succeeded, whereas the nuclear bombings were all too real.

One can make their own parallels as the Library of America has graciously bounded Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night and other stories from 1950-1962 into one volume.  One would have to purchase the second volume to find Cat's Cradle along side Slaughterhouse Five and other novels, which made him famous.

Anyone up for Vonnegut?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more