the KVS Blog

Leeds Interviewed for Pod Delusion

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 19:45:22 -0400

Leeds interviewed for British-based “Pod Delusion” concerning Republic, Missouri’s banning of Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Opening

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:56:44 -0500

I am flying at 35,000 feet, heading from Boca Raton to Atlanta and then on to Indianapolis for tomorrow’s opening of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. Under the guidance of Julia Whitehead, founder of the KVML, this moment has taken more than three years to arrive. Though I am privileged to be a member the library’s executive board, my out-of-towner status has only increased my excitement about what awaits.

Rodney Allen, also a board member of the KVML and one of the founders of our society, is at this moment heading toward Indianapolis from Louisiana. I have heard only stellar comments about the Kurt Vonnegut timeline he worked on with one of Indiana’s local artists. He taunted me with a photograph of a huge rectangle draped in a painter’s cloth along a very long wall. Another mystery that awaits.

I will post photos and write updates about the event. When you get a chance, please check out our society’s sister-site for the library.

Cheers,

Marc Leeds

2010 Presentations and Clambake Update

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:19:43 -0400

Presentation titles and authors are now listed on our Conference Papers 2010 page.

Arrangements for the Third Timequake Clambake will be finalized soon. Plan on Saturday night, May 29! Final plans will be posted to this site very shortly.

Coupland new title and Vonnegut

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:36:54 -0500

The title for new Douglas Coupland book Generation A seems to be inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's 1994 Syracuse University commencement address. (I'm of the mind that Coupland is among Vonnegut's successors.

Much like Vonnegut, Coupland's books provide "ah-ha" style social commentary. Unlike Vonnegut, Coupland's characters so far have spent their time on Earth. Generation A (2009) gives us a glimpse of a plausible future one hopes won't arrive. The author of this page-turner also wrote Life After God (1994), Eleanor Rigby(2005) and The Gum Thief (2007). He may be best known for Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) and Microserfs(1996).

Happy New Year!

Caroline in New Jersey

Charles Shields provides new insight on Latest Vonnegut Text

Thu, 3 Dec 2009 16:20:47 -0500

Two tales in Look at the Birdie, the latest collection of Vonnegut's unpublished fiction, and a mistake in the book, will interest fans of the late author.

"Shout It From the Housetops," about a poor young housewife who writes a bestselling novel and nearly ruins her marriage, is based on Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place. Metalious penned her novel revealing the "dark secrets" of her own New England town. Local residents instantly recognized themselves as characters. Metalious' husband, a school principal, almost divorced her. "If I had to do it over again," she once remarked, "it would be easier to be poor. Before I was successful, I was as happy as anyone gets." The fallout from the novel was widely known and Vonnegut no doubt speculated on what it would be like to meet the Metaliouses.

Later, he had a slight, real-life connection with her. Metalious was an alcoholic and couldn't finish the sequel Return to Peyton Place. Her publisher enlisted a ghost, Warren Miller who had attended the Iowa Writers Workshop before Vonnegut taught there. He eventually authored ten books under his own name, including The Siege of Harlem and The Cool World both about young blacks in Harlem (the latter was praised by James Baldwin) and The Way We Live Now an autobiographical novel about a high-flying advertising executive who throws himself into a series of soulless love affairs.

After Warren died of lung cancer, Kurt dated his widow, Jane "Jimmy" Miller in 1968.

The idea for another story in the collection, "The Honor of a Newsboy," comes directly from Kurt's life. It started with flu sweeping Cape Cod during the winter of 1957-58. Vonnegut's son Mark came down with a case of it, and rather than let him lose his paper route, Kurt and Jane took over serving his customers. Then Jane got sick and Kurt continued alone as both driver and paper route carrier. In the story, a killer's alibi depends on newspapers delivered to his home creating a chronology of his whereabouts. The father's conscientiousness about serving his son's newspapers saves the honor of his son, who insists to the police that his father would deliver to every house.

The mistake in the book, however, is nonfiction and less easy to explain.

A very important letter is reprinted in the preface to the book, supposedly to "Walter J. Miller." The letter is actually to Vonnegut's friend from Cornell, and former fellow journalist on the Cornell Daily Sun, S. Miller Harris. Harris later became president and CEO of his family's business, Eagle Shirts.

It's unfortunate that the mistake will bedevil Vonnegut scholars for years to come.

Charles J. Shields