Megan Stielstra's Blog

“I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Issac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, ‘Isaac is up in heaven now.’ It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, ‘Kurt is up in heaven now.’ That's my favorite joke.” from A Man Without a Country (2005)

When I woke up this morning I read that Kurt Vonnegut died and, it’s like—I really LOVED that guy, you know? I read all his stuff and shamelessly imitated him and told my dad the world was foma and then, later, when I started taking my writing more seriously, I tried to follow his rules of creative writing, especially when I read that Flannery O’Connor was the only one to have broken them all which A. taught me that Vonnegut must read like crazy if he knew that O’Connor was the only one who did that and B. made me read all of O’Connor’s stuff so I could SEE how she did that which C. trained me to read in a more constructive way and also D. turned me on to O’Connor in the first place and she’s one of my favorites to this day so ANYHOW, when I read that he’d died I made a pot of coffee and got out all my copies of his stuff (which took a while, FYI: we’re having shelves built right now so our books are still boxed up and I went through them all to find the Slaughterhouse V and the Timequake, the Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle and Welcome to the Monkey House) and, for the past hour or so, have sat here reading. RE-reading.

I do this thing when I’m reading where, if I like something, I dog-ear the page so I can find it later. If I’m really on my game, I write the thing down in my journal along with a few paragraphs about WHY I like it—it was funny, or philosophical, or it spoke to something I was going through personally at the moment or, after I really started studying writing, how was that passage written and how can I learn from it (ie use the technique to solve some of the problems I’m having in my own stuff)—and recording those impressions is pretty goddamn smart because if you DON’T write down why you like something, you’ll open up the book ten years later and be all Why did I dog ear this page again? Which sentence out of all these sentences grabbed me back when I read it, and why? (Dear my students who google me: yet another reason why you’re journaling about what you read week after week after week. It’s just not all going to stay in your head!) It’s an interesting marker of who you are as a person: when I was twenty I might notice one thing, and then something completely different when I’m thirty.

ANYHOW, I’ve sat here all morning with my Vonnegut books and there are hundreds of pages dog-eared. I mean, hundreds. In some places, I underlined passages, but for the most part I’ve just read through all these pages trying to find whatever took my attention back when I was reading this stuff so religiously (ten years ago, maybe?) (Vonnegut would probably be pissed that I used the adverb ‘religiously’ to describe how I read his stories. FOMA, he’d tell me. FOMA) and for the life of me, I can’t. BUT! I did find a hundred new reasons to dog-ear the pages, passages that are grabbing me now, and that’s the best thing about reading, if you ask me: the work will connect to you over and over again in all sorts of new ways. As you get older, live your life, break hearts and ache and laugh. All around you, the World will change, but the book will still find you.

One more thing: a fellow teacher of mine taught me a game. He says it can only be played with the novel Good Solider Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, but I think it works with anything. Here’s how you play: I say, “Tell me when to stop,” and start flipping through the pages of a book.

You say, “Stop,” and I open the book to whichever two pages I was on at that moment and ask, “Left or Right?”

You pick one, and I put my finger to the top of the page you chose. “Tell me when to stop,” I say again, dragging my finger down the page, and whatever passage it’s on when you say stop is your fortune for the day.

This is what I feel like, rereading all the Vonnegut. These little passages jumping out at me, like fortunes—probably they’re illustrative of my current state of mind. I’m sure that, were I angry or sad or depressed or whatever, I could find passages for that, too: as in life, you can find any emotion in a good f’ing piece of literature.

So here’s some Vonnegut for you this morning—the Vonnegut that jumped out at me. Give it a read and then go get your own Vonnegut. Maybe open up to any random page, run your finger down it 'til someone says stop and that's your fortune (and if you want to send me that passage in the comments, that'd be nifty). Vonnegut’d probably like that. It would make him not so dead, to know people are finding themselves in his stories.

And is he really dead, anyway? Here, read this (from Salughterhouse V):

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

And also:

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.”

“Listen: The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. ‘Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?’ she asked me. ‘The big show is inside my head,’ I said.”

“Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.”

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.’”

“Roses are red and ready for plucking. You're sixteen and ready for high school.”

“All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

“I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.”

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”

“We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap,” (to be written on a wall in the Grand Canyon as a message for aliens)

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

And, from an Interview with the American Public Broadcasting Service:

“(talking about when he tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.”

And—my favorite—written on Billy Pilgrim’s tombstone in Slaughterhouse V:

“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

And, from Vonnegut's Blues For America in the Sunday Herald:

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.”