During the summer after I graduated from high school, I started reading novels by Kurt Vonnegut. I knew him as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. back then. I learned of Vonnegut from my high school English class. I remember during my senior year we had to choose a classic author and read three books by them. I chose Joseph Conrad. A couple of my classmates chose Kurt Vonnegut. The first novel that I read by him was Player Piano. I enjoyed its post-apocalyptic science fiction. It seemed too enjoyable to be considered a classic. During college and the summer in between I read and enjoyed Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse Five, and Jailbird. In addition to the science fiction his books had a lot of humor and a kind of irreverence that I found amusing. One book of his that I did not enjoy was Breakfast of Champions. That one was just too strange.
A few years ago I heard that Kurt Vonnegut had died. He had been writing books and short stories up through the early 2000s. He even had a cameo in the film Back to School where Rodney Dangerfield’s character hires him to help write a paper about Kurt Vonnegut. Later, I think the professor says that the paper was written by someone who knew nothing about Kurt Vonnegut. After he died his publisher continued to print short stories and essays by Vonnegut that had not been published previously. In 2009 they published the short story collection Look at the Birdie. The title story also appeared in the online version of the L.A. Times. I found it vaguely amusing and a bit morbid. When I found that Look at the Birdie was available for temporary download as an Adobe epub from the L.A. Public Library, I decided to give it a go. I downloaded it onto my Aluratek Libre eBook Reader PRO. It wasn’t too long at around 180 pages.
Look at the Birdie consists of 14 short stories that range between 9 and 14 pages. One story, Ed Luby’s Key Club, was in 2 parts and totaled about 29 pages. The introduction was written by a friend of Vonnegut’s. The stories cover a wide variety of topics and settings. Nearly all have a twist at the end. Many take a dark turn, though some are lighter. I prefer these lighter ones. Some include elements of fantasy such as “The Nice Little People” and the first one, “Confido.” Overall, I found the lighter stories entertaining and the darker ones not quite to my taste. Still, I learned a few things from them.
Even though the book was published in 2009, some of the stories seemed dated or used terms I wasn’t familiar with. Maybe they come from a world that Vonnegut has known for most of his life. In the first story, Confido, one of the characters has to track down a typewriter to write his resignation letter. The title of the story, “FUBAR” is actually an old term as Vonnegut explains, “The word snafu, derived from the initials of situation normal all fouled up, was welcomed into the American language during World War II and remains a useful part of the language today. Fubar, a closely related word, was coined at about the same time and is now all but forgotten. Fubar is worthy of a better fate, meaning as it does fouled up beyond all recognition” (p. 26). The story “Fubar” actually turned out to be my favorite.
The story “The Nice Little People” includes a couple of new terms. Vonnegut refers to a letter opener as a “paper knife.” Another sentence mentions a food I hadn’t before: “Using his fingertip, (Lowell) made a circle of dabs around the center of the saucer, leaving mounds of peanut butter, mayonnaise, oleomargarine, minced ham, cream cheese, catsup, liver pate, …” (p. 105) I haven’t heard of oleomargarine.
A couple of stories refer to education in ways I could relate to from my experience and studies. The story “Shout It from the Housetops” kind of has a story within it about a man who “Falls in love with a simple country girl who has been out of Hypocrites Junction just once in her life—when she was a junior in high school, and the whole class went to Washington, D.C. at Cherry Blossom Time” (p. 43). When I was a junior in high school, I went to Washington D.C. with one of my classes in the spring when the cherry blossoms were blooming. The story “A Song for Selma” had an interesting passage about educational testing. A teacher finds cards in the student files with numbers that represent “not only an individual’s IQ but his sociability index, his dexterity, his weight, his leadership potential, his height, his work preferences, and his aptitudes in six different fields of human accomplishment” (p. 81).
I learned from the book that Kurt Vonnegut was originally from Indianapolis. He begins the story “Hall of Mirrors” by mentioning that Indianapolis was the “largest city not on a navigable waterway in the world.” It’s interesting to get into Kurt Vonnegut’s world once in a while. I usually find it entertaining and I learn some new things. I think I prefer his novels to his short stories, though. I’ll wait a while before I read him again.
Comments