From Mental Floss: “13 Humanizing Facts about Kurt Vonnegut”
Read HERE about 13 unusual facts that every Vonnegut fan should know! A few of them might even make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about Kurt Vonnegut.
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Ghost Shirt Society
Of Ghost Shirts and Gizmos | Phillips on Player Piano
Anthropology in Vonnegut’s Player Piano Sarah D. Phillips It is widely known that after the war Kurt Vonnegut studied on the GI Bill for a master’s degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. He struggled in the program and never wrote an accepted thesis, though the department awarded him the MA degree a full 25 years later, …
What Is the Soul of a Man? | Harriss on Player Piano
Vonnegut’s Ghost in the Machine M. Cooper Harriss Reading Player Piano conjured an old song that I’ve enjoyed returning to for the past couple of weeks. Not unlike the way a player piano engineers sound from collected data, the record of an earlier performance replicated with some precision, I know this song as a mechanical reproduction of Blind Willie …
“To the Record” | Sandweiss on Player Piano
A Historian Sits at Vonnegut’s Piano Eric Sandweiss “To the record.” It seems an oddly resigned cry with which to toast the failed revolution that closes Player Piano. Is this what it all comes down to—Paul Proteus’s final survey of the wreckage left by his comrades’ failed effort to upend the machinery of a soulless society, punctuated with a …
Angry Sordid Present | Elmer on Player Piano
Jonathan Elmer An insurrection erupts, and is crushed. We are in the years following World War III, and the United States has emerged victorious again. Player Piano is set, more or less, in our present time (Vonnegut tells us that “the characters are modeled after persons as yet unborn, or, perhaps, at this writing”—1952—“infants”). Of course, there has not yet …