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Ghost Dance

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 …