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.
player piano
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.
Should We Be Worried? Rick Van Kooten Ah, to return to the days of the skinny black tie, white shirts, and horn-rimmed glasses of the Houston-we-have-a-problem-era engineers! First a digression on the difference between scientists and engineers, from personal experience: as an undergrad, I was in an “Engineering Science” program that straddled both fields. Despite this increased scope, I …
Rebekah Sheldon I love Laundromats. No, it’s true! They are perfect. In any decent-sized city, there’s bound to be a 24-hour Laundromat nearby. When we lived in Brooklyn, we would smash our bags of wash into the wheeled conveyances that I grew up calling “granny carts” but that Google tells me are sold as “utility wagons.” Now that I …
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, …
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 …
Sandy Shapshay Player Piano is THE novel to read in the Trump era. I’m no political scientist, but I have a keen suspicion that if this novel had been required reading for the Clinton campaign, we might not be in the Trump era right now. Allow me to make a case for these bold claims. Vonnegut’s foreword proclaims that …
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 …
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 …
Player Piano as Educational Dystopia Ed Comentale In a recent interview with Bloomberg News, billionaire investor Mark Cuban offered some surprising advice for college students and their future employers. “No finance,” he proclaimed, “that’s the easiest thing—you just take the data and have it spit out whatever you need. I personally think there’s going to be a greater demand in …
A reflection on Vonnegut’s Player Piano Ted Castronova The Greek god Proteus changes like the sea. He can tell the future, but only if you can capture him. This is hard to do, because Proteus can change form at will, water to serpent to tree to lion to water. Changing with context: something we all do. Game researchers talk about …