Rebekah Sheldon
Billy Pilgrim can’t stay in one place. Like Winston Niles Rumfoord before him, Pilgrim has become unstuck. But while Rumfoord bounces around in space, appearing in his sitting room on Earth for only a few minutes at regularly scheduled intervals, Pilgrim is smeared across time, living many moments and timelines at once. He is a baby, a middle-aged optometrist in …
Rebekah Sheldon God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a book about economic inequality in America. It is a satirical examination of how class is lived and injustice justified, and so it is certainly timely. But I want to talk about pornography instead. There is a single example of pornography in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It is a dirty …
Rebekah Sheldon “We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodley do, What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must; Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust” —The Books of Bokonon Mud recurs throughout Cat’s Cradle. Most prominently, it is the scourge of marching armies that inspires Dr. Felix Hoenikker to …
Rebekah Sheldon Kurt Vonnegut opens Mother Night, his third novel, by explaining that he is not and never has been a Nazi. The closest he came was a youthful encounter with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion when he was a kid in the ’30s in Indianapolis. The Protocols is one of the most infamous examples of what …
“Here’s a little paradox courtesy of The Sirens of Titan: There is nothing worse than being used, and nothing worse than not being used.”
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 …
