I really fell down on exposing the kids to modern American literature in high school (although my coverage of esoteric ancient texts, gothic horror, and Greek mythology was exceptional, ahem), up to and including neglecting to have them read anything by our very own local son, Kurt Vonnegut.
Even more of a shame, because they would have loved Cat's Cradle, for instance, and Slaughterhouse-Five would have been an excellent supplement to a World War II study. Although only the older kid really dipped back into modern history in high school (we studied modern history very extensively in middle school, so the younger kid still knows about Hitler and AIDS and the Berlin Wall and all the important stuff!), and she still jokes about our "fun Mommy/daughter" date with popcorn and cookies and hot chocolate... and Schindler's List, yikes. I'll be minding my own business cross-stitching on the couch, and suddenly she'll be all, "Hey, remember that time we watched that heartwarming drama about found family in beautiful, war-torn Poland? I'm definitely not still traumatized!"
Sorry, I guess, but being traumatized by Schindler's List is how you know you're not a sociopath!
Anyway, the kids and I were BIG field trippers, so the only way I hadn't visited the Kurt Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis before was that I fell down on my duty to provide my children with their full component of modern literature to study.
However, both my partner and I, for various reasons, read plenty of Kurt Vonnegut for our sins while we were in college, and so a few weeks ago we took ourselves on our own field trip to the museum.
I do think this museum is best appreciated if you're familiar with at least some of Vonnegut's work, so it was well-suited for our own little Saturday morning date of wandering around and reading labels and looking at interesting stuff. And there's an extra fun looky-loo aspect when you're both local!
As in, I am OBVIOUSLY going to drive by these houses!
Because I'm literally that nosy I also spent a bit of time trying to figure out where Kurt Vonnegut Sr. moved to in his final years, since the place was apparently just the next county over from me, and thus even more driveable for my looky-loo nosy self, but everything in Brown County is so middle-of-the-woods and also middle-of-nowhere that I couldn't work it out.
Oh, well, current residents of the house that Kurt Vonnegut Sr. lived in at the end of his life, you can mark yourselves safe from me driving slowly past your home and gawping... at least for now.
There weren't a ton of personal artifacts of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s own, but there were a few precious and interesting objects:
I WOULD like to show the kids that course schedule! They go through agonies each semester getting their schedules finalized, and somehow they always manage to make it my problem, too. One kid's school has them register in waves, so you get a Round 1, from which you're guaranteed to get at least two of your four picks but you probably won't get all of them, and then by the time Round 2 rolls around all the good classes are full. The other kid's school lets them put their complete schedule into a "shopping cart," and then they run a lottery for every class that's overenrolled, so she'll be minding her own business trying to study for finals and get an email telling her that she lost the lottery for her most-anticipated class and so got dropped from it, and then three days later she'll get an email saying she was dropped from her next most-anticipated class, and she'll have to wait until the day before classes actually start next semester to scramble for open classes with the other unlucky kids.
When their dad and I were in college, we stood in line to meet with the registrar, and during that meeting we worked out every single aspect of our schedule, alternate classes and all, so that when we walked out fifteen minutes later we, just like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. up there, had our final schedule in our hands. IT WAS FAR SUPERIOR!
I thought this was an interesting display, in that it makes overt a gap in our understanding of Vonnegut's life, caused by the fact that nobody was taking photos of the help:
It's sort of like those who did the real labor of keeping house and caring for the children are the equivalent of ephemera, utilitarian and constant on a day-to-day level, but rarely valued enough to keep. It's crazy how quickly knowledge is lost when it's not carefully preserved.
A large part of the museum was devoted to the Dresden bombing and Slaughterhouse-Five:
This is the most viscerally upsetting of Vonnegut's novels, and I'd been prepared to see upsetting images and displays, but it was pretty visually gentle. I think this was the only actual artifact--
--although many of Vonnegut's quotes were highlighted:
I'm impressed with Vonnegut's processing of his war-related trauma, and I wonder what combination of his personal characteristics made him able to do that? My Pappa very rarely spoke about his part in the war, until he finally grew so old that I guess the memories eventually lost some of their bite and he was able to relate some very disturbing stories that I'd never heard before. Even with everything that he wrote, I wonder if Vonnegut also had war stories so disturbing that he never told them?
Here was another good artifact--evidence of a writer's life!
The museum has also recreated Vonnegut's habitual writing set-up, in case you, too, want to try your hand at the most ergonomically incorrect situation possible. Dude wrote in a low-slung easy chair pulled up next to an honest-to-god coffee table that had his typewriter sitting on it! You'd write your ass off just for the pleasure of getting up and stretching your spine out once you hit your word count!
I really like it when writers are Virginia Woof's idea of "writers-of-all-trades," so I thought it was interesting to see that Vonnegut also turned his mind towards song lyrics at least once, as well as writing an exceptionally charming note to the singers:
My search for that song led me down a rabbit trail of discovery, and I'm delight to tell you that Vonnegut himself recorded versions of some of his books on genuine vinyl record albums, and those albums are now on Spotify!
This introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, read by the author, is absolutely brilliant:
Is his authorial voice exactly how he spoke, or did he read his work so wonderfully that it feels like he was simply speaking it impromptu?
Spotify also has this exact album whose cover I photographed because it cracked me up:
Vonnegut SINGS on this album!
Vonnegut SINGS on this album!
My latest Spotify Wrapped was messed up because I sometimes listen to podcasts in the middle of the night to help me fall back asleep, and then those podcasts just keep playing softly under my pillow for the next four hours. So excuse me for a few moments while I go make myself a Kurt Vonnegut playlist for future bouts of insomnia...
Other large parts of the museum were focused on the importance of the arts--
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| I should make a quilt that has a favorite book quote on it, because this is beautiful! |
--and on the issue of banned books. As part of that exhibit, I think, or at least tangential to it, was my favorite display in the museum, this one on authors who have been jailed:
I should probably confess that these books were not arranged alpha by author, with their spines tidily aligned with the edge of the shelf, when I arrived... but they were when I left!
The display was really cleverly created by putting the information about each author's jail experience on a bookmark in that book, and I read every. Single. One! They were also hilariously non-discriminating about circumstance. Authors who were wrongly jailed for things that shouldn't have been crimes, like Oscar Wilde, Nelson Mandela, and Daniel Defoe--
--were right up in there with authors who full-on murdered people!?!
Okay, I looked this up, and it's pretty crazy. The murder of Honorah Parker sounds devastating, and I can't imagine what it would have been like at the time, knowing that a couple of teenaged girls brutally murdered one of their perfectly nice and perfectly normal mothers like it was nothing. People only found out about Anne Perry's history because Peter Jackson made a movie version of it which got journalists interested in finding out what happened to the murderers. It seems like both women did their jail time, were rehabilitated, and led solitary and upstanding lives afterwards. A career writing murder mysteries is a choice, but I guess your brain wants to write what your brain wants to write.
Anyway, that information was so wild that afterwards my partner and I had to go and eat Korean barbeque about it:
And yes, I DID just request a few of Anne Perry's Christmas mysteries from my local public library. Just because I've smashed my 2025 reading goal (108 books read of my goal of 104!) doesn't mean that I can't still get festive!
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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