I Alphabetized All The Jailed Authors At The Kurt Vonnegut Museum

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!

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--

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!

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I Cooked from Recipes from the World of Tolkien and It Turns Out That Hobbits Also Love Beans and Cornbread

From my November 2024 trip to Hobbiton!

Recipes from the World of Tolkien: Inspired By the Legends by Robert Tuesley Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading this book inspired my sudden revelation about how many cuisines are centered around beans plus flatbread. I grew up in Arkansas eating pinto beans with cornbread (and here I am today in Indiana with a pot of beans in the crock pot right this second!), which isn’t exactly a flatbread but I think it’s close enough to count. When I moved to Texas for college I found bean burritos, and black beans and refried beans and corn and flour tortillas. And then I learned about lentils with injera or naan, and falafel with chickpeas, and the tragedy that is beans on toast, and those are all the cuisines I know but I’m sure there are plenty more delicious bean/bread combos out there for me to discover.

All that to say that my favorite set of recipes in this book is a bean dish paired with a cornbread dish!

Sitting down at the hobbits' breakfast table, waiting for my beans and cornbread to be served.

I really liked how the recipes here were mainly British-forward or British-inspired, but with a lot more flavor than I’ve come to expect from British cuisine. I’ve made the Smoky Stewed Beans three times, and it is a super easy one-pot recipe that uses canned beans and tomatoes, tomato paste, stock, and then a bunch of flavorful ingredients like red onion, red wine vinegar, smoked paprika, and mustard powder. It serves two with plenty of leftovers, which is perfect because it tastes better the next day, and it also works with frozen peppers and spinach tossed in to beef it up.

Every time I’ve made it I’ve made the Lembas Bread to go with it. Calling cornbread Lembas Bread kind of feels like an abomination, but the author has read the Silmarillion and I have not, and they say that Lembas was originally made literally from corn. So, cheesy herbed cornbread it is!

I actually think the Lembas Bread, especially when paired with the Smoky Stewed Beans, would be even more delicious with even more cheese and herbs, so that’s what I plan to do next time.

The Green Dragon! I didn't try their mushroom and leek pie, but it was definitely delicious.

From this book I’ve also made Beorn’s Honey Cakes, Farmer Maggot’s Wild Mushrooms, the Prancing Pony’s Potato and Garlic Soup, and the Green Dragon’s Mushroom and Leek Pie. I’m not a good cook so I need simple instructions and simple ingredients, which this book for the most part has. Only the potato soup was disappointing, but that is definitely my fault, because 1) I did not understand that “floury” potatoes are different from whatever potatoes I apparently used that gave the soup a kind of gluey texture, and 2) I added too much salt.

See? Not a good cook!

If this book was meant to be an “official” cookbook for the Tolkien books I’d have more issues with it, because there were barely any shot-by-shot remake-esque recipes or recipes you could see reflected in the actual texts. But for most recipes other than Cram or that elusive Lembas Bread, there are plenty of other resources for that sort of cooking. For Father’s Day this year, the kids and I did a “There and Snack Again”-themed Taste the Movie experience for my partner, keyed to the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Rings, and all I had to do was click through a couple of webpages to find a blog post that listed every food shown on screen and its timestamp. And if I’d wanted to get fancy and have a proper feast with book-accurate foods prepared using boring muggle ingredients, I’d just click a couple more times and have my pick!

I am at the Green Dragon drinking ale and leaning casually against a mantle.

But anyway, these recipes aren’t really meant to be book-accurate, as far as I can tell. They’re meant to be “from the world” of Tolkien, and “inspired by” the legends. So basically British cuisine with more flavor. Which is actually really useful, because although I would have liked to have had an authentically book-accurate Lembas Bread recipe, I’ll actually make this particular Lembas Bread on the regular, not just during a LOTR movie marathon.

P.S. View all my reviews

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That Time During the Great Depression That Canada Stole Five Identical Babies and Put Them in a Baby Zoo and Made Them Do Brand Deals

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The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets by Sarah Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

WTF, Canada?!?

Just… every part of this story that comes after the children’s birth and first weeks--truly a miracle that the kids all survived without long-term complications!--is so messed up. The kids’ lives were the worst combination of overworked child actor and infant ape stolen from the wild and raised like a human for science. The way they were taken from their birth family, actively prevented from forming healthy sibling relationships (with their other siblings and with each other), raised with asylum standards by employees with a high turnover rate, and used for publicity stunts and brand deals and media attention is all so obviously wrong that I can’t imagine how anyone went along with it. And let’s be honest--the only way those kids managed to get out of that institution is because they, like sitcom child actors everywhere, grew up enough that they were no longer perceived as cute enough to stay kidnapped. And even then they had to leave the only home they’d ever known and go live with people who resented them and were jealous of them and abused them in a multitude of ways.

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Also just… the ABSOLUTE NERVE of the Canadian government and their official “guardians” to take custody away from the Dionne parents because they’d made a publicity deal with the Chicago World Fair--a publicity deal that they made to, you know, GET THE CHILDREN LIFESAVING MEDICAL CARE AND MONEY TO PAY THEIR BILLS--and then themselves go on to high-key expose those kids to publicity stunts and brand deals and advertising schemes for nearly a decade, all for money in everyone else’s pockets. The kids had to pretend to open Christmas presents months before Christmas so that the magazine layouts would be ready for the holidays. They were required to act in a movie years before they were allowed to sleep in their family home. They had to shill specific brands, and be in their doctor’s Christmas card photo with him instead of his own son.

What a bunch of assholes!

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The children’s upbringing really sets off the difference between surviving and thriving, and for whom. Sure, that early intervention is absolutely what allowed those babies to survive, but continuing it for months longer, then years longer than that emergency warranted may have been marketed as the best thing for the children’s continuing survival, but the only people thriving in that arrangement were those making money off the kids’ marketing deals and trust fund. Even if anyone involved in their care thought they were doing the best thing for them--which I’m pretty sure nobody really and truly thought that--sacrificing the children’s potential to thrive, to have big lives full of friends and family and experiences and normality, feels like too big a cost.

I found some of the old newsreels and footage of the kids (although I can’t find that movie they had to act in), and I guess we’re just more savvy about our reality television these days, because it’s obvious to me how often the kids look towards someone behind the camera to get instruction. That’s not even reality at that point--that’s an episode of Full House!

Random moments that horrified me:

• The nurses weren’t allowed to kiss the kids or show them physical affection, and their siblings were rarely allowed to visit and their parents weren’t left unsupervised with them. Was Canada TRYING to raise them as psychopaths?!? It’s a separate miracle that everyone managed to grow up as mentally healthy as they were able to. Annette, Cecile, Émilie, Marie and Yvonne Dionne are some of the most resilient human beings I’ve ever read about.
• People complained when they’d line up to watch the kids play in their custom-build playground that served as a panopticon/baby zoo and the kids didn’t look super cute like they did in the magazine photos, so the nurses had to dress them up and curl their hair before both their morning and afternoon yard time. And people would get pissed if they didn’t see all five kids or any of the kids were just moping around, so the kids had to go out even when they didn’t feel like it, and they had to “romp.”
• The trip to go meet the Royal Family when the kids were five was the first time they’d left their property since they’d been moved there as babies. Seriously, WHAT?!? No trips to the seaside or an amusement park or a zoo, much less to the hardware store or their parents’ farm or on a picnic? The kids had never even seen a cow before!!! How did anyone in charge of them think that would be good for their brains?
• When they tested the children while they were still institutionalized under Canadian guardianship, they discovered that the kids were developmentally behind, especially verbally because they’d lived in the same few rooms their entire lives and had nothing to ask questions about and nothing new to talk about, and physically because they never had to try anything new or develop independence.

Although I wish I’d been told more about the adult lives of Annette, Cecile, Émilie, Marie and Yvonne Dionne, I actually appreciated that I was not, because that’s clearly the better and more ethical choice. Those kids had their privacy stolen from them, and as adults they definitely deserved to be free from all the looky-loos who made their babyhood kid zoo so popular. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have burning questions that I didn’t try to Google on my own, ahem! But at least I had to do my own work for my gossip. I even Googled to see if anyone had ever found Cecile’s asshole son, Bertrand Langlois, who stole the rest of his elderly mother’s fortune and disappeared.

I hope you’re dead in a ditch somewhere, Bertrand!

P.S. View all my reviews.

P.P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!

Senior Pictures of the Jack-o-Lanterns, because the Real Senior in the Family Won't Cooperate

If YOU were a senior in college you'd let me take senior pictures of you, right? You'd let me coordinate cute outfits for you that go with the several picturesque locations I've planned out (I know where soooo many nice bridges are, for one thing!), and you'd be super into all the whimsical and flattering poses I've thought up, and you'd keep forever all the lovely photos I made of you as mementos of your magical senior year.

You'd definitely not be like my kid, who cares not for the frippery and folderol of the senior year season of life. Admittedly, she's stoked for some of her college's senior year traditions, like the few days between finals and graduation when apparently the seniors just get to run around campus, eat free snacks, and get their photos taken sitting behind the president's desk and standing on (GASP! The taboo of it!!!) the college's seal. You know, the one that you're not supposed to step on or you'll be cursed and won't graduate? I guess the curse can't take you after your final grades are in! 

But the year-long build-up to that last fun week? My college senior says no, thank you to that. She's got resumes to update and applications to fill out and comprehensive exams to study for and her last eight classes to pass. There is no room for whimsical nostalgia, much less a photo shoot that may or may not require several location changes and outfit changes and possibly more than one single instance of doing what her mother has asked her to do.

So sometimes you just have to pretend that you're taking senior pictures when you've got a kid pinned in your viewfinder, even if all you're actually doing is taking some snapshots while y'all carve pumpkins over Fall Break:

I love how ever since they were both little, one kid--the same kid each time!--has always tried to find the largest carving pumpkin in the pumpkin patch, and the other kid--also the same kid each time!--has always tried to find the smallest pumpkin that can still reasonably be carved.

I think this year is that kid's smallest pumpkin yet!

I don't know what kind of magic was used to make those cheapo pumpkin carving tools that you always see everywhere, but they randomly work great and last forever!

This weekend will mark our yearly tradition of finally kicking the Jack-o-lanterns over the edge of the wall so they can compost in peace under the bushes and we can put Christmas decorations there instead, so I thought I would memorialize their last week with us with a set of proper senior pictures just for them:

After this, they get to collect their free bagel, get their picture taken behind the president's desk, and finally stand on the school seal, and then it's off to new adventures!

P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!

10 Witch Hats for Halloween... Just Not Necessarily *This* Halloween

One improvement that I could easily make to my little hobby etsy shop is to anticipate seasonality.

Like, I'm literally the one who bitched every single year of my kid's Nutcracker years about why on earth the ballet department always acted like they had to reinvent the entire damn Nutcracker wheel every damn year. Y'all, you have done this thing before! Why is the children's dressing room never reserved and nobody has the elevator key and casting a dozen nine-year-olds in the same roles they held when they were eight takes three freaking weeks of daily emails saying that the casting will be out tomorrow? And yet here I am every year being all, "Oh, gorsh! Is Halloween month! Should I... make something Halloween for my etsy shop?" And then I have time to make maybe three things before Halloween is over.

Also me, sitting here on November 18 with nothing in my shop for Thanksgiving and nothing in my shop for Christmas

But you know what I DO have in my shop right now? The five handmade witch hats that I finished AFTER Halloween! The five that I managed to bust out before Halloween sold so quickly that I figured that this time I would get ahead of the game while I was thinking about it and my mind and my hands were already in witch hat mode.

I really like this hat that I fussy cut from a thrifted batik of the seven chakras:

I also got through quite a bit of previously thrifted formalwear for those pre-Halloween witch hats--

--as well as a successful experiment with facing a witch hat with burlap:

My big helper here just happened to be home for Fall Break right when I needed a witch hat model!

--but my absolute favorite hats, and the ones that I ended up making multiples of to get that jump on next Halloween, are these hats sewn from the last scraps of a vintage cutter quilt that I've had kicking around my fabric stash for over 15 years by now:

I'm a little sad to have used it all up with these hats, because I've never come across another old cutter quilt since, but I suppose that we mustn't hoard our resources, sigh.

It just sews up SO prettily!

These last four witch hats sewn from that vintage quilt are already listed in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, because who am I to tell you no if you want to buy one in the off-season--

--but what I really should do, and what I am firmly telling myself TO do, is to sew a couple more hats from unique fabrics every month, so that by the time next autumn rolls around I'll be fully stocked with seasonal items.

But not this week. This week my goal is to figure out how to sew re-usable fabric chains, probably with Velcro fasteners, because I think it would make a really cool--and eco-friendly! And heirloom!--holiday decoration. And obviously I won't figure that out and have any sets finished until it's past time to reasonably decorate for Christmas, sooo... I guess I'm really committed to getting a jump on next year's holiday products!

P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!