From Point A to Point B

With Lots of Stops

originally published May 14, 2008

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a friend of mine. Not that I ever met him, but he was a friend of mine all the same, because he did for me what friends do. He got me through rough patches of my life with his absurd humor and simple decency. When no one else’s words seemed to offer me anything, his were always there. Reading Vonnegut, I could always hear a voice, feel a human presence beyond mere style, beyond glib wordplay. Kurt Vonnegut was my friend, and your friend too.

Armageddon in Retrospect (Penguin USA, 2008) is a new collection of previously unpublished works by Vonnegut on the one-year anniversary of his death, and while it’s not exactly the treasure-trove his fans might have hoped for, this assortment of essays and short stories on the theme of war is still Vonnegut, and even the least of his works contain amazing stuff.

War was always a preoccupation for Vonnegut, its horrors and pointlessness and capacity to make otherwise rational people behave in nonsensical ways, and these elements are doled out in full and equal measure in this collection. Of particular interest to Vonnegut, and a running theme throughout most of his work, is the issue of capitulation - to what degree do we allow ourselves to be parties to war by doing nothing? In one story Vonnegut envisions a future without conflict, a condition so anathemic to the human condition that time-travel technology is used in order to seek it out. In another, an old couple in a Czechoslovakia freed from Communist rule finds themselves equally persecuted by an American occupying force for not having risen up against the last regime. A family man in Norman England has to choose between a cushy berth as his feudal lord’s tax collector and the example he must set for his son, despite his nattering wife’s excitement over better living through the scraps from the Normans’ table.

The defining moment in Vonnegut’s life was witnessing the firebombing of Dresden, Germany as a POW, an experience he attempted to write out through his seminal novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1965), but which provides fodder for several of the stories here. Unlike many posthumous collections, this one doesn’t quite have the feel of the author’s heirs plundering the bottom of a discard trunk, though the absence of any dates assigned to these stories does make one wonder just how long Vonnegut, a shameless anthologizer of his own work, allowed these to gather dust and why. Still, the collection is worth reading for the stories, the inclusion of Vonnegut’s final piece of writing, an address he was about to give at Indiana University when he had the accident that took his life, and son Mark Vonnegut’s eloquent and apt tribute to his father’s life and work. Vonnegut’s best? No. But in a world made the worse for losing Kurt Vonnegut’s voice and spirit, we’ll take what we can get. After all, he was our friend.

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One Man’s Trash: There are few phrases in the common parlance quite as pernicious as “guilty pleasure,” the idea that there are things out there - like raspberry Zingers, Weird Al Yankovic and “Walker, Texas Ranger” - that we enjoy, but should be ashamed of enjoying, because they’re somehow beneath us. We have devalued the notion of pure entertainment to such a degree that some of us actually apologize for being entertained. This is madness. Shy of snuff films and dogfighting, there is no shame whatsoever in deriving enjoyment from the labors of people who work hard to provide it, be they Steven Spielberg or David Hasselhoff. Say it once, say it loud, I watch “America’s Next Top Model” and I’m proud!

Michael Chabon doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures, either. Although firmly established as one of the leading lights of “serious” fiction of the last 15 years through remarkable work like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning (and just so damn good) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon has never been shy about his love of genre fiction or his assertion that there is as much insight, wisdom, and just plain good writing to be found in the pulp ghettos of mystery, fantasy, Westerns and science fiction as in the gated communities of the mainstream.

The eloquent defense of genre forms the core of Chabon’s first collection of essays, Maps and Legends (McSweeney’s Books, 2008). Many of the articles in the collection originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, erudite thought-pieces on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and the bizarre world of Sherlock Holmes scholarship (fanfic for academicians). Other pieces deal with M. R. James, the best writer of ghost stories you’ve never read, the passing of artist Will Eisner, and a celebration of comic-strip creator Ben Katchor.

Chabon’s nonfiction style is at times stultifyingly cerebral - the man does love a 10-dollar word - but never inaccessible, and his sheer enthusiasm for both the high- and low-brow elements that make up his psyche is infectious. Chabon’s fans are likely to get the most out of Maps and Legends, but then, there are an awful lot of those and there really should be more of them.

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Can’t Get There from Here: If you’re traveling to Central or South America any time in the near future and you want to use a Lonely Planet guidebook, check and see if Thomas Kohnstamm wrote it. The 32-year-old writer recently outed himself in a new book for writing at least one of his guidebooks, Lonely Planet Colombia, without actually going there, for plagiarizing passages in other guidebooks, and for dealing drugs on the side to supplement his income. Lonely Planet has been scrambling to fact-check Kohnstamm’s books and so far has found no inaccuracies, but Kohnstamm’s revelations come as a definite black eye to a company with a reputation for providing some of the most in-depth and comprehensive travel information on the market.

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RoboCop… Showgirls… Jesus: Film buffs tend to be divided on the subject of Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. Hailed as a genius auteur in his early career, particularly for his very good film Soldier of Orange, Verhoeven’s output in America has been spotty at best, from the campy brilliance of RoboCop to his embarrassing adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers to Showgirls, viewings of which should replace waterboarding as the CIA’s preferred form of torture.

Verhoeven’s next venture, however, is pretty much guaranteed to piss off everyone. Verhoeven, a member of the scholarly historical group the Jesus Seminar, has written a biography of Christ which contends that Jesus may have actually been the child of a Roman soldier who raped Mary. The book also attempts to salvage the reputation of Judas Iscariot. It is slated for release in English next year, and Verhoeven is reportedly working on a film version. Several members of the Jesus Seminar, including influential historian John Dominic Crossan, have come out against Verhoeven’s book, their comments boiling down to a collective “What the hell…?” Mel Gibson, on the other hand, may relax in knowing that he will soon no longer have made the most offensive movie ever about the life of Christ.

John G. Nettles