KVJ Documentary

March 25, 2022

 
I just finished the Kurt Vonnegut documentary “Unstuck in Time” and, ho boy, it surely hit me in the feels.

I’ve been reading some of his novels the past few years to include re-reading Slaughterhouse Five as well as purchasing the graphic novel version at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library gift shop when I visited there last year. It was my first visit to the new location in Indianapolis and because of the pandemic I was the only one there, having called ahead to set up an appointment of sorts. I was donating a copy of Life magazine from 1971 that I’d inherited from my Grandpa’s things and had a Vonnegut short story in it (Richard Nixon was on the cover, for goodness’ sake!). A Saturday morning tour of the museum followed while Elias slept in at our hotel room recovering from an AAU basketball game from the night before.

It seems a shame that I read so little of him prior to my 40’s, but there is much of his work that I would not have appreciated when I was younger. Now in my 50’s it is both painful and fascinating to see how similar our outlooks were/are when he was at this age. The realization kind of came full bloom as the documentary wound down and I realized his last published work before he died was a collection of essays entitled “Man Without a Country” which so strangely echoes things I have written about in my post-Army life, even just a week ago.

Probably the most Vonnegut-influenced thing I’ve ever written was Department of Dance which ends with a nod to Kurt and his famous bird’s call “Poo-tee-weet?” from Slaughterhouse Five that “symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say about war.“ Sadly, these are realities that continue to haunt us and I am thankful for Kurt’s unwavering honesty in writing about such things.

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