Thursday, April 12
When I saw Vonnegut in Denver
In 1997, Kurt Vonnegut came to Denver. My friend Krell and I made the drive down from the edge of nowhere to the Tattered Cover in Lower Downtown to see him. The next morning, I sent the following e-mail to my friend Hagerty.
Date: Wednesday, 8 October 1997 8:28 am MT
To: Tom.Hagerty
From: eba
Subject: Vonnegut
We waited about two hours, first for a ticket to one of the 300 seats, then for the thing to begin. All seats filled; standing crowd pushed total to maybe 350 or 400. He had a “professional interview” with a friend of his, the 40ish man who owns Wynkoop Brewery in LoDo, whose dad was a college frat buddy of Vonnegut’s at Cornell in the early ‘40s. [Note: Interviewer was John Hickenlooper, who’s now mayor of Denver.] As an interviewer, he was weak, but he was perfect to do it because they had some sort of relationship.
Vonnegut looked like the old man he is; a tousle of not-really-gray hair and lots of it, which he scratched frequently. He wore a blue suit and a thick tie that looked like it was made in the ‘80s; a big knot. He slumped back in the chair mostly, rolling his head from side to side, gesturing with one big hand. With his bush gray mustache, he looked not unlike Mark Twain, to whom he’s frequently compared of course.
He talked about lots of stuff: a bit about the new book; a lot about pursuing art in your life; he ripped Microsoft for doing everything it can to enslave people by making microchips replace much of the economic functions of human beings; he talked about religion and his atheism; he talked about social justice and living wages; and he talked about his silk screens. He had a lot of one-liners which the overly reverential crowd laughed loudly and applauded loudly and frequently.
He opened by asking if there were any members of the Turtle Club present. The appropriate answer is, “You bet your sweet ass I am.” Maybe a third of the crowd knew the answer and shouted it with glee, which is also appropriate.
I went, of course, with my own personal agenda: to learn from the closest thing I have to a mentor (in abstention), and to see if my literary hero could offer any advice that I could use. That’s asking a lot from a complete stranger, and usually in those situations, the anticipation, the waiting, the going is usually more important than the reality or the results. I’m a firm believer in ‘getting there is all the fun,’ that the journey is much better than the destination. And even with all of this personal baggage, I was still not disappointed by Vonnegut. He didn’t say anything new, but hearing it from him reinforced what we already know. And for some reason, I’m going to let him live as a hero, and try to do what he said.
Which was:
+ Be a decent human being. The world is a cruel place, and by trying, striving to be decent, to be a saint, at least there’s hope that the new babies born today will one day run into you and learn something about being decent. He also said his often-reported quote that he and a friend decided that about 17 percent of the people live these sorts of lives. (Drew a huge laugh).
+ Do art. Feed your soul. Don’t just watch it or read it or see it, but do it. Yourself. He even gave us homework: Go home, write a four line poem, and write the best four-line poem you can. Don’t read it to anyone. Just write it. Then wad it up and throw it away. Turn on the radio and dance. Don’t let anyone see you, just close the curtains and dance to a song. Sing a song. Learn all the words and sing the song to yourself. Draw. Paint. The art is in the doing, not in the selling or showing or reading or publishing. Do it for yourself. Get off the couch. (And as he talked, he got up out of his chair, and walked slowly around the riser/stage, dancing in slow motion the act of getting a book off a shelf and reading. In his old body, it was simply beautiful to see his fingers flipping pages.)
+ Enjoy the nice things. This was something his uncle told him. When you see a nice thing, pause and enjoy it. If it’s a pitcher of lemonade in the shade on the Fourth of July, pause and enjoy the moment. Say, “This is nice.”
+ Fart around. He lambasted the internet indirectly, reminiscing about the decentralized libraries at the U of Chicago. “I had to walk across the quadrangle and bump into people and see people and talk to strangers and go into the religion library or the English department library. How inconvenient!” he said, mockingly. “What a waste of time!” Then he paused and looked at the crowd. “But so what? What are humans here for? To waste time. Fart around.”
I’m glad I went. He lived up to my expectations, which is a rare thing indeed.
Date: Wednesday, 8 October 1997 8:28 am MT
To: Tom.Hagerty
From: eba
Subject: Vonnegut
We waited about two hours, first for a ticket to one of the 300 seats, then for the thing to begin. All seats filled; standing crowd pushed total to maybe 350 or 400. He had a “professional interview” with a friend of his, the 40ish man who owns Wynkoop Brewery in LoDo, whose dad was a college frat buddy of Vonnegut’s at Cornell in the early ‘40s. [Note: Interviewer was John Hickenlooper, who’s now mayor of Denver.] As an interviewer, he was weak, but he was perfect to do it because they had some sort of relationship.
Vonnegut looked like the old man he is; a tousle of not-really-gray hair and lots of it, which he scratched frequently. He wore a blue suit and a thick tie that looked like it was made in the ‘80s; a big knot. He slumped back in the chair mostly, rolling his head from side to side, gesturing with one big hand. With his bush gray mustache, he looked not unlike Mark Twain, to whom he’s frequently compared of course.
He talked about lots of stuff: a bit about the new book; a lot about pursuing art in your life; he ripped Microsoft for doing everything it can to enslave people by making microchips replace much of the economic functions of human beings; he talked about religion and his atheism; he talked about social justice and living wages; and he talked about his silk screens. He had a lot of one-liners which the overly reverential crowd laughed loudly and applauded loudly and frequently.
He opened by asking if there were any members of the Turtle Club present. The appropriate answer is, “You bet your sweet ass I am.” Maybe a third of the crowd knew the answer and shouted it with glee, which is also appropriate.
I went, of course, with my own personal agenda: to learn from the closest thing I have to a mentor (in abstention), and to see if my literary hero could offer any advice that I could use. That’s asking a lot from a complete stranger, and usually in those situations, the anticipation, the waiting, the going is usually more important than the reality or the results. I’m a firm believer in ‘getting there is all the fun,’ that the journey is much better than the destination. And even with all of this personal baggage, I was still not disappointed by Vonnegut. He didn’t say anything new, but hearing it from him reinforced what we already know. And for some reason, I’m going to let him live as a hero, and try to do what he said.
Which was:
+ Be a decent human being. The world is a cruel place, and by trying, striving to be decent, to be a saint, at least there’s hope that the new babies born today will one day run into you and learn something about being decent. He also said his often-reported quote that he and a friend decided that about 17 percent of the people live these sorts of lives. (Drew a huge laugh).
+ Do art. Feed your soul. Don’t just watch it or read it or see it, but do it. Yourself. He even gave us homework: Go home, write a four line poem, and write the best four-line poem you can. Don’t read it to anyone. Just write it. Then wad it up and throw it away. Turn on the radio and dance. Don’t let anyone see you, just close the curtains and dance to a song. Sing a song. Learn all the words and sing the song to yourself. Draw. Paint. The art is in the doing, not in the selling or showing or reading or publishing. Do it for yourself. Get off the couch. (And as he talked, he got up out of his chair, and walked slowly around the riser/stage, dancing in slow motion the act of getting a book off a shelf and reading. In his old body, it was simply beautiful to see his fingers flipping pages.)
+ Enjoy the nice things. This was something his uncle told him. When you see a nice thing, pause and enjoy it. If it’s a pitcher of lemonade in the shade on the Fourth of July, pause and enjoy the moment. Say, “This is nice.”
+ Fart around. He lambasted the internet indirectly, reminiscing about the decentralized libraries at the U of Chicago. “I had to walk across the quadrangle and bump into people and see people and talk to strangers and go into the religion library or the English department library. How inconvenient!” he said, mockingly. “What a waste of time!” Then he paused and looked at the crowd. “But so what? What are humans here for? To waste time. Fart around.”
I’m glad I went. He lived up to my expectations, which is a rare thing indeed.
