097 Time Pilgrim transcript (Kurt Vonnegut)

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Wiley: [00:00:00] This is famous in gravy biographies from a different point of view. To participate in our opening quiz, email us at hello@famousenggravy.com. Now, here's the quiz to reveal today's dead celebrity.

Michael: This person died 2007, age 84 in Chicago. He worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on quote, the fluctuations between good [00:00:30] and evil in simple tales.

Friend: Uh, Truman Capote.

Michael: Not Truman Capote, like Mark Twain, he used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence. For him, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. Studs, turkel, not studs, turkel with a blend of science fiction philosophy and jokes.

He wrote about the banalities of consumer culture and the destruction of the environment.

Friend: The Pinto guy, [00:01:00] I think he's still alive. Uh oh. Ralph. Uh, Ralph Nader.

Michael: Ralph Nader.

Friend: Ralph Nader.

Michael: Not Ralph Nader, who I believe is actually still alive. Let's see this recording.

Friend: Douglas Adams.

Michael: Not Douglas Adams Love Douglas Adams. With his curly hair askew. Deep pouches under his eyes and rumbled clothes. He often looked like an out of work philosophy professor. Typically chains smoking.

Friend: Oh my gosh, . Um, I mean, he sounds like Einstein, but Einstein's been dead forever. [00:01:30] Carl Sagan .

Michael: Not Carl Sagan. The defining moment of his life was the fire bombing of Dresden Germany by Allied Forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war.

His experience in Dresden was the basis of his book, slaughterhouse five.

Friend: Oh, Kurt Vonnegut . Kurt Vonnegut.

Michael: Today's dead celebrity is Kurt Vonnegut .

Archival: People have asked me sometimes about my popularity and I've tried to cobble together [00:02:00] and answer. The one I usually use is that I am sophomoric, is that I never got beyond asking childish.

Questions about what sort of person is God is. What happens to you after you die is what are you supposed to do while you're alive? Where were we before we were born? What will happen when the sun burns out? And these are all sophomore questions that grownups consider settled. And [00:02:30] in my books, I don't consider them subtle.

I consider them terribly interesting questions to play with.

Michael: Welcome to Famous Eng Gravy. I'm Michael Osborne, and my name is Wiley Hodges. And on this show we choose a famous figure who died in the 21st century, and we take a totally different approach to their biography. What didn't we know? What could we not see clearly? And what does a celebrity's life story teach us about [00:03:00] ourselves today?

Kurt GaN died 2007, age 84. Okay, so Amit is a way today, but I am thrilled to be joined by my friend Wiley Hodges Wiley and I met back when I lived in California for the last few months. We've been developing a show together that's about the history of technology. We're both are hoping that's gonna come out soon.

The other day, Wiley and I were talking, and I kind of casually mentioned that we'd been working on a Kurt Vonnegut episode and Wiley's face lit [00:03:30] up. He says like, I'm not just a fan, I am a Vonnegut student devotee. And I said, what the hell? Wiley? Come on the show and do a Kurt Vonnegut episode with us Wiley.

Did I miss anything and all that? Eh, it seems good enough and I'm excited to be here. I'm excited that you're here as well. Let's just get right to it. Category one, grading the first line of their obituary. Kurt Vonnegut whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like Slaughterhouse five, Kat's Cradle, and God Bless you, Mr.

Rosewater caught the temper of his times [00:04:00] and the imagination of a Generation died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and SCO Ponic on Long Island.

Wiley: Wiley. Your reaction? You know, it's one of those where the longer I read it, the worse it got.

Michael: Oh really? Okay. So you're coming outta the gate angry at the first one.

I'll

Wiley: admit that if I'm, I'm just thinking of score right away. I was at about like a seven and then I read it down to a six and I'm still kind of wavering.

Michael: Okay, wait a second. [00:04:30] I, 'cause that's so interesting. Yeah. I love it for a lot of reasons. Maybe let's start with the positives. Sure. And then I want to get to your criticisms

Wiley: and there's a lot of positives, so I need to be careful here.

Dark comic talent is great. It's a good way of describing him. It's interesting because I think he himself ISEs sued the term dark comic. I think he, in fact, oh, is that right? He really pushed back against that.

Michael: He pushed back against the dark part of that. The dark part in particular. Yeah.

Wiley: Yes.

Michael: Fair enough.

I mean, I could see that urgent moral vision though, that those are, I love

Wiley: that. That is a [00:05:00] brilliant turn of phrase and I think that that is the highlight for me of this opening line.

Archival: My wish is to be a good citizen. It's something my father was, he was a useful man in the community and, and so were all my ancestors in Indianapolis and, uh, I wanted to be of use to, to my community, what is the purpose of life?

To be the eyes and ears and conscience of

Michael: the creator of the universe. You fool. I [00:05:30] thought that caught the temper of his times and imagination of a generation was also kind of excellent. Like he rode a wave of sentiment. There is something coincidental about the rise of V's celebrity with what was happening in Vietnam and the sort of larger social forces happening in America.

He had a moment for a reason, and I think that's kind of captured here and that is a nice characterization of him. So I've said a lot of the positives. I'm dying to

Wiley: know your [00:06:00] critiques. I. I will admit, I began overanalyzing this, so I was probably at an eight on the first read. Okay. And the next time I read through it, I was like, okay, first of all, there are no novels here written after 1969.

This is a man who lived until 2007 and wrote through the nineties. It might not have been his best work, but I would question whether none of those books rose to the level of at least one of the three books here on this list. That's a i, I think a question

Michael: Slaughterhouse, five Cat's, cradle, and God Bless You, Mr.

Rosewater. I think those three choices are [00:06:30] interesting. Slaughterhouse Five, I think, had to be in there. Absolutely. Breakfast to Champions is

Wiley: the one that leaps out to me. That's the first one that really leapt out to me because I feel like it's. One of his most experimental novels and was very commercially successful and moderately critically successful.

Yeah, let me just go down my negatives. So nothing written after 1969 and then I start really getting like lawyerly about the next lines. I'm like caught the temper of his times. What are his times? I mean, remember he was basically [00:07:00] nearly 50 when he published Slaughterhouse five.

Michael: He's a countercultural figure, but he is not of the counterculture generation.

Wiley: Right. And so are they suggesting that he was of an older generation? I mean, he was contemporary, for example, of Joseph Heller? Yeah.

Michael: Let me add a little fuel to your argument. I do think that Vonnegut is still read a lot today When I was Is, is this where you're going? That's

Wiley: my next point, which is a generation.

How about many generations? At least three generations, quite frankly.

Michael: I, I agree with that. So in researching this [00:07:30] episode, I went to a local bookstore just around the corner where you can buy books around 50% of their original value. And I go up to the front desk and I say, Hey, I'm looking for these Vonne books.

And the person working at the information desk immediate was like, oh, I love Vonnegut. And then somebody happened to walk by and overhear us and was like, oh, Vonnegut, God bless you, Mr. Rosewater is my favorite book of all time. And then when I got the books and went to the actual front desk, they were like, oh, I have all these on my bookshelf.

I love Vate. These are three people who I'd never met. Complete strangers. Yeah. [00:08:00] And I used bookstore who are having a reaction in 2025 A around Kurt Flanigan. He is not just freeze framed in time like Frozen amber. He is very much . Still a, an important figure. And I think that maybe that's where you're going here.

Wiley: Yeah. This particular opening line could have been written in 1970 and it's not like the New York Times didn't have time to update this. I mean, the man was a chainsmoking. Octogenarian. Yeah. I think we were all a little shocked that Vonnegut made it to 84, I think including, by the way, Kurt Voigt.

Michael: Yes, I [00:08:30] He's the first to say that.

Yeah. Let me add one other thing that leaps out to me, and I hadn't thought about this until we started talking. I do like the simplicity of the language that's very Vonnegut like in a way, dark comic talent. Urgent moral vision, caught the temper of his times. Imagination of a generation. There's no $10 words in here.

The vocabulary is kind of succinct and efficient in a way that . In some ways echoes his style.

Wiley: You're right that this is a headline that any eighth grader could read and understand. So in that sense, yes, [00:09:00] definitely down the middle. Pretty easy to get. I think actually words like imagination of a Generation probably aren't very Vonnegut esque.

Okay,

Michael: fair enough. Because

Wiley: they're less personal. But you're right that the simplicity of it is, is definitely something that's important about Vonnegut.

Michael: Well, that's me over analyzing. All right. You've got your score. I want to hear yours before I get you go first. Yeah.

Wiley: So I've got my score. I landed at a seven and that was my, my charitable upgrade after diving to a six.

So I think you've heard my reasons. It's good, but it feels like there was so much more they could have tried [00:09:30] to work in there.

Michael: Fair enough. Okay. I'm higher than that. I'm, I'm gonna give it an eight. I would've given it a nine. But your point about nothing after 1969, I think is really well taken. And I do take issue with the idea of we happened to get lucky at a moment.

I know that that's not exactly what's being said here, but that's what I'm reading in the subtext caught the temper of his times and imagination of a generation. It doesn't do justice to his durability and to his lasting legacy. So eight and a seven. Alright. Okay. We landed in similar [00:10:00] places. All right.

Category two, five things I love about you here, Wiley and I will develop a list of five things that offer a different angle on who this person was and how they lived. I'm gonna let you lead here. What do you got?

Wiley: What do you got For number one, I think this is actually kind of hinted at, even in what we talked about with the first line of the obit, what are people for?

Oh, , you know? Yeah. This line. First appears in Player Piano in 1952, his first novel, and it feels like the question he [00:10:30] asks for the rest of his life and such a big question and such a big idea. And he didn't ask what is mankind's place in the cosmic order, right? He didn't like put it in bigger or impersonal terms.

It was what are people for?

Michael: Yeah.

Wiley: And he dared like very few novelists before, since to ask big questions like this in plain language. And I feel like that plain language actually makes the ideas feel bigger because the fact that he can distill the questions down to a few simple words. It doesn't make the answer any [00:11:00] less elusive.

And once you grasp that, I think you can really feel this mind at work saying, dammit, there has to be a simple answer in here somewhere and still struggling to find it for the rest of his literary career.

Michael: That's such a good deri. I mean, 'cause this is Vonnegut's great talent is his ability to go after very big ideas with very simple language.

Absolutely.

Archival: When you get to be my age, you start asking your kids what life is all about. [00:11:30] And I asked my son, mark Vonnegut, what life was all about. He's a pediatrician and he gave what I think is a very good answer. He said, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is, . So I tell you that.

Michael: One thing I have on here, and maybe this will come up in one of my things, is that he's kind of a gateway drug, right? Like he's the first person I remember reading in high school where I wasn't confused, [00:12:00] like I could follow this story, right? The language is all simple, but I also felt like I was reading

You know, literature. The other thing about that phrase, what are people for, it's a recurring theme, obviously in his work. The sort of tension we have. Industrialization and dehumanization. Right, right. Of the worker. Right. And of people, what is the point of us? I guess one thing I wanna make sure I'm capturing with your thing, number one, 'cause it sounds like you're pointing both to the like bigness of the idea and the way it's phrased and framed.

[00:12:30] Correct. And we've talked a little bit about the bigness of the idea, but say a little bit more about what the question means or how you interpret what are people for?

Wiley: Well, I kind of said he didn't ask what is mankind's place in the cosmic corridor, but I think that's actually the kind of question he's asking is why are we here?

Why do we have to endure the things we have to endure in human form and . He playfully answers that at different times in different ways in his literary career. You know, one of my favorites is in Sirens of [00:13:00] Titan. It turns out that most of humanity's endeavors after a certain point have been directed by these aliens to help create a new part for the spaceship of one of the aliens who stranded on Titan the moon of Saturn.

Yeah. And things like the Pyramids, or Stonehenge or the Great Wall of China are basically just messages back to this alien about, Hey, . Working on the part, Hey, expected soon it has this quality that I associate also with Douglas Adams. So I've always enjoyed, that's exactly

Michael: who I was thinking of, but

Wiley: obviously Adams was much later and had the [00:13:30] playfulness without the same level of sort of deep searching.

Mm-hmm . I think one of the interesting things about Vonnegut is he can take that kind of. Sci-fi humoristic conceit and turn it into an existential question.

Michael: Yes. Perfect. Actually. Okay, so I'm gonna give you my thing number two. Yeah. Which is kind of related to this. I wrote down Time Traveler. I've been rereading Slaughterhouse five, and I love the words Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

Wiley: Yeah.

Michael: And I'm like, why does that phrase do so much [00:14:00] for me? Unstuck in time. And one thing I love about it is that we all often feel unstuck in time. Most of our conscious life is not in the present. People talk about mindfulness and trying to get to the present most of the time where you're thinking about stuff we did in the past or what's coming next in the future.

We're all kind of unstuck in time, but we're also at the same time, stuck in time. Right? We're locked in to an experience of seconds, hours, minutes, days, weeks, months, years. Sort of marching along in a [00:14:30] relentless, stuck kind of way. And so it's such a like clever device to describe experience and then take it literally in a very science fiction kind of way.

But it speaks to what so much of us feel. Yeah. And it's built out of, I think, trauma more than anything else. And I don't know that he said that exactly. We haven't really talked much about the story yet. One thing that did not come up in the grading, the first line of the obituary is how important Dresden is in his life and the bombing of Dresden.

Kinda feel [00:15:00] like we might go through that chronology a little bit.

Wiley: I mean, he had this very privileged childhood early on, was part of a sort of huge community of German immigrants who were mercantilists and very successful. He was the youngest of three children and quite a bit younger, particularly than his older brother Bernard, who was kind of a dominating force in in his life.

He was very close to his older sister Alice, who came between he and Bernard. His mother was herself a wealthy heiress, but a bitch. She was troubled, I bet, [00:15:30] troubled. And let's fast forward a little bit because I think the family falls on hard times and the depression that privileged childhood essentially evaporates and his mother has.

Terrible trouble coping with this and in a really tragic, horrible turn kills herself on Mother's Day, I believe in 1943.

Michael: It's right after Vonnegut had joined the service, and then shortly thereafter he shipped

Wiley: off to Europe. Exactly. He ships off to Europe. He's in the Battle of the Bulge, right? Is taken captive along [00:16:00] with about 15,000 US troops in that battle, and marched for days deep into Germany where he then rides a rail car and eventually ends up in Dresden.

And after doing backbreaking labor, under starvation conditions, then has to be there to witness the aftermath of this absolutely cataclysmic horrible event, the bombing of Dresden at where at least 35,000 people died and estimates run to as high as 80,000 or more. And so he has the terrifying experience of being underground during the bombing, [00:16:30] and he described it as giants footsteps walking across the earth, but then worse yet, dealing with the terrible aftermath of that firebombing, which

Like I said, killed tens of thousands of people and utterly destroyed what had been a real jewel of that part of Europe.

Michael: I think you have to lay that groundwork of Donette's childhood into early adulthood experience. Right. To understand the trauma of his life. Yeah. This is, I guess my point with his relationship to time and time traveler that we all, I think for whatever reason, have a hard time [00:17:00] being in the moment because of our relationship with trauma for various reasons.

Right. I like the way he uses that. In his books to get at human condition and human experience.

Wiley: Yeah,

Michael: so obviously we kind of got a little bit away from it, but it's sort of necessary to understand my thing. Number two, we're all unstuck in time.

Wiley: There's also this intellectual level that I think Vonnegut got partly from his study of anthropology later at the University of Chicago, that there's this level at which humans as animals are unique in that we are unstuck in time.[00:17:30]

We recall the past used that to help us strategize and plan for the future, and so I think he was very attuned to that aspect of this as well, that that quality of . Not being present is part of what makes us human, but also part of what hurts us as human beings. Well said. Okay. What do you got for number three?

My number three is the company. Mm. One of the things that, if you look at Vonnegut's speeches and essays, he talks a lot about is this need to create families to create Yeah. Communities around us. And one of the [00:18:00] things I love in his literature is that he actually created a family. He created a, a company of players, a cast of characters who recur throughout his novels.

Some of whom are, you know, very notable and large, some of whom are probably. Very lightly disguised stand-ins for himself or members of his family and others of whom are just, you know, fun characters who he always wants to return to. And notable amongst those, you've got Kilgore, trout. Mm-hmm . The kind of failed, frustrated science fiction novelist.

Nothing autobiographical about that, I'm sure. Right. The [00:18:30] Room Fords the very wealthy family from the Midwest that controls so much wealth. And Niles Rumford is the central character of Sirens of Titan. You see the Rumford recur throughout other books in his work. These are characters who you actually come to really know and love and relate to.

Yeah. And I think it also comes back to that thing you mentioned in your number two about being unstuck in time and time traveling. I think he has this idea that he introduces in the sirens of Titan about kind of looping back through time. Mm-hmm . And repeating it over and over again. And Billy Pilgrim does this and Slaughterhouse five.

Yeah. [00:19:00] He does this with these characters, the novels that he writes,

Michael: the Tramal Dorans, the Alien Race experience Time in the fourth dimension, as in all events are present all the time.

Archival: Yeah.

Michael: Right. That is reality on some level. Yes. It's just not how we experience reality. And

Wiley: again, we meet the Tramal Alpha Dorans early in his work and they continue to appear throughout his novels.

Yeah. And so they are a, a fixture of Kurt Vonnegut's work throughout. So he's invented an entirely alien race and planet as well as this cast of characters.

Michael: I [00:19:30] have more about the company later on in a future category. All right. So I'm glad you brought it up 'cause I think there's more to say about that.

Okay. Let give you my number four. We, I'm gonna go with language lessons and I think this came up in a previous famous Eng Gravy episode. Language lessons is something I always think of Better Off Dead. The two Japanese guys who one doesn't speak English and the other one learned it from watching Howard Cosell language lessons.

This was my way of just capturing some things I love. So the two things [00:20:00] that have really endeared me to him is how much he does try to explain his process and his ways of thinking. So there is this very famous clip of Vonnegut drawing these graphs of story structure. Those graphs are beautiful. I've used those in working with people to help think about story structure.

Archival: This is the GI axis. Good fortune, ill fortune, sickness and poverty down here. Wealth and boisterous good health up there. [00:20:30] Now this is the be axis. B stands for beginning.

E stands for electricity . So we'll start a little above average is why. Why get a depressing person? The whole thing. We call this story man in hole, but it needing to be about a man and it needing to be about somebody getting into a hole. But it's just a good way to remember it. Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again.

People love that [00:21:00] story, . They never get sick

Michael: of it. He also has these eight rules of writing. I thought I might actually share 'em real quick just 'cause I think these are so valuable. I'll go 'em through 'em quickly. All right. Number one, use the time of a total stranger, meaning his reader in such a way that he or she will not feel that time was wasted.

Value the reader's time. Two. Give the reader at least one character. He or she can root for. Three. Every character should want something, even if it's only a glass of water. , [00:21:30] uh, which I think that's perfect. Uh, four. Every sentence must do one of two things. Reveal character or advance the action. Five. Start as close to the end as possible.

That's such a vonne. Good thing. Six. Be a sadist. This one's hilarious. No matter how sweet or innocent, your leading characters make awful things happen to them. In order that the reader may see what they are made of. I think that's a great tip. Do something awful to your characters. Be a sadist, and he definitely delivers and he delivers on that.

[00:22:00] Number seven, write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. This is an idea that I feel like. Everybody can benefit from think, this is why we come up with avatars and, and marketing right to please just one person. I think for him that was really his sister Alice, and we might talk more about that later.

Wiley: Yeah, that was, that was gonna be one of my five things. .

Michael: Yeah. All right. Number eight, give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible to, heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is [00:22:30] going on, where and why that they could finish the story themselves.

Should cockroaches eat the last few pages? These are great tips. You don't have to follow all of them, and this is obviously more how he writes, but they get you thinking about like, what am I doing in a story? Am I wasting people's times? Do my characters have a point? He opens the doors for how to write.

And Vette as a teacher and as a beloved teacher, is such a. Part of his overall persona that I felt like it had to be called out.

Archival: There [00:23:00] are a few fundamental things that are known about storytelling simply because some stories have succeeded and others have failed. So I can be like a golf pro is I can stand to one side and tell you to swing your club and I'll say, all right, put a little more weight on your left foot is move your thumb down a quarter of an inch and the ball will go 50 feet farther and you won't yourself know what the hell you were doing wrong.

And there are things you can do wrong in storytelling. I mean, these are mechanical things, so [00:23:30] I can be helpful in that way. So

Wiley: that was my number four. Alright, I love that. Number four. You did step on my number five, but I'm gonna pick a different one. So, okay. I, I do think it was a great point about writing for one person, but you know, the thing that I don't think we've talked about as much yet, although it came up in the obit, in the opening line.

Gut buster. Kurt Vonnegut was hilarious.

Archival: Oh yeah.

Wiley: at, at least in print, and actually in his public appearances too. You know, he loved using humor and he used it in uncomfortable ways. It's very clear [00:24:00] that he dealt with difficult topics by kind of laughing them off and making jokes about them.

Archival: The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most important, most powerful people on the face of the earth were named Bush Dick, and Colon

Wiley: He also clearly understood the value of humor in dealing with adversity, and I saw this interview with him where he cited his influences not just as literary giants like Gui, depe [00:24:30] song or whoever really said, you're right. Right. You know Twain. Yeah. Twain, obviously. But he also mentions Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton, and he actually says that making people laugh is one of the greatest gifts you can give.

I'm so

Michael: glad you brought this up. This has been so top of mind for me. Lately, this has kind of been a kind of theme we've been developing on Famous and Gravy, George Carlin for sure. But it really came up for me big in the Harold Ramis episode where I've been thinking about the intersection of humor [00:25:00] and spirituality.

I don't think to laugh is necessarily to have a spiritual experience, but I do think that laughing, it does create a feeling of belonging and security, that there's a sort of release of I'm gonna be okay. And part of the reason I feel that is 'cause I'm laughing with somebody else that makes me feel safe, but it also makes me feel connected.

And so I'm still, again, fleshing this idea out. But I do think that in as much as Famous Eng Gravy is sort of interested in [00:25:30] the upward staircase and the spiritual path of a life, we need to pay attention to somebody's use of humor sometimes, or that's one way to to track it a little bit. And I think super present with V,

Archival: the basic ingredient.

Of comedy is that you're a helpless person and it is a, it's the only response you can make under overwhelming odds. You see, you know, or you can make a blind last charge to glory basically. When you, when you can't fight back and you really can't do anything to rescue [00:26:00] yourself or anybody else, you have to do something and you can put your fist through a door or you can kick a baseboard or you can make a joke.

Wiley: I think you can't talk about Vette without talking about the humor because it is one of the most appealing things about him as a writer is that he makes you laugh and you wanna keep coming back for more of that. I can't tell you how much

Michael: fun I've had rereading Vonnegut in the lead up to this episode.

Let's recap. So number one, you said, what are people for? What are people [00:26:30] for? Number two, I went with time traveler. Number three. You said the company? Yeah. Number four. I said language lessons and number five, gut Buster . Amazing list. Okay, let's take a break. Alright. Next category, category three, one love. In this category, we each choose one word or phrase that characterizes their loving relationships.

First, we will review the family life data. Okay? There's kind of a lot here. There

Wiley: is a lot.

Michael: All right, so wife number one, Jane. [00:27:00] They were married in 1945. Kurt was 23 when they got married, divorced in 1978. He was 56 when they finally divorced, although the marriage had fallen apart years earlier. We'll get more to that in a second.

Three children with Jane. Then we kind of have to pause and tell this story about Alice. So, because it's a little too incredible not to tell. Kurt was very close with his older sister Alice. She was kind of the person he was always writing for. Alice died in 1958. She got diagnosed with [00:27:30] breast cancer and as , this is kind of wild.

So her husband was kind of, everybody's preparing for her death and her husband. 36 hours before Alice dies, he's in this terrible, crazy train wreck. So Kurt and Jane, I. Say, okay, we're gonna step in. When, when both Alice and her husband are dead, they're gonna take the children into their home. In Cape Cod, there's four kids with four boys.

Yeah, four boys. [00:28:00] The youngest ends up actually living with the in-laws for a while, but Kurt plays a important role in their lives. So he is got this house full of six children, sometimes seven children, and they're very broke during many of these years. Most of those years, yes. In the mid sixties. When Kurt goes to take a job at the University of Iowa and the Iowa Writer Workshop, he has an affair with a student.

Lori, this one was a little bit confusing because this comes out in the Charles Shields biography, but there was definitely an a [00:28:30] lasting affair, and she's kind of amused, but it's also not . Totally substantiated in other places. I came away thinking that the two of them had a lasting affair.

Wiley: I think they had a lasting relationship, and in fact, I would count Lori as one of the three romantic interests of Vonnegut's life.

Michael: I agree with that. Okay. Then finally, wife number two, Jill Kreitz. She's much younger than Kurt. They marry in 1979, and they're together until death. They have one adopted daughter, Lily. Kurt did file for [00:29:00] divorce and backed away three times. Three times with Jill and never saw it all the way through. But that relationship sounded problematic and toxic in a lot of ways.

So, a, it's not a great story. Kurt's love life. Couple other things with the three other kids. There's no formal adoption of his nephews of Alice's sons, although they're basically like his kids in a way, and he's very much a father figure. We mentioned his mother's suicide on Mother's Day. The last bit of information I think we have to throw in here is that for a period of time, his [00:29:30] son-in-law was Geraldo Rivera.

Wiley: I love that. Yes, and I, I'm glad you mentioned it. I was certainly going to, it was only, I think between 1971 and 75, but hey, yeah, one

Michael: of his daughters marries Geraldo Rivera. Of

Wiley: all people. Of all people. I'll be all people.

Michael: Why don't you take us off here, Wiley? Well,

Wiley: I've decided to choose the most complicated possible word or phrase to describe this, and I took it from who else, but Kurt Vonnegut.

I have actually chosen the word Kronos. Syn clastic, infundibulum,

Archival: Jesus.

Wiley: You know, it's a [00:30:00] literary device. It's a physical phenomenon, but a liter literary device that he creates in his novel, the Sirens of Titan. It's a time warp. It's a time and space loop. And there are a couple of qualities of the Kronos and classic infundibulum.

One of them is that you keep coming back to places at regular intervals. And to me, this is a really interesting theme of his life, that he does have this sort of sense of traveling from place to place, but always returning to the same few places. And that's actually the experience of, I think, the Niles [00:30:30] Rumford character in Sirens of Titan.

There's also this idea that, that all conflicting ideas can harmonize inside the Kronos Syn, clastic, infundibulum. And the reality is that he revisited relationships repeatedly. He . Had a very hot and cold relationship, I think with his wife Jane, who was very supportive of his writing. Yes. But also at times, very at odds with him, particularly as he grew into fame, success.

Yeah. And I think had a very complex and revisited relationship with [00:31:00] Lori, the woman he met at the University of Iowa and continued to have some kind of romantic dalliances with, at least into the 1980s.

Michael: There's emotional intimacy, physical intimacy, I think is a question, but she serves at a really interesting and important role in his life.

Wiley: And what's interesting to me is both Jane and Lorie . End up being sounding boards. They end up being, yeah. Women who he returns to, to have a intellectual relationship with. Because I think one of the things that's really interesting about Jane is she was as much his editor and critic as his [00:31:30] champion and sort of supporter through his writing career, fundamental role in his success.

He relies on her deeply for that. Yeah, and I think he also relied on Lori for this as well. Then we come to Jill, who is a very different kind of relationship, but Jill represents essentially the gateway to him, really imbibing success when he enjoys it in, in the early 1970s. Yeah. She's a successful photographer, right?

And very successful photographer. She's also a product of New York society, and so it's worth noting that she's already wired into the [00:32:00] glitterati of New York. Yeah. When she takes up with Kurt Vonnegut in 1970 or 71 or whenever that actually happens, she really becomes the entree to that very elite New York social scene, and so Vonnegut becomes.

A fixture of this, you know? Mm-hmm . Dining at the finest restaurants and attending all the best parties and things like that. Hanging

Michael: out with James Lipton, among others, .

Wiley: But that is a, a role that she plays, is to essentially take the cloistered Midwestern author living on Cape Cod and turn him into a [00:32:30] sort of fixture of American popular culture.

And I think it wears uncomfortably in a couple of ways. I think he has this difficulty with her, and I think with the life they have together, he leaves, he comes back. And so it's this loop. I know it's a complicated word. I know it's a silly word, but I do think that it embraces these ideas of this sort of journey that repeats and loops on itself.

Yeah. And that has a lot of both conflict and resolution. Because the last thing I'll say about that is that I think one of the [00:33:00] beautiful things about the relationship that he and Jane had, and that he and Lori had at least, it's very clear that there was a lot of resolution. Toward the end and a lot of love.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. Okay. That's so interesting. Mine has interesting parallels and echoes, but is described very differently. So I went with. Manje Ferrell. Stray Dog. Oh my. Yeah. Okay. . Uh, here's . So first of all, like Vonnegut is thoroughly disheveled, right? [00:33:30] I imagine that he looks disheveled even right after he steps outta the shower.

He always looks a little bit sort of mange. There's a rumbled look about him. There's a rumble. This to him. Yes. I think that he is a bit of a dog in the doghouse with some of his extramarital affairs. So there is a little bit of running around the neighborhood. Absolutely. A stray dog.

Archival: Absolutely. Yeah.

Michael: At the same time, like any stray dog, he has a kind of stubborn loyalty to his adopted home.

The marriage with Jane is over by the early seventies, but the divorce didn't finalize until 78. And the fact that he [00:34:00] can't ever quite have a clean break with Jill, I think also speaks to a stray dog that kind of doesn't have anywhere else to go. This is more about his parenting. He might romp through the mud with you and, and make a mess and

Wiley: lit literally.

In fact, I believe they had literally romp through

Michael: the mud at the home and Cape. God. Yeah. But I think he'll also bite the hand that feeds you. The kids talk about him being a very scary figure when they ran afoul of him in the house. Yeah. And it does sound like feral household in a way. Absolute. The, I mean, the kids are being parented, but it's pretty messy.

[00:34:30] And it's a scene there. And it sounded like the house that all the neighborhood kids would go to to get in trouble. It was not a regimented home. Exactly. So he might bite the hand to feed you just like a traumatized stray dog. And then at the end of the day, and it's interesting, I landed in . Similar places you did.

Like any animal, he's still got a lovable quality. Yeah. There's something very, like you kind of wanna pet him , you know? So I think you hit the important points, and I got there in a sort of different way, but main G Ferrell, stray dog. I [00:35:00] think that's a, I won't say a beautiful analogy, but I get it. Yeah, thanks.

Okay, let's move on. Category four, net worth. In this category, Wiley and I will each write down our numbers ahead of time. We'll then talk a little bit about our reasoning, and then we'll look up the net worth number in real time to see who's closest. Finally, we'll place this person on the famous and gravy net worth leaderboard.

I know you have thought way more about this than you should have. Yes. Explain your reasoning a little bit, . Well,

Wiley: when you think about someone's net worth, you wanna think about really a couple [00:35:30] of things. One is how much money did they ever make? How much money that did they likely spend, and what did they get for it?

Did any of it have lasting value?

Michael: That's the last part that I don't think much about, but yes. You don't wanna think about that. So you thought about that last one. I thought about.

Wiley: I thought about all of those. So,

Michael: so how valuable were the books? How valuable were the homes? How valuable were other Yeah.

Properties that he had. Yeah. And I think we,

Wiley: to get to the very, very last thing, I don't think we have any good way of knowing, for instance, the value of his investment portfolio. But he did have one. What's very interesting is for a kind of counterculture [00:36:00] figure, he was into investing in America, right?

Yeah. And he had stocks and bonds and all of the stuff you would expect of a wealthy guy living in New York. He's

Michael: not exactly an anti-capitalist No. Or a socialist, right? But he's

Wiley: read that way at times. He comes from this line of successful merchants and businessmen and, and he is not born from sort of revolutionary cloth.

He is very much a man of American industry. So he had those kinds of investments. So clearly he put some of that money aside, but he also had an [00:36:30] ex-wife and a bunch of kids, and um, that's a good point and a taste for some good life, at least during those, those times in the seventies. And so I'm sure he spent quite a lot of that money.

And so I look at that as there was a lot of outflow that probably wasn't that much less than the inflow. And so I doubt he accumulated. A huge amount of cash, but he kind of couldn't help being successful in the early seventies. I think he even said this that he had the unfortunate luck of after he published Slaughterhouse Five, being able to publish basically anything and have [00:37:00] it be a bestseller.

Yeah. And so he did have a number of New York Times bestsellers and

Michael: the back catalog got bought and is still in print after Slaughterhouse Five's success. Yeah.

Wiley: I believe that when he actually published Slaughterhouse five right before that, he only had like one novel in print at that time. Yeah. And eventually all of his novels were in print.

And they're all in print still today.

Michael: Uh, I'll tell you what I did. Okay. To get out a number, I looked at two comps on the famous eng gravy net worth leader. That's a great

Wiley: way to do it. Larry

Michael: McMurtry was about 2 million. Okay. Tom Wolf was about 20 million. Okay. I went [00:37:30] in between . That seems like a

Wiley: really good methodology.

That's all

Michael: I did. Okay, so let's reveal. So Wiley Hodges wrote down 4.7 million. I love that. There's a decimal in here. You

Wiley: know, precision Mike Osborne wrote down 12 million.

Michael: Yeah, the actual Kurt Vonnegut Networth 5 million at the time of his death in 2007. Well done Wiley Hodges. I can see you beaming with Pride

I know how [00:38:00] competitive you are. Way closer than me and well done. That's great. That's a perfect number for Kurt Vonnegut. Okay, before we move on, let's place Kurt Vonnegut on the net worth leaderboard. So at 5 million, he is in a four way tie with Yogi Berra, Fred Willard, Paul Rubins at Peewee Herman and Oliver Sachs.

That's great company for Kurt Von. That is great

Wiley: company for Kurt Vaught. I feel like that would be an awesome party.

Michael: Yeah. He's below Bob Einstein. He is also below James Lipton, which I gotta say I [00:38:30] kind of love that. And then Perfect. Then he's just above Nelson Mandela. Oh man. The positioning on this leaderboard is fantastic.

Absolutely amazing. All right, well then Kurt Vogan, next category, little Lebowski, urban Achievers.

Archival: They're the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers. Shit. Yeah. The achievers. Yes. And proud. We are of all of them

Michael: in this category, we each choose a trophy and award, a cameo and impersonation or some other form of a hat.

Tip that shows a different side of this person. I'll go ahead and lead this off because you and I had to compete over this a little bit. His cameo in the [00:39:00] 1986 film Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield. So Back to School, has become something of a Bermuda Triangle for Famous and Gravy. Recently starring Rodney Dangerfield, written by Harold Ramis.

And now we have Kurt Vogan. Yeah, there's a lot of confluence of forces here. So the setup of this is Rodney Dangerfield's character. Thornton Mellon has gone back to school as an older man, and he is now in college and he's sort of trying to prove something there. He's running late on a term paper on Kurt Vogan and his son says, you've gotta [00:39:30] get to work on this term paper.

And then the door doorbell rings and it's actually Kurt Vonnegut saying here, I'm, I'm here for Thornton Mellon, I'm gonna help him with the term paper, essentially.

Archival: So how are you gonna write the paper then? Huh?

Hi, I'm Kurt Voigt. I'm looking for Thornton Mellon. Uh, want to come in.

Michael: And it's the only time I think, other than movies that he wrote, he ever has a major Hollywood cameo. [00:40:00] My probably favorite part of this joke is when the teacher who grades his term paper says, I know you didn't write that. And by the way, whoever wrote this has no idea what Vonnegut is all about.

That's right. That's,

Wiley: yeah.

Michael: So back to school and I, okay. Different side. Why this cameo? I think we kind of alluded to this a second ago. I see some imposter syndrome with Kurt Gant. Right. And I think Rodney Dangerfield to his character. Thornton Mellon has a little bit of imposter syndrome too. He's a blue color guy who's made it into the rich [00:40:30] circle.

So there is something about not just any old author, but this particular author in this movie, in this role where there's some connective tissue there. A along the nose, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, back to school. That's my little Basque.

Wiley: And I'm gonna add to that, one of the best parts of that for me is that the person who answers the door in the dorm room is the actor who plays Rodney Dangerfield's son, Keith Gordon.

Yeah. Who goes on to direct the film adaptation of Vonnegut's Novel Mother Night.

Michael: Yes, [00:41:00] I saw that. So there you go. The chain continues. Yes.

Wiley: Beautiful. All right. What do you got for this? It's hard to even come up with a second place to back to school because it's such a perfect cameo. I'm gonna actually cheat and do two, which is the first I'll say is he was in a lot of his novels.

He actually is a cameo character who appears all over his own work.

Michael: Well, this a, an idea and all storytelling has an element of autobiography to it. Yeah. And he makes that explicit

Wiley: and he gets much more autobiographical as his career continues. A hundred percent. So when you get to Time Quake, [00:41:30] it's about 50 50 autobiography and, and novel.

Yeah. So I think, you know, he's the leading cameo. I, I will mention one in popular culture that I totally love, which is an episode of The Simpsons from, I believe, season 23 where the Simpsons are going on a trip. Lisa is packing and she's cramming her suitcase full of books. And Bart comes up to her and says,

Michael: Lisa, do you really need all these curd Gantt novels?

They self-reference each other, . And uh, and so it's, that's actually kinda one thing. And, and it's kind one, that's the Simpson's piggybacking on the [00:42:00] insertion of the author into his Exactly. Fiction novels.

Wiley: And then she ends up grudgingly throwing away Kat's Cradle. Awesome.

Michael: Okay, let's take another break.

All right. Category six words to Live by. In this category, we each choose a quote. These are either words that this person said or was said about them. Wiley, you go ahead here.

Wiley: Alright. My favorite quote from Vonnegut is actually from his novel Mother Night, which was 1962. So kind of halfway into the journey between his first novel and Slaughterhouse five, he wrote the [00:42:30] words, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Michael: Yes, I love this. Okay. Say more.

Wiley: Yeah. Well, he introduces this quote with the words, this is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral. I simply happen to know what it is. The character in this novel is a American who lives in Berlin, who becomes successful playwright in the pre-war era before World War ii.

As the Nazis arising to power, he is approached by an agent of [00:43:00] the War Department of the United States who asks him to work for the US and getting. Messages out of Germany to basically spy for his country. So to pretend to be a Nazi. And he becomes a leading Nazi propagandist a, an American voice on the radio who broadcasts from Berlin these horrible, racist, disgusting Nazi screeds against the United States.

The character ultimately feels deep guilt for what he has done. Yeah, and so I think the quote is incredibly germane, but I also [00:43:30] think it's probably some of the best life advice you could ever get.

Michael: Say it one more time.

Wiley: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Michael: Wow.

Great. One great one. Okay. Uh, mine's simple. If this isn't nice, I don't know what is. So where this comes from, at the end of a lot of Vette lectures, I'll often create a moment where he'll tell a short story about his uncle Alex, who he was very close to. And this sort of relates back to what you said in your thing five about company.

[00:44:00] GaN was a real big believer in the bigger, broader family, in that it takes a village. Something that's a, another theme of his work is he almost foresees this crisis of solitude that in some ways we're, we're in today, but

Archival: about my uncle Alex, who's up in heaven now. One of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed When they were happy, he himself did his best to acknowledge it.

When times were sweet, we could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree. [00:44:30] An uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, if this isn't nice, what is? When things are going well sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment and then say out loud,

Michael: if this isn't nice, what is? And then Vette would transition to this moment at the end of his lectures where he'd ask the audience to all raise their hand if they had the name of a teacher, if changed their life, somebody in grade school who had an enormous impact on him.

And then he would have the audience turn to the person next to [00:45:00] him and tell them the name of that teacher so that they're sharing that information. And then he would say, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is music. Please. I like the creation of that moment. I like that backstory. But if you just hone in on the words themselves, this is the mistake I think we all make about gratitude, happiness, and joy in moments of happiness and of joy, I tend to think, okay, this is now the condition that I'm going to [00:45:30] exist in forevermore, , I don't freeze frame it in the moment.

Right, right, right. I think I have now arrived at happiness and all I have to do is maintain that feeling of happiness. That's not how joy works. Joy works in a moment. It gets back to being unstuck in time and having somebody tell you that you gotta call that out when it happens. If this moment right now isn't nice, I don't know what is.

This is to me, a lesson in what it means to allow yourself to experience joy, to notice joy, [00:46:00] to be mindful of joy in the moment. Yeah. So simple words, but big idea. So I'm gonna try and live by those words. Wow. When I'm feeling it, I need to say if this isn't nice, I don't know what it's, yeah. I dunno what It's okay.

Category seven, man in the mirror. This category is fairly simple. Did this person like their reflection? Yes or no? This is not about beauty, but rather a question of self-confidence. Verse self-judgment. All right. I think he doesn't, but I kind of wanna make the case for He does. Like his reflection, and maybe I'm wrong on this.

This is my [00:46:30] reaction. I think that there is some signs of self-loathing. We've kind of talked a little bit about perhaps imposter syndrome. Does he feel comfortable in his own skin? I. There is a case for it. He develops a look, a very specific look, a cartoonish kind of look so much that we still have those doodles and cartoons all around and he stays pretty committed to the rumpled professor.

Look, I don't know, there's something about it that maybe he is comfortable in his skin. He also does make himself laugh a lot. It's not just that [00:47:00] he's funny. He tells jokes that he himself laughs at which I take to be a sign of self-confidence. I guess where I really landed with this question is it really is about PTSD on some level because I think if you take his mother's suicide and you take his experiences in Dresden, those are two deeply traumatic events.

Right. They're life defining kind of events that a lot of his work is in relationship to those things having happened to him. I do not wanna make the case that if you suffer from [00:47:30] PTSD, you also suffer with your own self-confidence and self-judgment. But I do think that there's a relationship there, so. I think overall I'm on the side of, he doesn't like his reflection, but I see a case for both ways.

Yeah. How did you think through this one?

Wiley: To be honest with you, I look at Vonnegut and I say, okay, he is a product of this family upbringing where he was the baby child and always felt like he had to kind of, I. Make himself important to the family. Yeah. And his older brother tells him when they're children that he's an [00:48:00] accident.

Yeah. Which definitely is not something that increases your sense of self worth as a young child. I actually, you know what? I was told

Michael: that at a young age. Wow. I, it was framed in a nice way. It was, you were the best accident that ever happened, but I have known almost all my life, we didn't have you on purpose.

Wiley: Yeah. I'd say it messed with my head. Still does. I don't think you get the sense that Vonnegut received that in a really positive way as a child. No, not at all.

Michael: And Bernard is such a high achiever Yeah. That there's this like standard that he's always fallen into. Yeah.

Wiley: We haven't talked much about Bernard, but he was a very [00:48:30] well-respected atmospheric scientist, actually one of the co inventors of cloud seeding to create rain.

Right. So really a lot to live up to for young Kurt

Michael: and MIT trained b HT scientist. I mean, yeah. I,

Wiley: I think this is, this is a, and

Michael: pushed

Wiley: vonne himself into science's against his wishes. And I think he. Struggled to find his place for a very long time. Here's the thing I would say as a no, is that I think Kurt Vonnegut had an ideal of success that involved becoming a successful and well-loved and respected novelist.

And what's really sad is he [00:49:00] got there and it wasn't enough. Yeah.

Archival: I

Wiley: think one of the themes I see in his life is that he continued to struggle with a sense of being an imposter. Not enough, not recognized enough, not having achieved enough, needing to achieve more as he went on in life. And one of the cruelest things that he reflected on was that he had lived so long after his huge success with Slaughterhouse five, and he did.

I mean, he lived till 2007 having written that in 1969. So

Michael: again, against the odds. Right? Against the odds. . Yeah. I love his joke about like, I'm gonna sue the makers [00:49:30] of Paul Mall because they promised on the packaging Yes. , that they were gonna kill him by now. Yes. And he is like, this is false advertising.

Yes. I should be

Wiley: dead . So I really think he struggles with that. So we're both nos.

Michael: Okay. Next category. Cocktail coffee or cannabis. This is where we ask which one would we most wanna do with our dead celebrity. What'd you go with here?

Wiley: I'm dying to know. Oh, you know, I went with coffee. Okay. Now you know, he was a drinker.

I debated a cocktail. I have to say the VT I wanna spend [00:50:00] time with is the vette of his novels and essays. He's the VT I kind of fell in love with as a young man, and by most accounts, he felt he did his best writing early in the day before noon. I don't think he was a morning drinker. . It feels too early for weed.

So we're gonna meet at a coffee shop. I found the coffee shop. It's on third Avenue around the corner from his brownstone and East's. 48th in Manhattan. Nice. We're gonna sit on the sidewalk outside this coffee place. It's gonna be like April. And you know, after he's done venting about the current political environment, we're gonna talk about bigger things.[00:50:30]

I wanna talk to him about life and love and how we build families, but mostly I just want to hear him tell jokes and experience his wit. Yeah, and I think that's gonna be most present. At that early hour over this nice steaming cup of Joe,

Michael: do you have any burning curiosity here, Wiley? Is there something you feel like you don't know about him?

I mean, I do feel like there's a lot to work with here in interpreting who he is and what he's all about. Not to mention the sort of key events of his life, his sister's death, his mother's death, and Dresden above all else.

Wiley: Yeah. This is perhaps morbid [00:51:00] curiosity is I would love to know . , why he didn't make the leap with Lori.

I look at her, you know, she was alleged to be his muse while, while writing Slaughterhouse five, probably the inspiration for the character in Montana Wild Hack. And so she was this very important sort of sensual part of his life. And, and actually, I mean, isn't

Michael: that the answer though? It like, because she's sort of forbidden, she's important

Wiley: maybe.

But there was a point where she wasn't forbidden anymore. And that's really what I'm curious about you. But in his mind, I

Michael: mean, yeah. But I wonder if, this is obviously [00:51:30] speculation, but I wonder if to not be in an actual committed marriage and loving relationship Yeah. With somebody who he's had a sort of fantastical romance with.

He preserves her in a more idealized light.

Wiley: I, I think you're probably right.

Michael: And that's important

Wiley: for him creatively, at least in his mind. But I'd love to know if he thought that or not. Did he consciously understand that or was that something subconscious that he knew he had to hold her at a certain remove to keep her as this kind of idealized person?

Michael: That's a good one. [00:52:00] Wiley. Okay. Well, I went, uh, with cannabis. Kinda wanna keep it simple. I don't know that I have so much lingering curiosity. The scene I'm imagining here is I'd like to be, uh, the University of Iowa at the Writer's workshop probably in the evening with rather than a chalkboard. I want a whiteboard and I kind of just want to doodle on the whiteboard with Kurt Vogan.

I love his doodles throughout his books. Yeah, they're hilarious. Especially, and Breakfast to Champions. I also just love these storytelling curves of this [00:52:30] character. Gets a thing and then loses it again. Or, you know, , the Kafka one is great, where the character starts in a bad place and it just drop downs off the map Goes down, yeah.

Goes, goes off and, and nothing ever happens. And the, the one about Hamlet is genius too, that there's not a lot of good fortune, ill fortune. It's open to interpretation. Right. It's a great story. I would actually like to . Continue that kind of deconstruction of other great stories and how he might chart them out with a whiteboard and probably a joint and then when I get distracted we could just [00:53:00] doodle back and forth.

So that's the scene I went with. Vonnegut. Alright, cannabis. Yeah. Okay. We've arrived. Final category, the Vander Beek, named after James Vander Beek, who famously said in varsity blues, I don't want your life. In that varsity blue scene, James makes a judgment that he does not want a certain kind of life based on just a few small characteristics.

So here we form a rebuttal to anyone skeptical of how Kurt Vonnegut lived. Let's start with counter argument. Maybe it's not so hard to [00:53:30] chart out. I don't wanna be a prisoner war stuck in a German prisoner war camp. I don't want to have . Lived through an event like Dresden. I also think that maybe even more important, crazy to say is the suicide of his mother.

That the way that trauma hangs over his relationship with women and his relationship with intimacy and that sort of uncertainty, that that creates the pain that that creates is awful. So he's got a [00:54:00] strong case for trauma.

Wiley: Well, and let's not ignore the seemingly unfulfilled last 20 some odd years of his life.

Yeah. I mean, they sound

Michael: pretty miserable. Yeah. And it does not sound like a happy marriage. I think you can also, while you're piling on to lose the most important sibling in some ways, Alice, I mean, he's obviously an important figure and doesn't sound like home life was ever all that fun, although I think there's moments There's manger dog.

Yeah. Moments there are here and there. So I don't know. I mean that that's the case against. [00:54:30] The case four. How would you start with mounting the argument for you should want this life?

Wiley: You know, the first thing is easy. It's that I think the body of work speaks for itself. He broke ground as a writer and he did capture the imagination of a generation and beyond.

Yeah. And I think that's something that very few people have ever walked this planet can say. Can I add to that? Absolutely.

Michael: I think that not only did he do that, I think the fact that he wants to tell you how he did it, how he thought about [00:55:00] story structure. Yes. How he thought about the rules of writing.

Yes. Is strong evidence that he enjoyed doing it too. That he didn't just enjoy the final work, but he enjoyed the process on some level.

Wiley: He didn't feel like he had to be proprietary about it. He gave it a write. Right. Right. And he, and you're right, he never hesitates to talk about anything about technique.

Obviously his famous story structure lecture, but he even, he'll talk about how he writes the fact that he. Writes a novel front to back, which I suspect is very much his journalistic background, that he sits down and he pounds out the first page until it works. And then he starts [00:55:30] pounding out the second page and keeps going.

Yeah. And when he is finished, he's done with the novel. That is extraordinary. And the fact that he can do that as a writer speaks to a kind of gift and discipline. It's

Michael: a generosity, right? Yeah. He wants others to have this. Yeah. Or to be able to have this.

Wiley: Yeah.

Michael: And so it's not just legacy of the work itself, but it's also the experience of a creative

Wiley: and

Michael: of

Wiley: creative.

The other thing I'll say about his life though, is I think when you undertake this exercise of the Vander Beak, you're really looking for growth. You're looking for someone writing that upward spiral [00:56:00] staircase. And I think his story is a story of growth because I think even as he may have . Begun to stall creatively later in his career and experienced some setbacks, maybe as a writer, he actually grew as a human being.

Archival: Hmm.

Wiley: And I think what you see is a legacy of not only great literature, but also of maturing and repaired relationships. The fact that he and Jane go from sort of like closeness to a kind of distance and eventual divorce, back to a kind of closeness before her [00:56:30] death. The fact that I think he has a, a reconciliation with his children, that that leads to a much warmer family environment.

Yeah. He really comes into the embrace of family later in life. And I think it. Represents a kind of growth that he's had as a person and understanding just how important that family and home is to him.

Michael: Yeah, that's a great point. Wiley and I, I do think you really do have to have some grace that we're working with a really traumatized human being and that Yeah, if he is.

Fighting the [00:57:00] hand that feeds him. If he's strained outside the marriage, I mean, if he's hurting those around him, that's what happens with traumatized people a lot. And it's sort of the battle against that and the fight to correct that, that on some level he has some consciousness of and gets better at.

Yeah,

Wiley: as time goes on it, it is a lifelong struggle, but he improves. And to me, yeah, that's one of the . The best cases you can make.

Michael: If I was to add one third thing, and this is more in relationship to the work, it is always incredible to me when somebody's humor endures. [00:57:30] I've made this point a few times on the show that comedy often has a shelf life.

Yeah. '

Archival: cause

Michael: the context for the world changes. The fact that we can read Vonnegut today in 2025 and still laugh out loud, speaks to genius to me and speaks to that kind of intersection that I've been interested in lately around spirituality and humor and the importance of feeling like we belong. And so to see that represented across time, unstuck in time, across generations, it's about the [00:58:00] work, but it's about a very essential quality of the work in my mind

Wiley: that goes beyond the humor.

It's interesting 'cause I reread Player Piano this week as the last novel, his first written in 1952, and the second industrial revolution that that. Book is preoccupied with is all about the stuff that we're dealing with now with AI and things like that. And there's a kind of relevance to his thinking about man's relationship to technology.

Yeah. That is still kind of amazing to me.

Michael: Somebody should start a podcast about our relationship to technology. I think [00:58:30] that would be

Wiley: a

Michael: fabulous thing. . All right. So let's recap a little bit. Uh, number one, we said legacy in the work itself, but also the process of creating that work. Number two, you said growth.

Yeah, growth. Growth. Spiral. Uh, upward staircase. Yeah. Argument and number three, humor and relationship with technology. The sort of enduring themes that really do cut across time. So with that, James VanDerBeek. I'm Kurt Vonnegut and you want my life.[00:59:00]

Okay, speed round plugs for past shows. Wiley, what episode, if any, does this remind you of?

Wiley: You know, the first one that comes to mind. Pretty recent, but a great one. George Carlin. I see some of the same sadness, some of the same use of humor as a way of commenting on the state of the human condition. I think it's an amazing episode and really relevant when we think about Kurt Vonnegut.

Michael: Nice. Okay. Acerbic comedian, George Carlin was Wiley's. All right, I'm gonna go with Bob Einstein. We re-released [00:59:30] this one. So number 80, super Funkhouser. Bob Einstein played Super Dave Osborne. He was also Funkhouser on Larry David Scho, your enthusiasm, but he also has a much, much bigger legacy and hidden impact and I think that some of these themes around humor just keep coming up for me.

So it's a fan favorite Super funk Hauser, Bob Einstein. Great episodes. Okay. Here's a little teaser for the next episode of Famous Eng Gravy. She attended Smith College at a time when women could be either nurses [01:00:00] or teachers, she said, and she had some vague idea of being a novelist or basketball star.

Archival: Oh gosh,

Uh, so she's gotta be tall, and she lived here a ripe old age. I don't know. I don't know.

Michael: Famous and gravy Listeners, we'd love hearing from you. If you wanna reach out with a comment question or to participate in our opening quiz, email us at hello@famousandgravy.com. In our show notes, we include all kinds of links, including to our website and our social channels.

Famous [01:00:30] Eng Gravy is created by Amma Kippur and me, Michael Osborne. This episode was produced by Ali Ola, with assistance from Jacob Weiss. Original music by Kevin Strang. Thanks and see you next time.