An Open Apology to the Late Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut photo by Zach Fine.
Copyright the University of Washington Daily.

Listen: You died yesterday after falling weeks ago. You were one of the most important writers of the 20th century. I miss you already. And I'm sorry.

I interviewed you almost 12 years ago, when I was in college, and got to follow you around for a day while you met with people on campus. You were 73 then. I was 19. The university's student activities committee paid you $10,000 to come speak; it was practically their whole budget for the year. I wrote a long profile to advance the event, assuming as so many college journalists do that whatever they have just discovered is news and that they have to bring everyone else up to speed on it. I don't recommend rereading the whole thing, but here's a good excerpt:

What he learned, of course, is that public support doesn't have much to do with American foreign policy. It's a nice thing to have, but our leaders can get along without it. And it really would be ridiculous for any writer to expect that a well-crafted novel could actually change their priorities.

So Vonnegut has a different goal: to catch young people before they become corporate leaders and politicians and, as he puts it, to "poison their minds with humanity."

Take this opportunity to be poisoned. There are few authors, dead or alive, whose work so skillfully marries criticism and compassion, who have so comfortably combined intelligent ideas and a lucid style, and even fewer who have written as seriously and as humorously at the same time.

I meant it then, and still do. You are still one of my favorite writers. More importantly, you influenced which writers would become my other favorites - Thomas Hardy, Donald Barthelme, Laurence Sterne, Saul Bellow. I can trace my appreciation for many of them back to my reading and re-reading of your books.

When you came to campus you let me follow you around for the day. You met with a graduate-level creative writing class which was absolutely in awe of you, and you gave them truly devastating career advice, which was basically that the market for new fiction was total shit and that they should really consider another field. It was hard for them to hear.

Then I got to interview you, which was a disaster. I had a new tape recorder and a tiny directional mic and I was too timid to ask you to wear it, so I put it on the table between us in your hotel room and it picked up maybe 10% of our interview, which the paper had heavily hyped on my behalf. I was also incredibly nervous, and you responded to all my overwrought questions with canned responses I had read years ago in his book of essays Palm Sunday, down to the word. You were quoting yourself.

After you left I promised I'd send you the pieces I wrote about you. I sent you the profile I had written before the event and you sent me a letter typed on a typewriter, which I still have, in an envelope on which you had typed my name and address.

Here's what I never told you. It probably isn't a big deal to you, but it has bothered me.

I published what I could salvage of the interview. I also wrote a follow-up feature based on my day with you, which it was very hard to write and to publish. I liked you a lot and am one of the many tremendously grateful fans of your work, and I hated saying what I believed was true about you. What I believed was this: That as a cultural figure your work was already finished, your voice had lost much of its relevance, and that young writers should not let you dampen their spirits. I counted myself among them, as I was writing fiction at the time and had spoken of "growing up" to be a novelist since I could remember, although I didn't tell you that. Wherever you are now, I'm sure you have Internet access. You can read the interview and the profile online if you want.

I considered you a friend even though we only had that one encounter. You were kind to me and very thoughtful to send the letter.

When I heard years later that you had been injured in a fire in your apartment and were in the hospital, I felt a wave of relief that you were still alive, and thought about sending you a letter. But I assumed you would not remember me, and I didn't send one.

I now realize that it was cowardly for me not to send you the commentary I wrote after your visit, as I said I would. At the time it felt self-important to assume you would want to hear a 19-year-old's criticism, but I have since learned that humility is often a mask for other, more selfish concerns. (I think that's in one of your books, too.) You had the right to see it and to react to it if you wished to do so.

So I'm sorry, Kurt Vonnegut, that I never sent you the piece, which I still think is true, although you did say some interesting and very brave things about terrorism in an interview a few years ago. I'm also sorry I didn't at least send you a card when you cheated death in 2000. I'm sure a lot of other people did. But I should have.

More than anything, though, your death for me raises the spectre of a much more intimate relationship that ended very badly several years ago, with a truly disturbed mentor and friend's attempt on my life. He may already be dead, although I can find no word of it online. He is half a world away and I am not sure if I will ever have the chance to make amends.

You would have liked him, and my stories about him. He'd be 75 now - about the same age you were when I interviewed you. He is depressed, as you were, and angry, and confused. He is the person who taught me that we do not necessarily grow wiser as we grow older, and that this is not always our fault. I'll tell you his story sometime.

A Novel Promotion: New Fiction Marketed In YouTube Video

This "trailer" for The Mystery Guest is probably a first. And not a book jacket in sight.

Notes On The Prehistory of Speech Balloons

Above: Phillipe Pareno's "Cartoon Bubbles." [Via]

One of my favorite blogs, Drawn!, recently pointed to cartoonist Andy Bleck's great "Evolution of Speech Balloons," just one of the many interesting sections of Bleck's website. The page is a great introduction to the concept that speech balloons as we know them evolved over centuries, and from other forms which lack the explicit structure but serve the same purpose, namely strings of text emerging from people's mouths (since the Middle Ages) and scrolls and banners which serve the same purpose. Bleck does a good job tracing the rough contours of this development, but the site reminded me of a couple of related artifacts which I think can broaden the discussion of what speech balloons are and where they came from.

I. Text Scrolls and Magical Writing

In the Western art tradition, there is an interesting gap between how speech has been rendered in images prior to and after the dawning of the Enlightenment in Europe. With the widening distribution of the printing press in the sixteenth century, newspapers flourished, and visuals were a powerful way to increase the density of information in a picture, which often was used instead of a written text. Such images can capture a whole host of its creator's observations on the web of interests and perspectives or of simple facts about an event that would otherwise be offered, far less efficiently, in a block of text.

The above 1741 illustration by Nathanial Parr (taken from Bleck's own History), offers a chaotic hint of both the rise of an age of information - of the cataloguing and indexing and reporting that would permeate the public sphere and digitize itself by the late 20th-century - and of the 18th-century rise of the modern novel, with its emphasis on multiple characters and on their perspectives and role in events. But more than anything, it's the former that strikes me; illustrations like the one above remind me more of survey results, bar charts, and other data visualizations than of a proper comic panel, more like a newspaper infographic or one of Harper's information-rich Annotations than today's comic strips. True, the text is ascribed to individual voices, but the field is a landscape in which to make an argument, not a vehicle for telling a story.

A dramatic rise in literacy rates over the previous century had prepared audiences for the use of text as an explicit and direct source of such information, and the Enlightenment use of extensive text in cartoon form represented the full domestication of written text that accompanies such a change.

For this reason, I find pre-Enlightenment examples of speech balloons, or their various permutations, to be even more interesting than the modern form. In the centuries leading up to those first balloons, much of Europe was non-literate, and the many examples of text scrolls and banners emerging from the mouths or hands of figures from Renaissance and earlier artworks addressed a population with miniscule levels of literacy. The question is, were artists speaking to that tiny privileged class which possessed the ability to read, if not write, simple declarations, or were they somehow speaking through their use of words to a public that could not read what they had written?

Above is one of the many quite gorgeous examples of scroll speech that Bleck highlights on his site. I don't remember the artist, but I do know that it is a painting of St. Anne, and I probably would not be wrong in guessing that she is being told something very important by the figure next to her, and that that figure is an angel. If I were wrong in that guess, I would be right most of the time under similar circumstances - it is frequently angels who do the talking in such paintings, and they are usually announcing something very important to a human, who is highly unlikely to have a response displayed unless they are a saint. I have seen many annunciation scenes - images that depict the Biblical announcement the angel Gabriel gave to Mary during her pregnancy with Jesus of Nazareth - in which Mary responds with statements attributed to her in the Biblical account.

This brings up a highly relevant, if obvious point regarding such paintings' effect on a nonliterate audience: If they couldn't read the text in the painting (and most of them could not), they couldn't read the book the text came from, either. The use of scrolls in this context, which are repeated again and again throughout these periods' religious artworks that depict man's intersection with the divine, reference not just words but the textuality of those words (that is, their printed nature) in almost every instance. It is almost as though the words are being transcribed for all time as they are spoken - or, to look at it another way, it makes the case that cultural stories which were shared orally, written down, amended, adjudicated, and copied over the course of centuries were preserved with absolute reportorial accuracy. I believe this is not a claim peculiar to the Catholic church or to religion, but reflects a pre-Modern (primitive?) cultural understanding of history. Further, as much as the dominance of images in Church teaching allowed for the illiterate masses to understand and appreciate stories from a book they could not read, the presence of text in such images preserved a crucial interpretive role for the priest and reminded viewers of the significance of the text from which their priest's orders and invocations were handed down.

But the uses of text in such imagery gets even more interesting. While briefly living in Paris several years ago I was in the habit of carrying a journal with me as I visited many of the city's astoundingly good museums, and one of my favorite haunts was the Musee de Cluny, Paris' civic storehouse of all things Medieval. The collection includes old capitals from at least one Romanesque church that was destroyed, which feature wonderfully deep relief and a slight wraparound style that links four related scenes together in a four-panel Romanesque "comic strip." Here is one from the excellent Cluny website; some of the best ones, though, don't have panel dividers like the column here, but actually have figures from one scene rubbing elbows with ones from the next:

One piece in this collection contributed to major changes in my thinking regarding both the degree of personal artistic expression in Romanesque sculpture and in the quality of visionary experience. I am very glad now that I sketched it, because in preparing for this post I could not find a photograph of it anywhere, so the sketch below will guide us here.

It is an annunciation, and I first took note of it because the angel's scroll is emerging in an interesting, parlor-trick sort of way from his left hand, rather than from his mouth; I suspect this was a convenience of the small "canvas" of the capital face more than anything else. But as I began drawing it I discovered the most fascinating thing about this relief, an interpretation I have seen hinted at a couple of times but never again this directly: The scroll declared by the angel is feeding directly into Mary's head, like a fax machine or a mail slot.

My interest in this aspect of the carving was twofold: First, it represents very skillfully the position that Mary was a passive recipient of information passed to her by an angel, in whose presence she was presumably in awe. Second, it alludes to the annunciation explicitly as a "voice in the head," a vision which to a contemporary viewer could be interpreted as a purely psychological experience. In an age that is both postmodern and post-Mulholland Drive, the blurred line between what is experienced on a personal level and what is corporeal is easy to appreciate, and the distinction less than crucial. Why, one might argue, would a diety who wished to communicate with a human need to visit them in the flesh, when its total control over human perception could allow it to do the same on a non-physical plane? The difference can only matter to an outside observer, not to the recipient of the vision.

I have seen very interesting descriptions of the ways artists have customized speech balloons to communicate specific things to their audiences. (Wikipedia has a great section in their Speech Balloon entry that offers many examples.) It is interesting to reflect on how artists were doing this even a thousand years ago through religious art, as well as on how our culture continues to label things in site-specific and context-rich ways to similar effect.

II. Pre-Columbian Speech Balloons

Another area that Bleck's history could address if it attempted to catalogue instances more than trace an evolutionary path would be the use of proto-speech balloons in pre-Columbian America. The Mayans (and others, I'm sure) used wispy tails to link ideograms to speakers; I don't read the stuff, so can't determine whether this reflects conversation or merely authoritative authorship. (Anyone?)

The Aztecs had a lovely tradition of using small "commas" of breath to designate speakers. In this case, ideograms are positioned outside of the picture, so I'm not sure if the ideograms are thusly tied to a speaker, or if it simply describes events (most of such documents are historical or mythic) with the speaker's speech being an important part of the action. It's an interesting solution to the problem of large-scale scenes with many actors rendered in a simple style that must recognize the importance of speech as an event or action that plays an important role in a story - with the content of the speech detailed elsewhere or perhaps not at all, the speaking itself being of primary importance (in the context of intertribal negotiations, for example, where any diplomat can tell you that the important thing is to get and keep enemies talking).

In looking at some images from the Codex Mendoza recently, however, I noticed that such "breaths" are also used in images that show the appearance of a godhead from an altar:

Does this mean that the "breath" indicates merely sound, or that the appearance of the god is accompanied by commands, instructions, or other statements from the godhead? Any guidance from knowledgable readers would be welcome.

Lifespan As Process

Several months ago, when preparing for a series of advanced PowerPoint training sessions, I designed an introductory slide that attempted to map out where we were headed in the training session. I had broken my advanced PowerPoint training down into ten "rules" I felt (and feel) should govern PowerPoint useage from an educational perspective. My goal was to fire a shot off the bow at the opening of the session so the antsy people who want everything to be hands-on would relax for the first half of the training, which had a largely theoretical emphasis, and that those who feared being asked to apply new skills would know they didn't have to do anything right away. I came up with a visually satisfying but completely unscientific "timeline" that mapped the level of "theory" and "practice" that would be covered in each of my ten subsections, which were titled and clearly delineated in the presentation. What I created was one slide, but it is shown in stages below. Each of the blue blocks appears by wiping from left to right, and the blue bar wipes in two segments because, at the time, the training was divided into two sessions.

I was reminded of this attempt at visualizing time when I came across an interesting exercise Dan Russell posted on the Creating Passionate Users blog a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to visualize his entire lifetime in a PowerPoint slide (gee, if I had a nickel for every time someone said that) and whipped up a grid of 500-day blocks of dots that add up to a 20-year timespan. As such quantifications tend to do, the results travel from retina to brain with a vague, tingly "seize the day" sensation:

I liked the visualization, personally, but it also got me thinking about next steps. There is a force behind this slide, but the information supplied is not very complex as far as visualization goes - or, rather, the effect is very generalized. We all have ambitions as well as regrets; the grid model merely taps into one or both of these feelings and gives one a sense of anxiety or fulfillment, wonder or dread. If we want to do a little more in terms of examining our own life, the grid doesn't get us very far.

I decided to try to use an Excel spreadsheet to create a graph illustrating something about my life's trajectory, as interpreted from the ripe old age of nearly thirty. I used a simple spreadsheet layout to gauge my level of happiness, engagement and adaptation (changing in response to environmental stimuli) on scales of one to ten at each year of my life. Since this assessment is laughably imprecise, I decided to assign values very rapidly and intuitively, recalling general life circumstances that pertained to a given year for no more than five to ten seconds before assigning H, E, and A values, and to resist going back to fiddle with them. Since this exercise does not map my actual experiences throughout my life (who can remember how happy they were when they were two?), the strategy makes the most of what this does represent quite well: the emotional "story" I draw upon unconsciously as I continue to develop as an individual.

To take things a step further, I treated the sum value of these three variables as a measure of my personal "cohesion" to further interpret the dataset. This is an attempt to create a general "evaluation" of my life at any given year.

On the chart above, the Happiness line is purple, the Engagement line is pink, the Adaptation line is orange, and the Fulfillment line is green. Color-coding of the plot area is meant to offer some guidance as to major life changes, which correspond with school changes (elementary/middle/high/college) followed by additional life changes (long-term location changes, marriage, and life with a child).

What I found most interesting about this exercise was that it demonstrated no clear corrolation between the levels of individual components, but a lot of loose tracking between channels. A major stressor that temporarily lowered Happiness (a difficult pregnancy and birth) proved an "investment" that led to greatly increased Happiness in subsequent years, as well as peaks of Engagement and Adaptation; at other times, decreases in the Happiness level almost seem to anticipate future drops in Engagement and Adaptation.

Much can be made of this stuff, even (or especially) if you construct your data set with a reliance on your intuition rather than careful examination. Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the exercise was using the spreadsheet and charting capabilities in a purely "artful" (that is, nonscientific) way. I'm not much for journaling, although I've done so in fits and starts. Maybe I should keep a "statistical abstract" instead.

A New Visual Thesaurus - and this one's free

Programmer Kyle Scholz has released a web-based visual thesaurus along the lines of Thinkmap's slick, Java-based mapper of word relationships. Unlike the prototype, Kyle's "Visual Wordnet," which draws on the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory's "Wordnet" database, is built using only Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets, and - drum roll, please - is free to all.