Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 7

GSV23: GALÁPAGOS!

This is the one the podcast has always been building towards: Gerry, Aaron, and special guest Brian Thill take on Galápagos. Does it hold up? Is it secretly the best Vonnegut novel? Can Kurt wriggle out of being canceled one last time? Only our big brains know for sure…

Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21

My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!

With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’
Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.And the obvious Plan B.CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.In praise of The Life Aquatic.Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”

As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”46 As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”47 In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:

I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.

In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.

“A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.War by Other Means.Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.

this is funny in that “this is an extremely serious problem at American universities” sense https://t.co/jEto0cdSaA

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2021

Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.‘The Agile College.’How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.

the long-term nuclear waste warning messages becoming a meme is really funny to me because no nuclear semiotician ever thought to consider preserving nuclear waste warning messages for future generations by just getting people to make jokes about them

— ludum tsundare (@prophet_goddess) December 24, 2020

We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.

Everyone in academia thinks they're in favor of cultivating skepticism and critical thinking until something like QAnon starts to eat people's brains, at which point they realize that actually they're very much in favor of highly institutionalized expert knowledge.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) January 5, 2021

Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.The Black American Amputation Epidemic.An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.The Long Plot to Escape From Work.Frozen and Queer Coding.California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.Who really created the Marvel Universe?Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.

This fantasy about colonising Mars is projection. Imagine dreaming of living on a soulless uninhabitable dead planet where we would be utterly reliant on technology for survival and where most would be in a form of servitude at the behest of a private company.

— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) January 22, 2021

The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.Behold: the megacycle!Okay this just seems mean.And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.

A Hypercontemporary Literature Syllabus! And More!

The first week is already over and I realized I never got around to putting up my syllabi. I’m teaching two classes this semester, an all-Zoom revision of my Tolkien class and an all-Zoom survey of 21st Century Literature that I decided to focus on texts from more or less the last two years. (I also have an independent study on Gender and Sexuality in New Wave SF that’s been terrific; no formal syllabus for that one but we’re reading Le Guin, Russ, Delany, Tiptree, Lem, the Tarkovskys, all your faves.)

Thanks so much to everyone on Facebook and Twitter who flooded me with suggestions for the 21st Century course. In the end I was so overwhelmed by the possibilities I solicited suggestions directly from the students, which allowed me to craft a syllabus that was both inside and outside my usual wheelhouse, hopefully in ways that will be fun for both my students and myself. And we still get to be surely the first class in the world to study Ishiguro’s new book.

The syllabus doesn’t list the films they picked, but our class vote landed on Parasite and Soul for the last two weeks of class, an intriguing dialectic arraying the full possibilities of the human experience…

synchM1/25FIRST DAY OF CLASSsynchW1/27Among Us game and thinkpieces [D2L]asynchF1/29Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” [D2L]    synchM2/1PLAY/MOVIE: Heidi Schreck, What the Constitution Means to Me (including bonus material) [Amazon Prime]synchW2/3What the Constitution Means to Me discussion continuesasynchF2/5POEM: Andrea Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” [D2L] and online reactions     synchM2/8SHORT STORY: N.K. Jemisin, “Emergency Skin” [Amazon Kindle]synchW2/10SHORT STORY: Ted Chiang, “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” [online]asynchF2/12Jemisin and Chiang sandbox assignment    synchM2/15COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part onesynchW2/17COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part twoasynchF2/19COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part three sandbox assignment    synchM2/22COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part three discussionsynchW2/24COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part fourasynchF2/26Haruki Murakami, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” [D2L]optional: Haruki Murakami, “A Shinagawa Monkey” [D2L]    synchM3/1Haruki Murakami, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” discussionsynchW3/3Hades [Steam or Nintendo Switch]asynchF3/5Hades sandbox assignment    synchM3/8Hades discussion continues W3/10UNIVERSITY MENTAL HEALTH DAY—NO CLASSasynchF3/12Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 1-16
CLOSE READING DUE    synchM3/15Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 17-30synchW3/17Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 31-45asynchF3/19Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 46-60synchM3/22Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 61-74synchW3/24Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 75-90asynchF3/26Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, whole book    synchM3/29Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future and responsessynchW3/31Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future and responses F4/2GOOD FRIDAY—NO CLASS    synchM4/5Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)synchW4/7Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)asynchF4/9Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)    synchM4/12Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)synchW4/14Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)asynchF4/16Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD)
MINISTRY RESPONSE DUE    synchM4/19CREATIVE NONFICTION: Zadie Smith, Intimations (first half)synchW4/21CREATIVE NONFICTION: Zadie Smith, Intimations (second half)asynchF4/23MOVIE or TV SHOW TBD    synchM4/26MOVIE or TV SHOW TBDsynchW4/28MOVIE or TV SHOW TBDasynchF4/30MOVIE or TV SHOW TDB    synchM5/3MOVIE or TV SHOW TBDW5/5UNIVERSITY MENTAL HEALTH DAY—NO CLASSsynchF5/7LAST DAY OF CLASS
INTIMATION DUE

GSV22: “EPICAC”!

Gerry and Aaron return for a discussion of “EPICAC” (1950)! Join us for a meandering tour of automation, machine learning, feminism, suicide, the war machine, masculinity, STEM, and so much more…

GSV21: PLAYER PIANO!

What’s that? There, in the back, behind the Christmas tree? Why, it’s a very special, two-hour episode of Grad School Vonnegut, guest-starring Matt Hauske & Hilary Strang from the Marooned! on Mars podcast! We talk Player Piano, automation, capitalism, revolution, utopia, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future, failsons, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, the Ghost Dance, and so much more…

Ye Old Link Roundup!

I updated my professional website with online article and interviews for the first time in four years. So, yeah, I guess you could say I’m not doing great.Special issue of Loading on Animal Crossing: New Horizons.Second Languages and Jesuit Core Education.Still stripping the walls of copper wire on his way out the door: Trump sought to tap Sidney Powell as special counsel for election fraud. Officials increasingly alarmed about Trump’s power grab. Giuliani asks DHS about seizing voting machines. Ivanka Trump, Famed Public Health Expert, Screened CDC Guidance to Make Sure It Was Nice to Her Dad.

ok but can I just mention that being all the way down to the “is the military on board” gate on the flowchart is also alarming https://t.co/eQ2KG8dJPg

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 19, 2020

American learned helplessness is evident not only in its inability to recognize what is happening as an attempted coup, but also in its failure to see this behavior as both illegal and illegitimate. https://t.co/MmKjpPBQfW

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 19, 2020

GSV20: “All the King’s Horses”

This week Gerry and Aaron’s guest is Cameron Kunzelman of the “Just King Things” and “Game Studies Study Buddies” podcasts! We talk Vonnegut’s 1951 short story “All the King’s Horses,” adaptation, chess, Go, games, game theory, the Cold War, the 90s, Stephen King, The Queen’s Gambit, esports, Pikmin 3, and finally taking down the Vonnegut Library! #FreetheGame #FreetheVonnegutBoardGame

This was a really fun one with @ckunzelman of @rangedtouch! And it has an unusual amount of homework. In addition to the story (https://t.co/9yvvTcgFBz) we also discuss Kurt’s unusual chess strategy (https://t.co/DFFnunSQs5), his unusual review style (https://t.co/J2kI71nLlD)…

— gradschoolvonnegut (@gradschoolvonn) December 21, 2020

…Vonneguts and Glory (https://t.co/VmYjAPZRfp), AND the board game he invented that no one has ever really seen. https://t.co/CZIOxrSJbm #FreetheGame #FreetheVonnegutBoardGame

— gradschoolvonnegut (@gradschoolvonn) December 21, 2020

It’s Been a Minute: Links!

There’s a new episode of SFRA Review!I did this, on The Fifth Season, about a month ago. It was super fun! This just came out, and I was co-editor on it. It’s enormous!Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues. A little inside baseball perhaps, but for people in my very tiny sliver of my very strange industry it’s a fascinating situation.Call for Proposals: 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference. 2020 Visions: Imagining (Post-) COVID Worlds. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. Call for Applications: the MA Program at Marquette English.







Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.The Proletarian Fantastic.Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.Generation C.National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.

Read the whole thread, but this part in particular is infuriating. They’ve been talking about a $45 million budget hole since the summer. Now the hole is only $30 million — so we suddenly need a new $12 million operating margin to make sure the firings stay at the same level! https://t.co/CuOLmQ9AIn

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 7, 2020

Watching this letter from my STEM colleagues go viral has been beautiful. Solidarity is beautiful. https://t.co/NsufAqY3FB

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 3, 2020

‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.

Cumulative job losses at America's universities and colleges since the pandemic's start surpassed more than half a million in October, according to preliminary numbers from BLS. pic.twitter.com/19CgR9coiY

— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77) December 7, 2020

The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.

(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020

The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers. And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better. Fandom and the Future of Trek. In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since. If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out. Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for. implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war

Someone in my Norwegian class didn't know the word for cowboys so called them 'American horse pirates' and I've been laughing about it for about an hour.

— so cactus so owl (@socactussoowl) November 16, 2020

Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.Joe Biden should do everything at once.Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.In the Time of Monsters.The Election That Broke the Republican Party.How To Avoid Another Trump.Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.







How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.

my favorite part of the Superman mythos is when Krypton’s scientific and political elite all agreed with Jor-El that the planet was doomed but still you can’t fix it because a 250-year-old piece of paper says white people from Space Wyoming gets 100x more votes

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 28, 2020

A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.

goddamn he solved it https://t.co/RFoXmQlmy2

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2020

GSV 19: GOD BLESS YOU, DR. KEVORKIAN!

Gerry and Aaron’s whirlwind tour of the late Vonnegut reaches a resounding anti-climax in 1999’s God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, based on Vonnegut’s recurring WNYC segment Reports on the Afterlife! Our next novel is the very first one, Player Piano (1952)…

John Brown wears a hangman’s noose for a necktie in Heaven. I asked him about it, and he said, “Where’s yours? Where’s yours?” https://t.co/k9XwZRoxNv

— gradschoolvonnegut (@gradschoolvonn) December 12, 2020

Next week we jump back to the very start of his career for a discussion of “All the King’s Horses,” Vonnegut, and games with @ckunzelman of the “Just King Things” Stephen King podcast on @rangedtouch. Then it’s PLAYER PIANO with the hosts of the KSR podcast @podcastonmars!

— gradschoolvonnegut (@gradschoolvonn) December 12, 2020

GSV 18: HOCUS POCUS!

Evan Kindley joined us for the latest episode of the Grad School Vonnegut podcast, on the late novel Hocus Pocus! It’s definitely as good as our other episodes!

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