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1) It's funny. I'd heard this but, knowing that it is a war book (and M*A*S*H* being before my time), I guess I didn't believe that it could be done by anyone other than Vonnegut.
2) Based on what I know of Rick Perry and Ted Cruz, it seems that the political thinking of Texans has evolved precisely not at all in the last fifty years (Marfans, Austinites, and otherwise dispersed fans of Wendy Davis excepted, of course).
Yes, Austinites & Marfans definitely excluded. Is it odd that I find Rick Perry extraordinarily attractive? I think something about the close minded, "white man" is oddly exciting. Anyway, I haven't gotten this book yet & I probably won't. I don't like war or the last name Heller. I'll be back with Biography ideas ASAP.
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I will say that the depiction of the B-25s flying through flak in chapter 5 was well done, but I will also say that I'm bothered by the character of Yossarian. I understand that war is madness; by no means am I pro-war. But, surely, sometimes you have to fight. And surely WWII was one of those times. Yossarian's attitude would have been right in so many wars: Vietnam, Iraq, arguably Korea. But not WWII.
Every time a character, like Yossarian or Doc Daneeka, talks about how inconvenient the war is, I think of J.S. Mill: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
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The names undermine what Heller is trying to accomplish, which is to demonstrate the absurdity of war. But, by giving his characters absurd names - ones that would never appear in this actual universe - he creates the feeling that the rest of this story, including the reasoning of the characters, is also not part of this actual universe, which is the opposite of what he's trying to do. Their reasoning is part of this universe, which is why it's so dangerous.
The names also feel like a lazy shortcut to signify absurdism. It's better to show than to tell, and since Heller is so gifted at showing how the world is crazy, the names are unnecessary.
Plus, I just don't like silly names. This is why I could never get into Thomas Pynchon or Rodrigo's Concierto Para Una Fiesta.
Finally, this sentence struck me as a perfect distillation of the reasoning that repeatedly occurs in grand jury rooms across America every day: "Clevinger was guilty, of course, or he would not have been accused, and since the only way to prove it was to find him guilty, it was their patriotic duty to do so."
I haven't read Catch 22, and if the thirty books stacked on my desk are any indication, I won't be reading it any time soon--at least not until I finish my master's thesis. So all I have to contribute is trivia. The Atlantic ran a story on Catch 22 about a year ago (though I learned this in a postmodernism class during a Pynchon discussion about numbers and names, silly ones and all). Heller first submitted his manuscript to his editor under the name Catch 18, but because another book that used the number 18--Mila 18 by Leon Uris--had recently been released, Heller's editor requested that he change it. For those of you who are reading the book, do you find the number symbolic at all? Or, like Pynchon's 49, is it against interpretation?
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I wonder what caused Heller to originally choose 18?
What I like about both numbers is that they're sufficiently high to suggest the soul-crushing scope of the military's bureaucracy.
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Bologna. Bremen. Schweinfurt.
I can only imagine the dread that must have shuddered through those men when they heard the names of certain towns that they were ordered to bomb. The commitment that they had, and the courage, is incredible. Young men in their twenties, and even teens, risking being blown apart tens of thousands of feet in the air.
And many of them were blown apart.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
"A ball turret was a Plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose."
-- Poem and explanatory note by Randall Jarrell.
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[The beverage pairing is New Belgium's "Pumpkick" spiced seasonal ale.]