"Did I lie? Yup. Did I also write a book that tore people to shreds? Yeah."

Said James Frey, quoted in "Oprah Shamed Him. He’s Back Anyway. Twenty years after 'A Million Little Pieces' became a national scandal, James Frey is ready for a new audience" (NYT)(free-access link).

As Frey sees it, the public has gotten increasingly comfortable with falsehoods, without getting fully comfortable with him. He finds it all a bit absurd. “I just sit in my castle and giggle,” he said.

I'm using my 3rd free link of the month of June on this because I am a long-time admirer of photographs of the interiors of writers' homes. As I wrote 12 years ago: "I love this book, 'Writer's Desk,' with excellent photographs by Jill Krementz (who was married to Kurt Vonnegut) and an introductory essay by John Updike."

I see Frey has an "extra-large mohair Eames chair, which he had custom-made so that he could sit in lotus pose." I identify. I've been buying chairs that accommodate the lotus position since I first bought furniture, which would have been in the 1970s. I wish I still had the chair I bought at Conran's that got me through law school. I'm one of those people who feel more comfortable with my legs folded up. 

Speaking of things written on this blog long ago, I've been around long enough, doing this low-level writerly thing that I do, to have covered the "Million Little Pieces" foofaraw when Oprah was agonizing:

"The whole point of this bill wasn't to get it passed. The whole point of this bill was to call out the hypocrisy."

BREAKING: Ohio lawmakers have proposed a new law that bans men from ejaculating without intent of conception, would fine men up to $10,000 per ejaculation. pic.twitter.com/eOtMUatSPt

— Daily Loud (@DailyLoud) February 14, 2025

If there's an exception for LGBTQ people, it seems you could avoid the $10,000 fine, by identifying as bisexual or "queer." Who could challenge you? You are what you say... among the kind of people who would institute an exception like this.

Not that anyone would ever really get charged. And obviously and admittedly, the bill will not get passed. Republicans control the Ohio legislature.

These Democrats are introducing The Conception Begins at Erection Act for rhetorical purposes. They want to expose hypocrisy within the anti-abortion group, which tends to say to women, if you don't want to get pregnant, don't have sex. 

ADDED: These Democrats present the idea of leveling. Since sexual intercourse only risks pregnancy for the women, the law should impose an equivalent burden on men. Equity = $10,000. This reminds me of the much-loved Kurt Vonnegut story, "Harrison Bergeron," which begins:

"Young lady, you've made me a lot of money," said Kurt Vonnegut to book designer Carin Goldberg.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jeffrey Canino (@jeffreycanino)

Here is the Washington Post obituary, "Carin Goldberg, designer of book covers and Madonna’s first album, dies at 69/John Updike called her book covers — which numbered in the thousands — 'bold and festive.'"

And here's her Instagram page, where you can see a lot of her work, including this:

"You do your best, you know, and maybe people will agree. And maybe they don’t. And maybe you’ll win. And maybe you’ll lose."

"And then what you do is you think about it for a while. Go on to the next thing, so that you can do a decent job on the next thing. And just keep going."

Said the retired Justice Breyer, quoted in "Breyer warns justices that some opinions could ‘bite you in the back’ in exclusive interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace" (CNN).

Breyer seems to have adopted the catchphrase "And there we are." He's quoted using it 3 times in this short summary of the interview. 

He used it after stating the he tried to change the outcome in Dobbs, describing the mood at the Court after the Dobbs leak, and after declining to criticize either Ginni or Clarence Thomas.

Breyer's "And there we are" made me think of Kurt Vonnegut's "So it goes." In "Slaughterhouse-Five":

[Vonnegut] uses it as a refrain when events of death, dying, and mortality occur or are mentioned; as a narrative transition to another subject; as a memento mori; as comic relief; and to explain the unexplained. The phrase appears 106 times.

Is Breyer's "And there we are" like Kurt Vonnegut's "So it goes"? "And there we are" feels lighter, more like "It is what it is" or "Whaddayagonnado."

"Kurt Vonnegut and Nicholson Baker embraced good television. Vonnegut said he’d rather have written 'Cheers'..."

"... than any of his books. In Baker’s novel 'The Anthologist' (2009), the poet-narrator comments, tongue only partially in cheek, that 'any random episode of "Friends" is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than 99 percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published.'"

Writes Dwight Garner in "David Milch Made Remarkable TV. His Own Life Was a Drama, Too. 'Life’s Work' is a memoir of outrageous youth, creative obsessions and ruinous habits" (NYT).

Milch's shows include  “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “Deadwood.”

Has Kurt Vonnegut's rule against using semicolons turned into a pro-semicolon rule?

Here's a passage from Kurt Vonnegut's "A Man Without a Country"

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

That came to my attention this morning because it was the answer to an old Wall Street Journal acrostic I just did. I had the book in my Kindle, so I looked it up. It ends a half-page bit at "location 222" that appears under the heading "Here is a lesson in creative writing." 

There's more to that quote. This is the lead-in:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

But the first thing under that heading is: 

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

It's considered bad form these days to be averse to sexuality that's not manifested as clearly masculine or clearly feminine. And "transvestite" and "hermaphrodite" are disfavored and inappropriately pejorative. Nowadays, it's unseemly to pressure anyone to get into one camp or the other. You can be "nonbinary." That's not "nothing." So the Vonnegut rule against semicolons is nullified. Don't disrespect the semicolon because it's neither a period nor a comma. Celebrate the semicolon!

At Kurt's Kaffe...

... you can write about anything you want in the comments.

I took that photo of my favorite Indianapolis mural when I was in town last weekend.

"Books to stop a young man from getting deeper into the alt right."

A post on the subreddit s/suggestmeabook:

My friend's brother loves to read, mostly nonfiction. He also listens to a lot of podcasts. The past few years he's been getting further into right-wing media and punditry. He reads so much, but it's all shit about Fascism and conservative viewpoints. What sort of books can help show him a different perspective without immediately turning him off?

Usually on this subreddit, people are looking for something else for themselves to read. They liked a certain book, and they want to hear about other, similar books. Or they have a certain feeling, and they want books about characters who feel like that too. But here's somebody who wants to massage or manipulate another person — a person they don't even like. They want to derail a young person who seems to be finding his way along a conservative path. 

But the most interesting thing about this thread, to me, isn't the desire to affect another person's political orientation, it's that the other commenters have a hard time coming up with good ideas about books that might reroute this young reader. Don't lefties have some antidote-to-conservatism books? 

And then there's the way they get twisted up in confusion over whether individualism is fascism. 

Somebody asks:

"Semicolons are ugly, pretentious and unnecessary; they immaturely try to have it both ways."

"There are so many things to fear in life, but punctuation is not one of them. That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied.... Are they ugly? That’s an opinion. Theodor Adorno said they looked like 'a drooping mustache,' but in his view, that’s good — all punctuation marks, and the downtrodden semicolon especially, are 'friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes the body of language'; they ought to be defended. What’s more: Why does your text message, email, tweet, article or book need to be pretty? Is that not also a little pretentious? According to Kurt Vonnegut’s often-taught (and, if you read the full quote, both a little ironic and offensive) advice, 'all they do is show you’ve been to college,' but these days anyone can look up how to use a semicolon.... That semicolons aren’t popular on social media — where oversimplification and directness reign and the presence of too much grammatical flair is likely to limit 'engagement' — is perhaps the only argument some readers will need to be convinced of their value."

From "The Case for Semicolons/There are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside" by Lauren Oyler (NYT).

"I’ve been against the space program.... After all, we knew there were no resources we could economically bring back from [the moon], and we knew there was no atmosphere."

"Even if the whole thing were paved with diamonds, that wouldn’t help us much. So it seems like a vaudeville stunt. A lot of scientists felt it was money that might be spent in other areas of research. What it was was money spent on engineering. It might as well have been an enormous skyscraper or a huge bridge or something like that. It was publicity and show business, not science. John F. Kennedy was largely responsible for it. He was competitive. He was a tough, joyful athlete and he loved to win. And it wasn’t a bad guess, really, that this might cheer Americans up and make us more energetic. It didn’t quite work out that way, but Kennedy, in his enthusiasm for this thing, was really wishing the best for the American people. He thought it might excite us tremendously.... It seemed childish. It seemed childish even to children. My children simply weren’t interested. There was nothing they wanted on the moon. A third grader knows there’s no atmosphere there. There’s nothing to eat or drink, nobody to talk to. They already know that. There’s more that they want in the Sahara or on the polar icecap.... They picked colorless men to make the trip, because colorless men were the only sort who could stand to make it. In science-fiction stories, people on spaceships are arguing all the time. Well, people who are going to argue shouldn’t go on spaceships in the first place."

Said Kurt Vonnegut in a 1973 interview with Playboy.

Playboy: You said it was sexual. 

"Whomever has the gun, you see, gets to tell everyone else what to do — it’s the American way."

A line in Kurt Vonnegut's 1970 play "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," which is revived right now off Broadway and discussed in "Kurt Vonnegut’s Vietnam-Era Play Lands With a Gasp" (NYT).

“There’s absurdism in the news right now,” [said the director Jeff Wise], “and it’s getting more and more absurd in a very despairing and awful way.”...

“Even in the last few days,” [said the actor Jason O’Connell, who plays Harold, a "Trumpian guy"], “there are elements of the show that played funnier in April that feel a little darker now, and I don’t think we’re doing anything differently with them. I think people are receiving them differently.”...

Night to night, too, sensitivities change. The evening of the October day when 11 people were murdered at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the moment in the show that didn’t work involved Nazis, [the actress Kate] MacCluggage said. At a performance right after a different mass shooting, she recalled, a line that Harold speaks went over like “a stomach punch”: “Whomever has the gun, you see, gets to tell everyone else what to do — it’s the American way.”

Contemplating the shrine to the mid-60s.

Detail of the display, from the LBJ library,  under the 1964-1966 sign:



The model on the cover of Playboy looks kind of like Ann Margret, but it's Venita Wolf, She was a minor actress who lived from 1945 to 2014 — not too minor to have a Wikipedia article:

Venita Wolf... appeared in the Star Trek episode "The Squire of Gothos" (1967) as Yeoman Teresa Ross.



Other than that, she had only a short stint on popular television from 1966 to 1969, including guest roles in The Flying Nun, The Monkees, Gunsmoke and The Beverly Hillbillies, among others. She appeared unbilled in The Oscar (1966) but her only feature film credit was a supporting role in the beach movie Catalina Caper (1967)...

"Arabesque" was a 1966 movie. It was, like "Charade," one of those Hitchcock movies not by Hitchcock but by Stanley Donen.

"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" is a Tom Wolfe book from 1965. Here's its Wikipedia article:

Many versions of the book are headed by an incomplete quotation from Kurt Vonnegut: "Verdict: Excellent book by a genius." Vonnegut's full quotation was "Verdict: Excellent book by a genius who will do anything to get attention." 

Speaking of orangeness, there's Tang. And that grand triad of mid-60s fun: the Spirograph, the Frisbee, and Operation.

Google suggests a question I'd never thought of asking: What was the IQ of Jesus?

Go here if you want to click those links. I think it's a sacrilegious question. It doesn't even make sense as a question. To ask it is to confess not to believe what Christians believe. You wouldn't ask what is God's IQ. If God chose to sojourn for a lifetime as a man, would he select an IQ level for Himself or would He go ahead and maintain Godlike intelligence while passing Himself off as someone recognizably human? Putting the question like that — and I've never thought about this before, so bear with me, I'm not trying to be offensive or even provocative — the answer I would suggest — relying as I must on my own merely human intelligence — is that God would want a high but not too high intelligence for His human life. He would want to feel like a human being who would naturally relate to other human beings and be able to talk with them and understand their needs in a human way.

If you're wondering how I got to the point where Google suggested this search, I had noticed a picture of a particular famous person (whom I won't name) and the facial expression made me suspect low intelligence. I typed "what was the IQ of J..." and Google's first suggestion was Jesus. Next were, in order, John Stuart Mill, Steve Jobs, and Thomas Jefferson. The internet answers are 174, 160, and 153.8. I know. It borders on nonsense, but numbers seem cool to us idiot humans. Did you know that the actress Sharon Stone (supposedly) has an IQ of 154, and that's one ahead of Mozart and Charles Darwin and 4 ahead of Abraham Lincoln?

Perhaps it's a sin to think about people in terms of IQ. I'm not proud of looking at "J" and thinking the expression on her face said something about IQ. She might have been stupefied, temporarily, by drugs or by painful tragedy or simply very bored by whatever circumstance brought her in front of that camera.

The question of Jesus's IQ reminds me of something I was talking about in real life yesterday. This was a propos of my new electric bike, which boosts my physical ability to the level where I'm equal to Meade, my riding companion. That made me think of a twist on the well-known Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron." Wikipedia summary:

In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic. One April, 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron, an intelligent and athletic teenager, is taken away from his parents, George and Hazel Bergeron, by the government. They are barely aware of the tragedy, as Hazel has "average" intelligence (a euphemism for stupidity), and George has a handicap radio installed by the government to regulate his above-average intelligence.... [Ballet dancers] are weighed down to counteract their gracefulness and masked to hide their attractiveness....

It's ridiculous (or terrifying) because people are leveled downward, but what if you could level people upward, the way my e-bike brings me up? I'll leave you to dream up the physical possibilities. I remember saying "Where are my electric shoes?" But let's focus on the mental leveling up. What if everyone could choose to turn up their IQ as far as possible?

This is close to the hypothetical question of what IQ would God choose for His life as Jesus? But it's different if everyone could level up. What would happen to the world, to human life as we know it if everyone could equalize? The question gets really complex if you think about everyone having access to the e-bike of the mind. I'd be afraid the work that needs to get done would not get done.

But to make the question easier — since I don't have the device and need an easier question — if just you had access to the device, what IQ would you turn yourself up to? It's dangerous to pick a fixed level. You could say I want 174 like John Stuart Mill and then find yourself gloomy...



... or just burdened or annoyed by the complicated hard work you have to do to keep from becoming bored. You might be smart enough only to see that there's no way for you to have fun or to connect with anyone else and to dither away philosophizing about the value of the fun and connection that has become unavailable to you.

You don't want to end up like David McCallum in "The 6th Finger" episode of "The Outer Limits":



With the e-bike you have a switch that lets you change your level of assistance up and down. I can turn it off entirely and just go on my own muscle power, or I can up the assistance to "eco," "tour," "sport," or "turbo." To have a good, happy life, you'd probably want to stay at "eco" or "tour," the way I do with the e-bike, and save "sport" and "turbo" for hills.

Posing and not interposing with Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A chance encounter as we walked down Massachusetts Avenue in Indianapolis last Friday...



Meade wanted me to pose with my hand like that, but it was hard to figure out what in the position of that hand was giving it such expression. And I didn't know until I uploaded the pictures that he was also trying to catch the blazing sun, which I presume is intentional, since a slight step to the left would have interposed the building.



The sunlight seems to say the brilliant spirit lives on.

The mural was painted by Pamela Bliss.

"It’s hard to appreciate how little Warhol’s art was worth at the time. Twenty-five hundred was the going rate at the time. Why would Andy give him a fake?"

"He had plenty of electric chairs. They were not an easy sell. They weren’t decorative in the conventional sense. It’s a brutal image."

He = Alice Cooper, who "says he remembers having a conversation with Warhol about the picture. He thinks the conversation was real, but he couldn’t put his hand on a Bible and say that it was."

"Little Electric Chair" (from the "Death and Disaster" series) was found rolled up in a tube in storage.

Never stretched on a frame, it sat in storage alongside touring artefacts including an electric chair that Cooper used in the early 70s as part of his ghoulish stage show.

I saw that show, actually. I remember the electric chair. It must have been July 28, 1971 in Wildwood, New Jersey. That was the "Love It to Death" tour:

The Love It to Death tour featured an elaborate shock rock live show: during "Ballad of Dwight Fry"—about an inmate in an insane asylum—Cooper would be dragged offstage and return in a straitjacket, and the show climaxed with Cooper's mock execution in a prop electric chair during "Black Juju."

Let's see if Alice Cooper is mentioned in "The Andy Warhol Diaries." Yes! Exactly once:

Bianca took us to On the Rox, owned by Lou Adler. When we got there it was Ringo Starr and Alice Cooper. I’m not saying they were the only celebrities there— they were the only people there, and they were in the john. Whoever is there is in the john taking coke. Bianca introduced me to Ringo. Alice came over to say hello. Bianca left because she was staying out in Malibu and Mick was coming in and then leaving town the next day so she wanted to get home early to see him.

Those were the days.



And here's what Alice Cooper said last August about the 2016 election:

[The election is] funny in a Kurt Vonnegut kind of way. It's also funny and kind of seriously demented that nobody wants to vote for a candidate; they want to vote against the other candidate. I can't think of anybody that's going, "I really like Hillary. I'm going to vote for her." No, it's: "I'm voting for Hillary 'cause I hate Trump." Or it's: "I hate Trump, but I hate her worse." Nobody's actually for anybody.... I honestly cannot in my head look at either candidate and say, "Oh, yeah. I'm behind that." So it's weird. I'm going to vote, but it's really going to be one of those last-minute decisions going."

Ha ha. Me too. That's exactly what happened to me. I decided which one I would vote for as I walked to the poll. (That's all I'll say about how I voted.)

"There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes."

Said Kurt Vonnegut, drawing diagrams on a blackboard:



I found that via this Atlantic article, "The Six Main Arcs in Storytelling, as Identified by an A.I./A machine mapped the most frequently used emotional trajectories in fiction, and compared them with the ones readers like best."

The 6 shapes are:

1. Rags to Riches (rise)

2. Riches to Rags (fall)

3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)

4. Icarus (rise then fall)

5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)

6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)

"Trump is like a Karass Negotiation Class that's run wild."

Writes Tom, fascinatingly, in the comments to the first post of the day (the one about what Rush said about Trump's complicated relationship to conservatism).

I'm sorry to see that there really is something called a Karrass negotiation seminar. 2 "r"s there, but I think that's what Tom meant. "Karass" in my book — which is "Cat's Cradle" — is "A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial links are not evident."

I don't know how you could take a class or negotiate about that, but I loved the idea of Trump as a man finding his Karass.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba."

One time we talked about this blog that way:

matthew said...
So are the readers here a karass, or is this blog just one giant granfalloon?
12/14/08, 11:25 AM

Ann Althouse said...
Clearly, a karass!
12/14/08, 1:11 PM

BJM said...
The internets are a granfalloon; blog Althouse a karass.
12/14/08, 5:15 PM

I love the idea of speaking and, by speaking, causing kindred souls to assemble. But does it make sense to think about Trump that way? It resonated for me, because I think there's some unusual variety to who responds to Trump. MSM may hope to brand Trumpions as the uneducated and unintelligent. But something more complicated is going on, and — as I said yesterday in a Bloggingheads episode that isn't up quite yet — there's a coming "cascade" of support for Trump when people feel liberated to reveal their affiliation — or, as I'm seeing this morning, their membership in the karass. I know, misreading, but it's that cascade that came to mind when Tom spoke of running wild.

"Many of the ideas and themes that characterize Vonnegut were born in the conversation between Kurt and Janet..."

"... and throughout his career she remained a voice in the text. She was there: that was her," writes Ginger Strand in The New Yorker.

"Ariana Grande Is Not Here for Your Sexist Interview Questions."

I'm only posting about this because I already have an Ariana Grande tag. That tag only has one other post and it's a post that contains the phrase "I'm only posting because...."

The other post is "Thanks for licking the doughnut, Ariana Grande." She's the celebrity who licked a doughnut that was on a tray left unsupervised in a doughnut shop where anyone could just come up and lick it.

I appreciated her calling our attention to unattended doughnuts, and now she's applying her celebrity power to the problem of radio show hosts asking female celebrities questions like "If you had to choose between your phone and makeup, which would you give up?"

As for the doughnuts tag, which this post also gets, it's not languishing so unused I wish I'd never created it. It's rolling along. This is its 33rd appearance.

I wanted to illustrate this post with an image of a rolling doughnut. (Yeah, here's a good one.) But searching for "rolling doughnut" turned up "15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will," and one of them is: "Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?"

#1 on that list is "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" I read that out loud to Meade without identifying the context and he thought I was reading something I'd written. His reaction was: "I think it's below your normal writing."

And that's it for the second Ariana Grande blog post.

"One of the most entertaining searches you can do on Spotify is for Hitler: There are tons of songs."

"A band called The Buttplugs wrote one about Hitler’s nipples. There’s one by Antony & the Johnsons ('Hitler in My Heart'), and one by Faith No More ('Crack Hitler'). There’s the obligatory Mel Brooks number, plenty of punk, and a track by Bob Newhart. There’s a Churchill speech and a testimonial from an RAF Bomber, and the announcement of the Führer’s death on German radio. Under related artists, where you’d expect to find Hideki Tojo, Benito Mussolini, or maybe Himmler, you find Neville Chamberlain, Edward Kennedy, John Glenn, and Charles Lindbergh. Statistics aren’t the same as historians. Related Artists is actually a social network for people with extremely eccentric friends: You can get from Nazis to an album of Kurt Vonnegut reading Slaughterhouse-Five in a few clicks. Here’s how: Start with Hitler, and then go to Charles Lindbergh. Take a left at Franklin D. Roosevelt, a hard left at Studs Terkel, and an even harder left at Ward Churchill. Veer slightly right (but you’re really still going left) to Howard Zinn, then Angela Davis. Enter a tunnel until you hit Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Next you’re at Gertrude Stein, who is unexpectedly close to Dorothy Parker. Head right until you see Rudyard Kipling, and after that you can’t miss Vonnegut."

From "Other People’s Playlists/Spotify’s secret social network," by Paul Ford in The New Republic.