Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [12]
Kilgore Trout exclaimed upon arriving at Xanadu, two weeks after free will kicked in again, “All four of your ink-on-paper heroes were certifiable alcoholics!”
Gambling ruined William Saroyan. A combination of booze and gambling did in the journalist Alvin Davis, a much-missed friend of mine. I asked Al one time what was the biggest kick he got from games of chance. He said it came after he had lost all his money in an around-the-clock poker game.
He went back after a few hours with money he had gotten wherever he could get it, from a friend, from hocking something, from a loanshark. And he sat down at the table and said, “Deal me in.”
The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell said he lost friends to one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess. Kilgore Trout was hooked on making idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines, with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp, of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.
I have been married twice, divorced once. Both my wives, Jane and now Jill, have said on occasion that I am much like Trout in that regard.
My mother was addicted to being rich, to servants and unlimited charge accounts, to giving lavish dinner parties, to taking frequent first-class trips to Europe. So one might say she was tormented by withdrawal symptoms all through the Great Depression.
She was acculturated!
Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction, can do that to people quicker than you can say “Jack Robinson.”
As Trout wrote in his “An American Family Marooned on the Planet Pluto”: “Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.” He said in conversation at the 2001 clambake: “If I hadn’t learned how to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times.”
In Timequake One, I had Trout discard his “The Sisters B-36” in a lidless wire trash receptacle chained to a fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street in Manhattan, two doors west of Broadway. This was on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 2000, supposedly fifty-one days before the timequake zapped everybody and everything back to 1991.
The members of the Academy, I said, who were addicted to making old-fashioned art in old-fashioned ways, without computers, were experiencing acculturation. They were like the two artistic sisters on the matriarchal planet Booboo in the Crab Nebula.
There really is an American Academy of Arts and Letters. Its palatial headquarters are where I placed them in Timequake One. There really is a fire hydrant out front. There really is a library inside, and an art gallery and reception halls and meeting rooms and staff offices, and a very grand auditorium.
By an act of Congress passed in 1916, the Academy can have no more than 250 members, American citizens, all of whom have distinguished themselves as novelists, dramatists, poets, historians, essayists, critics, composers of music, architects, painters, or sculptors. Their ranks are regularly diminished by the Grim Reaper, by death. A task of the survivors is to nominate and then, by secret ballot, elect persons to fill the vacancies.
Among the Academy’s founders were old-fashioned writers such as Henry Adams and William and Henry James, and Samuel Clemens, and the old-fashioned composer Edward MacDowell. Their audiences were necessarily small. Their own brains were all they had to work with.
I said in Timequake One that by the year 2000, crafts-people of their sort