Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [61]
I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whore-houses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn’t anything that hadn’t been done before.
In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras! They don’t have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic depressive experts on what most people want.
Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”
Steve Adams, one of my three adopted nephews, was a successful TV comedy writer in Los Angeles, California, a few years back. His big brother Jim is an ex—Peace Corps guy and now a psychiatric nurse. His kid brother Kurt is a veteran pilot with Continental Airlines, with scrambled eggs on his cap, gold braid on his sleeves. All Steve’s kid brother ever wanted to do for a living was fly. A dream came true!
Steve learned the hard way that all his jokes for TV had to be about events that had been made much of by TV itself, and very recently. If a joke was about something that hadn’t been on TV for a month or more, the watchers wouldn’t have a clue, even though the laugh track was laughing, as to what they themselves were supposed to laugh about.
Guess what? TV is an eraser.
Having even the immediate past erased may indeed make it more comfortable for most people to get through this thing, whatever it is. Jane, my first wife, won her Phi Beta Kappa key at Swarthmore College over the objections of the History Department. She had written, and then argued in oral examinations, that all that could be learned from history was that history itself was absolutely nonsensical, so study something else, like music.
I agreed with her, and so would have Kilgore Trout. But history still hadn’t been erased back then. And when I started out as a writer, I could refer to events and personalities in the past, even the distant past, with a reasonable expectation that a fair number of readers would respond with some emotion, whether positive or negative, when I mentioned them.
Case in point: The murder of the greatest President this country will ever have, Abraham Lincoln, by the twenty-six-year-old ham actor John Wilkes Booth.
That assassination was a major event in Timequake One. Who is there left under the age of sixty, and not in a History Department, to give a damn?
59
Elias Pembroke, a fictitious Rhode Island naval architect who was Abraham Lincoln’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy during our Civil War, was a character in Timequake One. I said he made significant contributions to the design of the power train of the ironclad warship Monitor, but was neglectful of his wife, Julia, who fell in love with a dashing young actor and rakehell named John Wilkes Booth.
Julia wrote love letters to Booth. A tryst was arranged for April 14th, 1863, two years before Booth shot Lincoln from behind with a derringer. She went to New York City from Washington with a chaperone, the alcoholic wife of an admiral, ostensibly to shop, and to escape the tensions in the besieged