ArtiFact #11: Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" | Alex Sheremet, Keith Jackewicz

Taking up Mark Twain's mission, then greatly expanding upon it, Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) was one of the best comic writers to have ever lived. His best-known work, Slaughterhouse-Five, features everything from sci-fi to dramedy to timeless political comment, and has overshadowed his other great works. One of these is 1963’s black comedy, Cat’s Cradle, a 127-chapter novel split across a mere ~300 pages, best typifying Vonnegut’s idea that his books “are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips, and each chip is a joke”. Featuring an artificial religion and carefully built-up philosophy (Bokononism), WMDs familiar (the atomic bomb) and strange (ice-nine), well-phrased doggerel that serves any number of functions, and a subtly rich set of characters, the novel remains one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best.

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Music sample: Lowkemia - "Lorem Ipsum" (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Timestamps:

0:00 – Cat’s Cradle: structure, density, value systems, political lens(es) 09:20 – Bokononism, black comedy, Kurt Vonnegut’s artistic choices 19:40 – Keith on the degeneration of the novel 21:56 – Alex: will shortened attention spans kill the arts during this cycle? 29:29 – Ch. 1: “Call me Jonah”, Ch. 2: the karass & Vonnegut’s ‘good’ doggerel 51:40 – The Bokononist compulsion to “write things down” + artistic mystique 55:40 – Alex: how art helped me introspect & make better decisions 01:00:52 – How Cat’s Cradle tries to resolve the object/subject dilemma 01:02:40 – Understanding the Bokononist vocabulary 01:28:46 – Ch. 5: Newt/Felix Hoenniker + how Kurt Vonnegut builds Cat’s Cradle upward 01:47:12 – Keith on Felix Hoenniker’s “saint” (‘miracle’) function 01:52:42 – Ch. 11: “Protein”: how Kurt Vonnegut generates character capstones 01:56:58 – Who is Mona? Wherefore is Mona? 02:05:00 – Hoosier + the concept of a “granfalloon” 02:13:46 – Why did Kurt Vonnegut choose ice-nine as his WMD? 02:26:32 – Reading the final 3 chapters