Phthursday Musings: Kurt and David's Kingdom

Back in February, having totally run out of ideas, I devoted an entire post to bird poop.

In that guano-laden installment, I noted, in part:

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library publishes an annual journal, So It Goes, which is a collection of vaguely Kurt-inspired works around some kind of theme. Last year’s theme was civic engagement. This year’s theme is Vonnegut and the environment…

I want to submit something this year. Perhaps some of you can help suggest something. See, I find fiction very hard to put together, even a very short story, and I am sure as hell not submitting a poem.

Also in that installment I recounted my own personal experience visiting Sioux Falls, South Dakota in December 2012.

If you’re this far in, and you haven’t read “David’s Kingdom”, which I published earlier today, now is when you should stop and go do that. Or, you can be part of a META-SPIEL control experiment: You can be the weirdo who reads all about a short story before or maybe without at all reading the story itself. More about this much further below.

“David’s Kingdom” was written for the singular intent of submission to So It Goes. As initially conceived, the entire story was essentially a forced build up to telling the bird poop joke. You may note that in February I re-told the joke, and also relayed the Sioux Falls story, and also talked about writing a short story, so all of this stuff wound up packaged together.

A month before the infamous bird poop installment I noted what I’d been reading recently:

Last week I finished The Artificial Man and Other Stories, a collection of science fiction short stories by Clare Winger Harris, who is widely regarded as the first woman to publish stories under her own name in science fiction magazines. These stories are largely from the 1920s, and it’s fascinating to consider how at the same time that she considered the potential for extraterrestrial travel, she was still thinking largely in terms of communication primarily by radio waves.

While certainly “David’s Kingdom” is written in a very on-the-nose Vonnegutesque manner, the nominal story is very much informed by Harris’s work as well. I’ll come back to Harris; for now I’d just note that, if you’re intrigued by early to mid 20th century science fiction, but unfamiliar with Harris, now is a fine time to acquaint yourself.

I pay a lot of attention to the energy sector and I see a lot of stories about various actions related to various pipeline projects. There was Keystone XL, there’s Line 3 in Minnesota, there’s Line 5 in Michigan. If you look at the conceit of much of science fiction - post-apocalyptic but not necessarily dystopian - well, I think a major pipeline explosion fits in with that tradition quite well.

So in my early framework I had a lot of the pieces. I had a joke (bird poop), a location (Sioux Falls), I had a disaster, and I had a framework of “Vonnegut and the environment” to unify all of this, which meant taking a disaster and turning it into something even more ludicrous, like the idea that bird poop itself could displace fossil fuels as the greatest possibly energy source known to mankind.

Of course, this isn’t quite as ludicrous as it first sounds, when you consider the Guano Wars, the Guano Islands Act of 1856, and also the reality that a whole lot of the fertilizer used today is actually derived from fossil fuel sources itself.

One other thing I do in the short story is suggest that much of the actual devastation from the disaster was actually after-the-fact, caused by the human response. Yeah, I’ve read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. But I think this idea of my was influenced in part by Jonathan Katz’s writing on the aftermath of the massive Haiti earthquake, and how the “help” the Haitian people got made a terrible situation far worse, in the form of the cholera outbreak there in 2010. (At the time Katz wrote a Substack called The Long Read, which has recently transitioned to The Racket. I highly recommend his work.)

So I had a lot of framework, and I also had a word limit of 1,250, and you might be aware that keeping things concise is not necessarily my forte. What I didn’t have was a protagonist, or maybe a set of protagonists. Really, the story wouldn’t be about the characters themselves. Whatever names I dropped in were… replaceable.

I was looking for help coming up with character names. I had an idea about a small crew, and that they would be from a ways away, maybe Minneapolis… the thinking being that there would be crews chasing the goose poop cash the same way so many men have poured into places like Williston, North Dakota chasing fracking.

I wanted the names to be those of regular, average guys, probably white guys in this telling. I was bouncing around very flat named like Chad or Stan, maybe names that were a bit older and sort of implied that I wasn’t necessarily imbuing any of the protagonists with any particular personality, because they were just intended to be pawns in the game, so to speak.

And at some point in this mulling, it dawned on me: if I want four average guys from Minneapolis, I could do far worse than naming them Paul, Bob, Chris, and Tommy.

And so the last conceit of the story locked into place. In this sort of post-apocalyptic time, when maybe there wasn’t a lot of work to be had, what if four young men, otherwise wired to a willingness to do the filthiest work imaginable, had no way of escaping, through, say, rock and roll, and instead wound up being like everyone before them who had chased, say, the Centralia oil boom (like my own great-grandparents), or the fracking boom or the gold boom or any other boom?

Well. If you haven’t read Bob Mehr’s Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, one of the absolute greatest in the rock biography genre, what are you waiting for?

The trick for me was, how do I actually refer in every which way to the Replacements while leaving the story alone? So that if you were in on that part of the joke, the whole thing was even funnier, but if you weren’t, it wasn’t a problem?

Well, fair reader, I leave it to you to determine whether I pulled that off. I’ve already been chided for going too far with the Twin/Turd joke, but honestly, once that idea entered my mind, I couldn’t let it go, it was just too funny to me.

Last month, Vish Khanna devoted an episode of his podcast Kreative Kontrol to an interview with Bob Mehr, Jason Jones, and Peter Jesperson, about the new box set issue of the first Replacement album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash. (Peter Jesperson co-founded Twin/Tone Records, the Replacements’ first record label, to fill in an explanation for a seemingly out of nowhere couple of paragraphs in “David’s Kingdom”.) In a lot of ways it’s hard to imagine the current timeline without the Replacements existing, because they were clearly so formative to much of what occurred culturally during and after their time. But it’s remarkably easy to imagine a timeline where everything fell apart early on.

The imagining of drastically different timelines is, I think, at the heart of science fiction. It could be argued that it’s at the heart of fiction generally, but so much of fiction is designed to hew to what we know, that if and when it steps too far outside those boundaries, it just doesn’t work. Certain branches of fiction, though, are able to sidestep the problem by declaring themselves to be way outside of what we know, and then they can lean in to what we do know. Within science fiction it arguably becomes easier to use outright absurdity to provide basic moral lessons. Does this not sound precisely like Kurt Vonnegut, who had so much to say about who we are, but often did so by writing about seemingly anything else?

Along those lines, it was intentional that in “David’s Kingdom” I did not try to provide a chronology relative to our own timeline. Oh, I cheated a little bit, because it’s funny to imagine that the most effect goose dispersal tool in the universe is Kenny G. But I left it intentionally vague as to whether I was talking about a post-apocalyptic past, present, or future. Actually, vague isn’t even the word. I didn’t even decide for myself.

This brings me back to the idea that maybe you have chosen to read this explainer, which will ultimately be many words longer than the story itself, without actually reading the story.

Reader, I want you to read the story now. Then find alternate timeline you, who did the more logical thing and read the story first. Have a conversation with alternate you. See who has the most insight. Then report back to all of us.

Yes, this sounds difficult to pull off. It literally requires that you somehow reach out and contact another dimension. And, given that it requires such a thing, it is probably the absolute stupidest thing you could do with such a power.

Indeed, let us go further, and consider the possibility that you successfully traversed dimensions into another actual timeline, only to find that this was one your one and only shot, and, moreover, humanity’s one and only shot, and you are the nincompoop who wasted this extraordinary gift on the absolute stupidest possible thing that you could possibly have imagined considering doing.

Seriously, pal, just think about that. Is that the kind of nincompoop you want to be?

The other theme that I hope you picked upon from reading the story is the circular nature of things, where by “things”, I mean “humanity being a gigantic collection of nincompoops over and over again.”

The whole story is predicated on the basis that extraction of energy led to a disaster, and ultimately culminates in the mass extraction of energy. Never in the story does anyone consider the possibility that maybe certain things shouldn’t be done. The protagonists, to be fair, aren’t expected to grapple with this. No, sir, or madam as the case may be, that job is yours.

Today at home we were talking about the holiday that today is. In this country, it’s Veteran’s Day, in Commonwealth countries it’s Remembrance Day, in Poland it’s actually National Independence Day. In France and Belgium, it’s still Armistice Day, to commemorate the signing of the armistice which formally ended World War I on November 11, 1918.

The United States changed it to Veterans Day in 1954. Let’s face it: remembering the end of World War I must have been a strange thing to do once World War II began.

Kurt Vonnegut, of course, was born on Armistice Day 1922, and then served in World War II, where most famously he was a prisoner of war in the European theater, and as such happened to be in Dresden on February 13, 1945, when British and American forces firebombed the city.

Are you unfamiliar with the firebombing of Dresden? You should acquaint yourself. You can’t ultimately understand Kurt Vonnegut’s worldview without understanding what happened in Dresden.

Kurt was a satirist and a father and a writer and a soldier and a whole lot of other things. I think at his core though he was just another one of us out there, looking for the answer. For him, the search led not heavenward but inward. And what he found on the inside was a great deal of madness but also a great deal of kindness. His imperative to all of us - goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind - well, it’s the golden rule, isn’t it? Presented in a not-so-common way, of course.

The inner tension between order and absurdity, I think, is something far too many people run and hide from, when they should really be embracing it. Part of what makes us so damn foolish is all of the damn order we try to impose, and part of what makes us so damn sensible is all of the damn nonsense we try to impose. The entire brain wants to be stimulated. That, I think, was Kurt’s gift as a writer. He made you think deeply about real things, made you think deeply about utter bullshit, and also had a way of just suddenly changing the narrative voice so as to address YOU, thereby making you think about something else entirely. He activated so many more synapses than the average writer.

What I love about the bird poop joke in its original format is that it is the ultimate combination of high brow meets low brow meets absurdity. The whole setup is complicated and ridiculous but at its core is deconstructed high brow humor. The joke itself isn’t actually funny but rather almost a joke upon the auditor. And, of course, it involves poop. It’s absolutely perfect, and no less so because it would likely irritate the shit out of the majority of sane people on the planet.

I was in Sioux Falls from December 10-14, 2012, one of a handful of work trips I made there. I was there to help set up a new point of sale system at the zoo.

My second night in town was when I was down to the riverfront at night and encountered David. It still baffles me that he’s there:

In the background to the left there’s a fleet of vehicles. Zoom in and you find that they’re postal trucks. To me this just adds to the bizarreness of it all.

I didn’t actually take a picture of goose poop, but I did take this:

It was a splotch of snow thoroughly trampled upon by the geese. It almost looks like some kind of written language where the words are all jumbled together.

David surrounded by goose poop was not the only strange thing I encountered on the trip. The Great Plains Zoo & Delbridge Museum of Natural History is a zoo that, inexplicably, has tacked on to it a large indoor exhibit of dead animals, the absolute most bizarre of which was certainly this pair:

I always had a love/hate thing with work trips. This was back before there was a child around so it wasn’t quite as bad. I didn’t like being away from home. But, if I was going to be away from home, I was going to make the most of it. And for me that meant seeing whatever there was to see, whether it be a replica of a famous statue, whatever exactly the hell the above is, or this:

The above is part of the USS South Dakota Battleship Memorial, a confusing site dedicated to a World War II era battleship alternately known as both “Battleship X” and “Big Bastard”.

I hope that nobody who comes across “David’s Kingdom” attempts to take offense on behalf of the good people of Sioux Falls. Please rest assured, I thoroughly enjoyed visiting your fair city, sampling the excellent walnut fatayer one day, dining at a very fine Ethiopian restaurant the next, finding a more than ample amount of beer to be had, and just in general finding a highly fascinating and utterly American city.

I very much look forward to taking the family to Sioux Falls one day. Forget California. Florida, get lost. We’re headed to South Dakota.

If the Replacements hadn’t existed, it would have taken a mind like Kurt Vonnegut’s to have dreamt them up. Even if you’re not (yet) a Mats fan, you really should read Bob Mehr’s book. It’s that good in and of itself. And then you just need to sit back and listen to Pleased To Meet Me or Let It Be all the way through. In their own way they’re like versions of the bird poop joke, and yet also the highest art we might ever dare to know.

I will be in Indianapolis one year from today, on the occasion of Kurt’s 100th birthday. I’ve been planning this for a while, it seems. It’s absolutely going to happen.

It does seem a little odd to keep writing about the man when it’s been more than a decade since his passing. It’s not like I’ve been reading a lot of Vonnegut in recent years. But as with a tiny number of other people, it does seem like he just keeps being relevant.

I hadn’t attempted writing anything like a short story in many years. I was really hoping I’d get published. It’s honestly getting harder and harder to see how anything I write might be published anywhere else, given that I couldn’t even get this one over the line.

The last time I took some sort of piece of creative writing and had it actually published in a print form was in our high school literary journal Kudos. I find fiction to be remarkably difficult, I think because I have less grasp of my audience, and therefore less clarity as to what all else needs to be described or explained. With most of my essay-style writing I’m a lot more liable to overexplain than underexplain anyway. Fiction though requires portraying a scene, adding in flourishes of color or whatnot. This is probably why what few stories I’ve written over time have tended to be very short. Get in, get to the point, get out.

I would love to write more. I would love to experience “being a writer” as opposed to whatever participial phrase is most appropriate for whatever exactly META-SPIEL is.

If you enjoyed “David’s Kingdom”, I hope you will share it with others. It would be very interesting to me to get feedback on it, even if it’s just horror at some element thereof.

But, hopefully, Kurt can continue to inspire me to do things outside of my comfort zone. I’m not sure what else I could possibly mean by that. But here I am wrapping up an entry that is about a short story that is about bird poop, so by gum, I suppose anything is possible.

Poo-tee-weet?