Player Piano: This Wednesday!

Folks, it’s here, it’s actually happening. Wednesday night we’ll be discussing Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, on an hour-long Google Meet session. We’ll start at 8:00 Eastern / 7:00 Central / 6:00 Mountain / 5:00 Pacific, and if somehow you’re joining from another time zone… who on earth are you!?

Here’s your invite link:

Our special guest will be Dr. Michael Weis, Emeritus Professor of History at illinois Wesleyan University, who assigned Player Piano as part of his course on the Sixties. One of the things which typified a Mike Weis class was how current the material always felt, and here we have a book written in 1952 which has stunning currency for our times. It feels like a perfect nexus.

I’ve participated in book sessions like this before but I’ve never managed one, so it might be a mess, but I think it’ll be a hot mess!

If you haven’t read it yet, don’t worry, you can still participate, because I asked ChatGPT to summarize it for us! Here’s what ChatGPT says:

Well, hmm. Hmmmmm. You don’t say, ChatGPT, you don’t say.

Gosh, I wonder if we’ll wind up talking about AI at all…

If you do plan on joining on Wednesday, if you could, please send me a message in one of the 73 ways available to do so. I’d like to make sure everyone I expect is online when we get started. And please feel free if you know someone else who you think might be interested to forward this on to them.

Hope to see many of you Wednesday night!