I’ve recently reread the 1973 Playboy interview with Kurt Vonnegut. It’s excellent and worth reading in its entirety. Like all the prophets, he was just some silly guy. In 2010 or thereabouts, my friend Jarrett, who I had recently made swear an oath to be my lifelong friend, handed me a copy of Slaughterhouse Five and instead of reading my assigned philosophy or literature or religion homework I read that book in one sitting. Over the next summer I read every single one of his novels. This interview is a fun read even if you haven’t read everything he ever wrote. Some excerpts:
Playboy: Is there any religion you consider superior to any other?
Vonnegut: Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous gives you an extended family that’s very close to a blood brotherhood, because everybody has endured the same catastrophe.
I love this answer. “Catastrophe” is the language Cornel West and James Cone use to talk about the cross, the lived experience of anti-Black racism, the being-destroyed that comes with being alive. Blues and jazz are about catastrophe. It’s not that things are kind of bad and need fixing— it’s that things are unfixable and we are all broken wide open, screaming that even the end of the world can’t break us. Catastrophe.
Playboy: In some of your books—especially The Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse-Five—there’s a serious notion that all moments in time exist simultaneously, which implies that the future can’t be changed by an act of will in the present. How does a desire to improve things fit with that?
Vonnegut: You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.
Playboy: Of course.
I’ve recently gotten into Ted Chiang, who writes wacky short science fiction stories. He deals with a similar recurring theme of our actions being worthwhile even if the future and past are written. We are agents of change and powerless. We are trapped in time and can change the timeline.
Further down Vonnegut says:
So I ask, “Where is my bed?”—and then wind up in a Holiday Inn. You can’t go home again.
This line got me like the line in the Mountain Goats song Riches and Wonders when he sings, “I want to go home. But I am home.”
Playboy: This longing for community may explain, at least in part, the Jesus-freak movement among young people. But why do you think they’re attracted to fundamentalist Christianity?
Vonnegut: Well, the choice of a core for an artificial extended family is fairly arbitrary. I’ve already mentioned the arts and jism and blood and spaghetti. Christianity is equally commonplace and harmless, and therefore good. Do you know what nucleation is? I don’t, but I’ll pretend I do.
I obviously think some belief systems are better than others. That doesn’t mean Vonnegut wasn’t on to something. I used to think liturgical reforms were important— get rid of some of the excessive use of he/him pronouns for God, change the language to be more precise about what we’re not claiming about the nature of salvation, etc. And lots of Episcopal churches do this to the point where the whole service feels clunky. One of my many liturgical pet peeves is what I call Elmo-ing God. In Sesame Street Elmo’s pronouns are Elmo/Elmo. Elmo simply doesn’t get referred to as he/him/me/I/you/she/they. Elmo is Elmo. Elmo says, “Elmo is sad. Elmo wants to be your friend. Elmo is an an emotionally present agender furry monster puppet preaching kindness to all of Elmo’s friends.” You change every “he” to “God” and it just sounds weird. More true, maybe. What I’m saying is it doesn’t matter so much what the words in the hymn or liturgical response are as the fact that you’re singing with people. There was a moment where all these progressive churches were freaking out about the hymns with lyrics like, “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins and sinners plunged beneath its flood lose all their guilty stains.” I actually think this line is theologically harmless at worst, metal as fuck, and fun to sing. But even if I thought it was an offensive line, why give up singing a song that ancestors before you sang to the same tune in the same hallowed rooms? The important thing might be your shared breath, your harmonized nervous systems, that safe sense of connection you feel with a whole mob of other worshipers. The real reason the satanic panic parents were breaking their kids’ CDs is because that feeling of transcendence can also be found at punk shows and that feels like a threat to organized religion. There’s more than one way to find the grounding and awe so common in shared musical experiences. I think Saint Vonnegut here is right that we are desperate for the antidote to lonesomeness that religious practice offers and it’s probably right to focus more on what’s being held together than what’s holding it together. More from KV on the same topic:
Playboy: Aren’t links by name, though, what you call a false karass in Cat’s Cradle—a group that finds its identity in an irrelevant or artificial shared experience?
Vonnegut: I don’t know, but if it works, it doesn’t matter. It’s like the drug thing among young people. The fact that they use drugs gives them a community. If you become a user of any drug, you can pick up a set of friends you’ll see day after day, because of the urgency of getting drugs all the time. And you’ll get a community where you might not ordinarily have one. Built around the marijuana thing was a community, and the same is true about the long-hair thing: You’re able to greet and trust strangers because they look like you, because they use marijuana, and so forth. These are all magical amulets by which they recognize one another—and so you’ve got a community. The drug thing is interesting, too, because it shows that, damn it, people are wonderfully resourceful.
Here’s another link to the whole thing. Read it on the bus instead of getting on one of those goddamned endless scroll apps that are rotting my brain. Dream up some useful lies.
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I recently got a record in the mail that I had pre-ordered months ago and was excited to listen to. The kids were asleep. Naomi was asleep. I put the record on. I sat in my comfy recliner that's torn to bits by the cat. I held the lyric sheet and read along. Three songs in I reached for my phone. For what? I was having the time of my life. I stood up, put the phone away in the kitchen and came back. I really am addicted to the damn thing. Why would I stop doing a fun thing I’d been looking forward to just to look at my little screen full of disappointments? Gonna throw it in the ocean one of these days.
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The record was Chat Pile’s new album. I love it.
Each of their albums make me think of the concept of the Non-Place. We spend so much of our lives in places that feel like nowhere in particular. Highway on-ramps, a Dollar General in a parking lot in a corn field, airport baggage claim, the smokers’ corner on the grocery store loading dock, etc. They all feel haunted if you pay attention to them. They’re built to be ignored, which is an affront to being a human who wants to look around and pay attention. Chat Pile’s project seems to me to demand your attention to the hauntedness of normality.
In one Wendell Berry poem he wrote, “There are no unsacred places; only sacred places and desecrated places.”
An excerpt of the lyrics from Creatures, the opening track of Chat Pile’s new album Who Loves The Sun:
Every creature led to slaughter / Every city underwater / Or covered in ash / or covered in dust / or buried in ash / completely fucked up.
Please don’t say we couldn’t stop this / and please don’t feed me all that bullshit / ‘cause this is what you always wanted— / an empty world vast and haunted
Don’t let them hide! / Don’t let them hide! / While there’s still time / don’t let them hide
I love this song because it’s about climate catastrophe as much as it’s about Noah’s flood. On the one hand the poisoners of our planet have names and addresses. On the other hand the bow God laid down promising not to drown every city and destroy all flesh ever again is strung and pointed at the heavens. Don’t let them hide.
We don’t appreciate imprecatory poetry enough. Here’s another liturgical rant (sorry not sorry) about progressive Christians. Lots of Anglicans have taken some of the fucked-up psalms out of the lectionary. Some of the Bible says some messed up things. I don’t think anyone should have to affirm texts that don’t affirm them. That doesn’t mean there’s not something to learn from them or that you don’t have something to gain by hearing those passages. In Psalm 137 the psalmist is powerless and broken. He is a part of an enslaved people. Here’s the story: The Babylonians had taken the Jews captive, made a mockery of their God, stolen everything from them, taunted them by asking for a song. Catastrophe. So the Psalmist imagines the most fucked-up thing he could do to his oppressors and he makes it the final haunting line of his song that his people, forced to live as a permanent underclass based on their ethno-religious identity, are going to sing. They can take everything from you but that doesn’t mean they can take your resolve. They can kill you but they can’t stop you. That’s what Blues is. And sometimes that takes the form of horrifically violent fantasies.
Psalm 137 in its entirety:
1 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
2 There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How can we sing the songs of the Lord
while in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
6 May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.
7 Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
“tear it down to its foundations!”
8 Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.
9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
Not G-rated! Not the best way for somebody or even a community to respond to lives shattered by violence and oppression, but it’s good spiritual and political praxis to honor the rage of those who suffer. You can sit at the feet of the downtrodden and listen to the pain and just let the feelings sit. That’s good for you and for them. You ever sit and talk with someone in or leaving an abusive relationship and she finally says she fucking hates him? It’s good. People whose backs are up against the wall aren’t under some kind of obligation to tiptoe around how much they’d like to see their abusers suffer the indignity they’ve suffered. There’s no reason not to have this as a lectionary reading in my opinion and lots of good reasons to keep it in there. Hopeless vengeful screaming is a kind of prayer. Are we worried about not being polite? It’s a scary thing to be a full human. Do it anyway.
Best Bob Dylan song is probably Masters of War. Imprecatory poetry at its finest. This was on heavy rotation while Naomi was pregnant with Mary and for months after she was born. The assault on Gaza had begun. American arms manufacturers and their shareholders were seeing one of their best years ever. Children were being dismembered and bludgeoned to death by rubble blown apart by American-made munitions. What could I do?
The complete lyrics:
Come, you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
While the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
While the young peoples' blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatenin' my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins
How much do I know
To talk out of turn?
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness?
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die
And your death will come soon
I'll follow your casket
On a pale afternoon
I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead
There should be more folk songs painting the visual fantasy of war profiteers dying. The masters of war, like the ancient Babylonians, have the law and its gods and the establishment’s respectability and civility on their side. But they can’t take away us singing that we will watch with glee when their pulse flatlines knowing they will never strike terror into the hearts of the weak again.
You’ve thrown the worst fear that can every be hurled— fear to bring children into the world.
I have every right to be outraged. So do you. Rage is a gift.
Let me ask you one question— Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness?
I want billionaires to die and it’s OK and maybe even healthy to say that. I could be an even healthier person and want them freed from the wealth that deforms their soul. Maybe tomorrow I'll be there. I'm not there today.
It’s a good song. Give it a listen. I sang it to Mary as a lullaby when she was tiny. They can’t take that away from us.
This was a review of the Chat Pile album. I meandered and failed to write about the album. Good album. A+. I like it. The world is haunted, we can have the courage to look at it, and the people who made it so grotesque and violent can be stopped. That’s the gospel according to chat pile in my opinion.
From Cristabel ’26:
All they really need— every drop of blood, all your family’s blood— to spit in the face of God.
And what makes that such a crime isn’t just that they’re vampires.
They drank my blood so wastefully.
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Look at this tract. People fucked up hands before AI did and it was way funnier. Look at God’s middle finger tickling this blood-miner’s taint. Annie Dillard has a book of found poetry. It’s fun. That book is what led me to make my zines of found poetry made from tracts. It was called But Now I’m Found.
Wonder all around us in ordinary places. That’s what got me hooked on Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was my favorite book for a bit back in college. Then I gobbled up the rest of them. I love her unaffected unsentimental nature writing. She names things as they are: styrofoam trash, dirt bike tracks, a weasel— or a spider behind the toilet. Great stuff. She’s funny and serious— she demands an earthy spirituality.
I wrote the above two paragraphs before she died. I just have this open document and when it looks too long I stop editing it and put it on the bloggity blog. I delete a couple segments. Add some links. I’m not changing the tense. I wrote it. She was alive. I opened the computer back up. She’s dead.
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Annie Dillard was an important teacher to me. Her genre-bending creative nonfiction made me see any writing on any topic can be beautiful. We really can bend our attention to the world, put words to our experience and make our life a prayer that way. To try out a new recipe is to try to talk to God. I don’t say that flippantly. Maybe I mean there’s a materialist way to see the world as enchanted.
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Here's a culinary tip for you: Duke's mayonnaise mixed with chili crisp is a perfect dip for sweet potato fries or regular potato fries.
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Despair is a cage and hope is work. Workers make the world. Hope can be made. Hope is a thing we do. Despair is capitulation to the capitalists’ lie that the future has already been killed.
Raymond Williams wrote, "To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing."
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The indignity of not catching right away that what you just read is milquetoast GPTvomit or what you saw is an AI image is that images and words really are sacred. They’re a way we can peer into each other’s souls. All advertisements are blasphemy. All LLM-generated motivational LinkedIn posts are false signs and wonders. You’ve been duped thinking you were going to get real insights from a real human trying to share their soul with you and instead it’s gobbledygook. You’ve given your time on this real earth to something unreal. It’s anti-art. It’s unliterature.
We live in a real world. Pay attention to it!
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In 2008 Naomi took this CD into a hair salon in Toronto and said, “I want a haircut like this.” The haircutter did an excellent job and she looked cute. I saw her for the first time not too long thereafter and I was like a cartoon character whose eyes bulge out and tongue flops around in the wind like a flaccid slobbery streamer and they go hubba hubba awooOOooOogaa. That’s how I remember it kind of.
So in a sense I owe this relationship to Robyn. If you read this blog Robyn I would like to thank you.
I used to be Naomi’s barber. I would do her asymmetrical Robyn-inspired hairdo. Then I fucked it up one time and she fired me. Many hairstyles have come and gone since. Still very cute.
She just left town to go see Robyn perform in Toronto leaving me with the kids and dancing on my own.
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Here’s an art activity you could do right now: Print out the lyrics of Chat Pile’s song Creature and collage it on public domain kids Bible story pages of Noah’s flood. Add some mushroom clouds and scenes of climate collapse. This could be a soothing evening activity for you today.
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A word in praise of Sharia:
It’s a boogeyman. It’s also a real historical legal/religious/cultural set of rules and practices that you and I could learn a thing or two from.
I don’t go around claiming Jewish people want to impose their religious dietary restrictions or keep me from eating shrimp or make me observe the most regressive of their takes on marriage or sex ever recorded in their millenia of being a downtrodden and outcast ethnoreligious minority because I would sound like (and be) a stupid bigot. Yet people talk about Muslims this way because it is socially acceptable to be an anti-Arab anti-Muslim bigot.
I also don’t go around saying that Christianity demands subjugation of women, chattel slavery, public executions, criminal penalties for homosexuality, etc. because Christianity, like any major world religion, contains many competing and contradictory claims by various factions, some of whom are mostly or entirely rightly relegated to the past. Every adherent of a major world religion is faithful to some elements of their faith tradition and rejects some elements. That’s just a fact.
“Sharia” is literally “the path” or “the way” and means “divine law” or “religious law.” When a Christian fundamentalist says gay marriage goes against God’s law they’re not always saying they want to ban gay marriage in whatever secular pluralist democracy they have the good fortune to be going on a homophobic tirade in, though they do mean that sometimes, which is obviously bad. But we’re not thought police and if someone thinks God’s the orifice police they have the right to think that. I don’t know of a religious tradition that doesn’t have some outlines of norms and restrictions for how to interact as a society. Of course Muslims have one too. Call it God’s law or the path. Whatever. They call it Sharia and all us non-Muslims should have the basic decency to know what that word means before letting demagogic Fox News hosts poison the waters with their racist rants.
The financial teachings of Sharia contain a great deal of wisdom. Gambling is forbidden. Now that I can’t go an hour in public without seeing ads for sports gambling I pray for the wisdom of Sharia to enlighten policymakers in the US.
Guidelines like prohibitions on usury or alcohol consumption arise out of communities’ desire to protect the weak and vulnerable. Alcohol prohibition passed in the US largely because a lot of Christian ladies were sick of getting the shit kicked out of them by their drunk husbands. Levitical law established jubilee practices to prevent the poor from being enslaved by their debts.
“God has allowed trade and forbidden usury.” That’s in the Quran. Good. That’s anticapitalist. It rules. You shouldn’t get richer by sitting on your ass and impoverishing the impoverished even if it maximizes value for shareholders.
Payday loans are haram. I want clear moral language for practices that prey on the vulnerable. Evil and forbidden. You can’t do that. It’s wrong to grow rich from immiserating others.
Here’s an old Current Affairs article on the topic.
Insha’allah the light of Sharia can save us from some of the cruelties of capitalism. I really mean that and believe that. Muslim immigrants are a blessing to my extended community and it’s good to be grateful for what we can learn from each other.
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I’ve been toying with the term “deskilling economy.” It overlaps significantly with the gig economy but generally refers to the end users of the “services” rather than the contractor/employee doing the “gig.” Not sure if it makes sense yet. DoorDash loves that you don’t know how to place an order at a taco truck. Instacart relies on you being too stupid to know how to go to the grocery store. Uber thrives because you’re too lazy to figure out the local bus schedules. Grow up. Learn some basic life skills. It’ll save you money you would have otherwise given to parasitic middlemen in Silicon Valley. Ask around. Learn to do stuff. You don’t need an app to buy a pillow.
I feel most strongly about Uber and Lyft. I remember when those were introduced and I was one of the ones that said, “Hell no. I’ll never get in one of those. They’ll slash the wages and raise the prices. It’ll raise a whole generation too inept to use public transit.” I was right. I’ve taken a number of rideshare rides now. I find them awkward. Just ride a bus. It’s cheap.
Opt out of the deskilling economy. Learn your neighbors’ names. Don’t hire a nanny or dogwalker from an app. That’s my advice. I’m not the boss of you.
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Philly’s public transit system, Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation System, AKA Septa, kind of sucks. I love Septa the way people might love their local baseball team. They suck, everyone who runs them sucks, they were never good. If you met their manager you might get into a physical altercation. If you love baseball you root for the home team. If you love buses and trains you root for the home team. I’m rooting for Septa forever. It’s called loyalty.
SEPTA!!! No one likes us. We don't care.
Also, fuck cars.
•••
Two weekends ago my friend Rob, father of my son’s good friend, called me to see if I would help him move a free piano. “Hell yeah,” I said. It’s 600 pounds. It’s a half mile from the pick-up spot to his house. Rob had a specific vision: We would go to Harbor Freight for some cheap furniture dollies, strap them to the piano with ratchet straps, then use those appliance-moving harness strap things to lift it over all the wonky sidewalk and curbs and up the steps into his home. We would buy beer and stop to drink a beer every time it seemed like we’d earned a beer.
While we were having our second beer outside Seven Swords Tattoo shop on Frankford Ave a tattoo artist named Lo came out to smoke and we chatted. She’s an apprentice that just started and doing free tattoos. She’s gonna tattoo me tomorrow.
On we went. By the time we got to Rob’s back door and had waddled and wobbled over the cobblestone Rob was a bit toasted. I was on the higher end of the stairs doing the 1-2-3 count trying to get him to push and lift as I put all I had into lifting this monster instrument up a few inches to the next step.
We were successful. It’s in his living room and not going anywhere anytime soon.
We had beers number seven and eight in his back yard. I woke up feeling like I’d been in a fist fight, but in a good way. I still have a bruise on my right bicep and I don’t bruise easily or know exactly how that happened. There were a few bruises and cuts.
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It’s a beautiful day. I rode my favorite bicycle and stopped in a park to finish typing this up.
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I still own most of Annie Dillard's books. Borrow any anytime. Most readers of this blog know where I live. The door’s unlocked.
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Here's a good recipe for a Chik-fil-A-esque sandwich. I might be wrong. I've never had a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich.
Buy that big restaurant pack of tofu. Strain tofu using your preferred method. Slice so they're square patties.
Freeze. I like to freeze tofu flat in freezer bags. Reuse your ziploc bags. It's only a single-use plastic if you don't reuse it.
OK now take it out and thaw it again. Strain it again. Tons more liquid comes out. Now it's spongy.
Fill that freezer bag with the brine from pickled jalapenos or regular ol' cucumber dill pickles. Let it sit a day or two or don't. There are no rules. Bread the patties. I used bread crumbs and egg.
Fry. Serve on a soft bun with mayo, pickles, and lettuce. Deeelicious.
There would be a picture of the final product but I ate them.
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May your life on earth be full of farting around. Call me if you need help moving a piano.