Vaults of Vonnegut

Player Piano by Vonnegut describes the factory and the rise of automation in a dystopian but whimsical future. Machinists with their blackened hands. The punch press sound: 'Aw grump. Tonka Tonka. Aw grump. Tonka Tonka.' Vonnegut paints a picture where all humans face the fate of Native peoples run over by a colonizing power, in this case the power is technology, you have little but leisure time, your caught in a dream of 1984 with less harsh edges.

He was something of a technical writer when he composed Player Piano [alternatively titled "Utopia." 

[a press release and story writer for GE in Schenectady, NY after WW II] and was quite aware of "Cybernetics" because Weiner's writings were prominent. Norbert Weiner appears on page 14 of Player Piano, he comes up in conversation about time and motion. 

Reading' And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut a Life" by Charles J Shields page 97 vonnegut is working at General Electric in Schenectady the job he got through his brother a company scientist who among other work experimented with seeding clouds to create rain. Kurt fudged his application form saying he graduated from college. In fact,  he had attended Cornell and another school without graduating.

 

We will find him at the GE Schenectady works among full time publishing staff that created manuals examinations and visual aids and promotional stories on GE advances in all kinds of publications. He had previously worked as a newspaper man, and readily found targets for story ideas about the company’s progressive technology.

 

The author Shields says Vonnegut was initially very positive about working at the company he wrote for example about sodium lights. Among favored projects was an oral history with some of GE famed long time researchers headed to retirement.

 

General Electric was all about progress. The company motto was “Progress is our most important product.” [Recalling tonight a train trip from Chicago to Boston, and an interminable evening’s wait in Schenectady [for a NY train to connect] near GE which was a limitless industrial complex of otherworldly sodium lighting.]

 

He bemoaned on occasion his classification as a science fiction writer, saying the fact that he had technology in stories should not consign him to such a category.

 

But the experience was to sour and in the end would see Schenectady serving as a setting for his first novel - Player Piano.

 

Page 123 play it piano saw a cameo [of sorts] appearance by Norbert Weiner - the father of cybernetics. Player Piano [a droll title choice as the paper punch-roll programmed instrument put a few ticklers out of work in its day.

 

Player piano was very much about automation and dehumanization as a result of computerization. Kurt sent a copy of player Piano galleys to Weiner who bridled at the books  insertion of a John von Neumann character. Why don't you change the name? he asked.

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Later on Cape Cod, It was a struggling artist version of KV that was to follow. Writing novels. Trying to pay for his family's needs by selling stories to Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post. Knowing the different magazines of the day that placed short fiction would come to an end with the Golden Age of television emerging. He quickly realized that work orders for magazine fiction would have to give way to television show scripts that he couldn’t quite hit with. When his father died he inherited money which mostly was wasted on the effort to start a foreign car dealership in Osterville on the Cape. The hope was it would work magically, and he could just write. The bottom feeder market of paperback reprints sold in ‘dime stores and bus stations’ would have to serve as his golden path.

copy to come

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Reading Player Piano. And remembering the factory cybernetic. A lot of these idea were in my head when I got a summer job on assembly lines at Johnson's Wax [if you ever get to Wisconsin, be sure in visit the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Johnson's Wax building - the factory moved many years ago.]

When I worked the Paste Wax line at Johnson's, we placed the lids on the cans (two of us) by hand. It could well have been the oldest line in the old factory. With so much cybernation around, it seemed primitive - something that could be automated. And I would look at the other lines (the Jubilee line with its ear shattering glass jostling was adjacent) and wonder how. Earl, the engineer, I remember him now in crew cut, white short sleeve shirt, tie, glasses and pocket protector, would come by and eye the process as well. This was me entering the world. When I worked the line, one day, my compatriot, Pedro did not come back from lunch. His girl friend shot him over his paycheck. Well, he was just 'winged' - and he was back in work the next day (hilariously using just one arm to put lids on cans).

When I worked the line: they would pump-in Muzak. Then by syndicated radio. Once a week, in some alternating pattern related to pay day: "Whistle While you Work."

Player Piano [1952], his first book which I bought at Shorecrest circa 1965. A satire on corporate life that carries echoes of Brave New World and concerns an engineer working at Ilium Works [GE] who comes to lead a band that destroys machines they think are taking over the world

Player Piano by Vonnegut describes the factory and the rise of automation in a dystopian but whimsical future. Machinists with their blackened hands. Great description of the punch press sound: 'Aw grump. Tonka Tonka. Aw grump. Tonka Tonka.' Vonnegut was something of a technical writer [a press release and story writer for GE in Schenectady, NY after WW II] and was quite aware of "Cybernetics" because Weiner's writings were prominent. Norbert Weiner appears on page 14 of Player Piano, he comes up in conversation about time and motion.