Concluding

I’m bad at finishing things.  Without strict discipline, I would start a thousand projects and never finish any of them.  When you start writing a story or drawing a picture or designing a new college English course, it is full of excitement and possibility.  You can imagine all the fabulous things that you will include, all the brilliant details, how much everyone will enjoy it. It is rich with unrealized potential, ready for action like a new battery or a wound-up toy or toddler.

Finishing things is grueling.  All the hopeful energy of newness has been spent, and you must deal with the reality. You need to make sure that everything works, that it’s all been done correctly, that nothing has been overlooked.  There will certainly be parts of the project that are painful, tedious, miserable. You need to get through those parts to finish.  You also need to accept all the imperfections that you know are there but don’t have time to fix and all the awesome parts of your plan that didn’t end up happening.

The worst part about finishing things is that it always seems to take about three times longer than anyone could anticipate.  That’s why I never finish cleaning my kitchen: I always feel like I’m about ten minutes from getting it really clean, which means it will take thirty minutes, and I always need to leave my apartment in twenty minutes. 

Last week, I finished revising a novel.  I had been revising it for over a year.  I thought I could do the entire revision last summer during my two-month break. But when school started again, I was only halfway done.  When this summer started, I promised myself that I would be finished by the end of June.  But as my self-imposed deadline arrived, my speed slowed to a crawl, like decelerating at the end of a sprint. There were so many little details to check, so many final issues to address, so many finishing touches.  I wasn’t done on Friday, June 29^th, as I had hoped.  I swore I would finish by the end of the day on Monday, July 2^nd, but as the end of the day approached, I still had about fifteen things to do.   It will be done by noon on Tuesday, I assured myself.  By 3pm, I had to cut myself off—for better or worse, I was done. There were still two things on my list I hadn’t gotten to, but I needed to be somewhere at four, and I didn’t want to wait another day.  I was afraid if I didn’t send the draft off right then, I never would, that Wednesday would stretch into Thursday and into the weekend and then suddenly it would be August and my summer would be over and I would still be working on the last two things on the list.

That’s how I feel about finishing anything. Eventually I have to make a proclamation that something is finished, because if I didn’t, I could keep fussing at it forever, fixing up different parts, ignoring it when I didn’t like how it was going, impulsively changing this and that every time I got a better, more interesting idea.  

I always thought everyone shared these same preferences, that starting things was objectively more satisfying than finishing things.  But recently I learned that there are people who enjoy the end of a project more than the beginning.

I learned this from a program I teach in.  As part of the program, students identify themselves with one or more of the following learning styles: synthesizer, interactor, analyzer, and concluder. These styles correspond with the types of energy needed to work on any sort of project.

Synthesizer energy is what you need to start a project.  People who are high synthesizers like to brainstorm and come up with ideas.  Interactors, predictably, like to talk to people and make connections.  This is the second stage of a project: once you have an idea, you need to get other people involved and find out who can best help you. Analyzers like detail work.  They enjoy reviewing numbers, double-checking data and calculations, editing for grammar and clarity, and making sure all steps have been followed.   The final kind of energy is the one needed to finish a project.  Concluders like to cross things off their to-do list.  Given a task, they start right away, don’t procrastinate, and check in with others on a team to make sure they are also finishing their assigned tasks according to schedule. 

While the students in this program are fairly evenly spread amongst these four energies, almost all teachers who take the learning styles test, including me, come out high on synthesizer energy. We love brainstorming, coming up with ideas, discussing ideas with others; that’s why we became teachers.

Since synthesizers are good at beginning things, they are often horrible at ending things. Not all synthesizers are low on concluder energy, but many of us are, myself included.  Working with a panel of teachers can be a nightmare for this reason.  We will come up with a million grandiose ideas and never devise a realistic strategy to implement them.  College administrators, many of whom are concluders, hate working with us because we will spend hours coming up with a million ideas that suit everybody’s competing needs and desires and are completely impractical to implement. We have to make a point of writing outcomes for any meeting or we’ll just brainstorm and never actually devise a plan.

Of course, the concluders need us as much as we need them.  My students who are concluders will rush through an assignment and turn it in without proofreading, skipping any directions that seem too intricate or time-consuming.  My coworkers who are high on concluder energy will roll their eyes as we engage in our (admittedly annoying) brainstorming, but left to their own devices, they would choose a plan that wouldn’t work well just for the sake of having made a firm decision. They need us to devise the alternatives and we need them to force us to choose one.

In the teaching materials explaining the types of learning styles, concluders are horribly maligned.   The Powerpoints and handouts for the program include examples indicating that the concluders are bossy, fussy, controlling—basically a bunch of jerks.

A typical example is something like:

Imagine how each learning style would help plan a surprise party for Sarah.

Synthesizer: Let’s have a pirate theme for the party.

Interactor: I’ll invite all of Sarah’s friends.

Analyzer: If everyone pitches in $20 we can afford enough food and drinks for 30 people.

Concluder: You all need to listen to me because you are doing this all wrong.

When I teach these materials, I always jump to the concluders’ defense—and not only because about a quarter of the students in the class fall into this group. I tell the students, honestly, that I love concluders.  Sure, they’re bossy sometimes, but they keep everybody focused and make sure things get done.  If I am working on a project, I always try to find a concluder to be my partner or teammate.  If I know someone is expecting me to finish my part of a job, I am much more likely to do so in a timely manner. If I know that nobody I’m working with cares if I finish or not, I might procrastinate and stretch out my task forever.

For example, my novel revision—when I finally emailed it, I got a message saying that the agent I sent it to will be out of the office until next week.  Five extra days until anyone will look at it. That means I still have time to go back and finish those last couple revisions on my list, right?

I know the title of this post totally scared the crap out of you, but don't worry, I am not done with Smythologies. What a relief!  I have just been taking a break from things like this blog, my friends and loved ones, cleaning my apartment, while I concluded my novel revision.  I'm happy to be back! 

Skinny with Big Boobs

The woman on the workout site looked like a porn star.

Yeah, I think she used to be in porn, my friend Marie told me. Marie was the one who had recommended the site to me. It was a great site, filled with high-intensity exercises that I started using as kickboxing warm-ups. Its creators were a husband and wife: Freddy, a shy Canadian who did the video recording and editing, and Zuzana, a petite, extremely muscular Czech woman whose surgically-enhanced breasts could barely be contained by her skimpy sports bras.

I have no problem—or perhaps not much of a problem—with breast implants. Several people I love very much have gotten implants to replace breasts lost to cancer, which I think is a great reason for cosmetic surgery. As for women who just wanted larger breasts, I consider their decision none of my business, but I do think most women look nice with the breasts they came with.

My standards for Zuzana were a bit higher than for most women, though. I felt uneasy taking workout advice—which is a form of health advice—from a woman who had risked elective surgery and the insertion of foreign objects under her skin in order to look like a Barbie doll. Once I found out that she was a former pornographic model, however, I could forgive her unhealthy decision, since it was a career choice made before her career was being a role model for health and fitness.

The site had a community of followers who would often send in pictures of their newly fit physiques. The comments under these pictures would gush with praise and support: You look so strong, so sexy! But underlying this support, I noticed an ideology that disturbed me: Exercise is for making you look good. And when it comes to looking good, leaner is always better.

This was especially true of Zuzana’s own standards for herself. In one video journal, entitled “Stress Makes Me Fat!” she complained about the weight she had gained over the past few weeks. I can’t stop eating cashews, she said, turning her palms upwards. I could eat two big handfuls of them. In the video, she is sitting cross-legged on the floor in a sport bra and hot pants, her late six-pack reduced to a four-pack by the unsightly flab covering her toned abdomen. I don’t know much about body-fat percentages, but if her old physique was somewhere around 0% body fat, she must have increased it to at least 2%. Watching this gaunt woman, it was easy to envision her shoving two entire handfuls of cashews—that must be at least twenty of them—into her ravenous maw. Of course you can’t stop eating cashews! YOU ARE STARVING TO DEATH!

A few members of the site commented on how ridiculous it was for a woman with the physique of Bruce Lee to call herself fat, how it set a bad example for the millions of regular people following the site. Zuzana’s husband lashed out at them: How dare you invalidate the very personal feelings Zuzana is sharing with you! Here she has gone out of her way to show that she is vulnerable and struggles with her weight just like everyone else, and all you can offer is criticism.

The commenters were on to something, though. Looking at the site, it was easy to imagine that Zuzana-style skinniness was the ultimate sign of strength and fitness. As an athlete, it was difficult not to be seduced by this ideal: This was as fit as one could possibly look. I often thought of Zuzana as stronger than me, but when I saw her use weights, I realized that I was probably at least as strong as her, just with a lot more body fat. Of course, if I were as lean as her, I would be completely flat-chested, which is not a trade-off I was interested in. But with her ginormous porn-star rack, Zuzana had all bases covered. It seemed to me like cheating: starve yourself down to no body fat and then insert artificial fat where desirable.

Soon after the “Stress Makes Me Fat” post, Zuzana and Freddy got divorced, finally clarifying what type of trauma had driven her to ingest twenty cashews. She left the site and reappeared a few months later on YouTube cooking healthy recipes. She had gained at least ten pounds, moving her from Bruce Lee’s weight class to perhaps that of an Oops-I-did-It-Again-Era Brittany Spears. All the comments praised her new appearance: She looks good fat, more than one commenter noted.

Freddy found a new girlfriend, Lisa, who became the site’s new host. She was rail-thin with rippling muscles, like Zuzana had been. But her breasts were smaller, a natural size for someone with no body fat. Her tomboyish figure looked cute in the little shorts and bras that were the site’s signature workout gear. She gave lots of advice about exercise, about motivation and positive attitude, about healthy eating and lifestyle. It only took her three months on the site before she checked herself into the hospital to get her new, fake boobs.

Grades

During high school, my parents told me not to worry about my grades. “Take the most advanced classes you can,” my father said. “Colleges like to see that you’ve challenged yourself.”

I wanted to challenge myself, too. I took every honors and advanced placement course that would fit in my schedule: American history, calculus, chemistry, physics, music theory, English. They were hard classes, and I was a stress-case of a student, staying up all night to study, writing endless sheets of notes. It was miserable a lot of the time, but I loved taking the most rigorous possible schedule, testing myself to see if I could hack it.

At the beginning of my senior year, I met with our high school’s college-placement counselor, which was the recommended thing to do. She greeted my mother and I with a grim face as she opened the folder containing my files.

“Your grade point average is only 3.6,” was the first thing she said. “When colleges see that, they will wonder why your grades are so low compared to your standardized test scores.”

I was puzzled. A 3.6 meant roughly half A’s and half B’s, with a few more A’s. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I figured it was okay. The B’s were in my most difficult classes, math, science, classes in which maintaining a B had been hard work. Or sometimes they were in physical education, where I never suited up properly and usually snuck out halfway through class. I wasn’t exactly a model student, sure, but in my academic classes at least, you couldn’t accuse me of not working.

“It’s fine if school isn’t your priority,” the counselor said. “I can respect that. But the colleges will think you’re not living up to your potential.”

School isn’t my priority? I was dumbfounded. Had she ever been in an AP calculus class? If school wasn’t your priority, “B” would not describe how things would go for you.

I knew the counselor was crazy, but her accusation still haunted me: Colleges will think you’re not living up to your potential. Each time I got a rejection letter from a college, it was easy to blame my mediocre GPA. “I guess you should have taken easier classes that you could get A’s in,” my father said, disappointed that I had not been accepted to any of the Ivy League schools that we couldn’t afford anyway. I did get interviews for some of those schools, and looking back, I think the problem was more likely my teenaged understanding of “professional attire” (the thrift-store sweater and skirt without the holes) or my professed (and short-lived) love for Camille Paglia’s book Sexual Personae. But at the time, I was sure my horrendous grades had held me back, indicators of laziness and indifference.

Once I set my sights on graduate school, I learned not to take any college class that I thought I couldn’t get an A in. I avoided history, science, foreign languages, knowing how bad I am at memorizing lots of little separate facts. English was my major, but I knew that I couldn’t get A’s in English classes if I took too many at once. I padded my schedule with courses in linguistics, a subject that suits my brain so perfectly that I could get an A+ without studying for any of the exams. Then I found that I could really impress my English professors by incorporating ideas from linguistics, which I understood far better than they did, into my English essays. It was a cheap trick, but it turned getting an A into a guarantee instead of a gamble.

I knew that the top English PhD programs would only accept students with very high GPAs, not necessarily straight-A’s only, but close. Often, in fits of anxiety, I would calculate my average by hand during a lecture, running different scenarios: if I were to get one B next semester, what would that do? What if I take one class pass/fail?

It makes me sad to think of having spent college this way, trying to construct a marketable transcript to sell to the highest bidder. Of course I learned an amazing amount there, but that learning was always tinged with terror, the desperate need to do well enough, the unacceptability of failure. I think of all the classes I might have taken if I wasn’t worried about my grades—history, science, languages—and how much I might have learned in those classes, even if it happened not to be A learning but B or even C learning.

Grading does some good things for students. It gives them something to aim for, shows them how they are doing in comparison with other students, affords a sense of accomplishment. But the bad thing it does is turn education, and the educated student, into a commodity. Students don’t generally strive to get good grades just for their own sense of self-worth (if you don’t believe me, check out a spring-semester senior transcript). Good grades are worth something, and they can buy advantages like a job or college admission.

My kung fu teacher often says that students are acquisitive about learning kung fu forms (choreographed routines). Instead of learning a few forms well, we want to learn as many as possible, more than we can possibly practice on a regular basis, so we can have more than everyone else. That’s also how grading students teaches them to be—acquisitive. They earn the grade, and they can stash that grade away like an arcade ticket until they have enough of them to win a prize.

Sometimes I wish I could teach my English students the way my kickboxing teachers have taught me. In a combined-levels class, everyone learns the same lessons again and again, until they aren’t even lessons anymore but parts of our own minds and bodies. Some students are naturals and they come in throwing an A roundhouse kick without any experience. Most students struggle to learn, and work harder in their first year than they will ever work again, harder than the experienced students whose bodies could do the moves as they sleep. A grade is a score relative to others, but in this class, it doesn’t matter how you are doing in relation to others; it matters that you are trying your hardest. If you aren’t trying your hardest, you won’t learn, which means you have wasted your time and money. That’s what I wish school could be about: earning knowledge, information, and ability, not a grade.

Hives

“Galaxy Glue, Galaxy Glue,
Life would go to pieces without Galaxy Glue.”
—The Incredible Shrinking Woman


The hives popped up on my toe first, a perfect circle of blisters. You’re allergic to tape, my doctor friend told me, which made sense. The toe had a large cut on the bottom of it, making it uncomfortable to walk and more uncomfortable to kickbox. I’d been taping it every day, with athletic tape, with band-aids, with scotch tape wrapped around the band-aids to hold them in place. Now my body was rebelling against the mystery adhesives I’d been casually strapping against my skin as though I had any idea what they were made of and whether it was bad for me.

I was relieved to hear it was an allergy. Easy, just stop taping it, I told myself. But avoiding tape didn’t seem to help. The hives spread, first to my hands, which they covered entirely so that I looked like I’d been burned. Then all over both of my feet. They were creeping up to my knees and elbows by the time I went to the doctor, who beat them back with two rounds of strong steroid pills.

Make a list of things you have been in contact with during the last forty-eight hours, the medical websites told me. Medicines, clothing, pets, foods. I remember Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the housewife steeped in a cocktail of household chemical products—who could say which had caused her body to shrink away into nothing?

“It’s spreading internally,” the allergist told me. “And once your system is sensitized, anything will set it off. It’s like your body is set on a hair trigger.” And so anything did set it off: detergents, wool, leather, anything scratchy, the friction of a jujitsu gi against my hands. I became one of those allergic people who is scared of everything, who feels like the world is attacking her, though really it’s her own body that is staging the attack.

On good days, the hives lie low, waiting but not acting. They’re like the physical version of panic attacks—always there, threatening to flare up at any moment and ruin everything. Once my skin gets dry, I can feel them hiding on the palms of my hands, agitated little pores looking for a fight. And if I rub them the wrong way, if I touch something they don’t like, they jump to attention, rising up, daring me, just daring me to scratch them.

Scratching them is the worst thing you can do. That’s what allows them to reproduce, sending their little hivey spores through your entire body. Scratching the bumps on my feet will instantly raise the ones on my hands, the chemicals moving through my body at a speed that seems completely disconnected from anything I’ve ever learned about a bloodstream.

Once you start scratching them it’s impossible to stop—or rather, you don’t care if you stop, you don’t want to stop, because the scratching is like heroin and you don’t care who you have to rob or kill to get more. It’s that kind of itch that makes you remember why itch is a euphemism for horniness. Scratching it the best feeling in the world and horrible burning pain all at the same time.

One good thing I’ve learned about hives is that they can kill you, which makes it really easy to get a doctor’s appointment. Every time I told the appointment nurse what was wrong, her first question was, Is your throat swelling shut? Are you having trouble breathing? I learned to cut her off to save time.

“What is this appointment for?”
“I have hives.”
“Okay, ma’am, I need to ask you…”
“My throat isn’t swelling. I’m not having trouble breathing.”
“Great, thanks.”

“Contact dermatitis is serious stuff,” my doctor told me, shaking her head in sympathy over my mangled hands. “You need some pretty aggressive treatment to stop it.”

I wondered what would happen to me if I didn’t have medicine. Would I die of a something as seemingly benign as a skin rash? Or just live the rest of my life looking ever more like Freddy Krueger? What did people do hundreds of years ago, before they had steroids and cortisone? The answer of course, is that they mostly didn’t need them, because they didn’t go around strapping laboratory chemicals against their skin as though they had any idea what they were made from and whether it was bad for them. But when they did need laboratory chemicals, when the chemicals were the only thing that could save them from a deathly allergic reaction, they were out of luck.

The Duty

I know a woman who had it for six weeks.
Six weeks! It could happen
To anyone, ripped as if by cancer and broken bones
From life and normal things. We pretend to be immune but,
Like cancer and broken bones, it calls us all in time.

Each day she rode the train from Livermore
To Oakland, my home. For her, it was going somewhere
She would not normally go. Quarantined in the county seat, she
And eleven of her peers called a man a murderer
Then went for beers. So it turns out

Their shared trial formed a bond, and they remain
Best friends to this day. Talk about
A positive attitude. "It could happen
To you," she says. But we all know,
Just like there's no such thing as true love

Or true justice or learning from suffering,
It wouldn't happen to you.

Like reasonable people, I live in terror
Of my summons. I always defer
To the twenty-third of December, which is not
A holiday. If you must come for me,
O Judge, come then. I'll be waiting, limbs
Stretched, bones ready for breaking.

Not Sleeping

“He hates wasting time—a category that includes, for him, sleeping.”

–Sam Anderson writing about James Franco

I once heard an interview with an Israeli artist who had just won an international award for her art and activism. She was also the mother of two young children.

“How do you find time to do everything?” the interviewer asked.

The woman laughed carelessly. “Oh, I don’t sleep very much,” she said, as though this fact were amusing. “Four hours a night or so.”

This glib treatment of sleep is part of the mythology of the superheroic, those people who seem to achieve more in a day than is humanly possible. It makes sense. If you want to sleep for eight hours, then you must fit your job, your hobbies and passions, your family and friends and love life, your exercising and cooking and eating and house cleaning and showering and brushing your teeth all into sixteen hours per day.

I am always overcome by guilt when I hear these superheroes boasting about their inhuman feats of wakefulness. That is why you can’t seem to balance work, writing, kickboxing, seeing your friends and family and cleaning your apartment, I scold myself. I’m sleeping too much.

Look at actor James Franco. He did four years of college in two years, attended four graduate programs at once while filming about five movies and publishing a book of short stories—none of this is an exaggeration. He thinks sleep is a waste of time. Just think of all the awesome things I could get done if wasn’t wasting all that time being unconscious.

For most of my life, I too considered sleep to be a waste of time, some need my body was trying to impose upon my mind, as though it didn’t realize that my mind had more important things to be doing. I pulled regular all-nighters starting in middle school, drinking endless cups of microwaved instant coffee, blasting cassette tapes to keep from getting too sleepy or too depressed as I lay awake studying on top of my unmade bedcovers.

In college, I used to haunt the recreation room of my co-op into the early hours of the morning with my textbooks and my electric word processor, writing the endless string of essays that were my lot as an English major. At 3 a.m. I would take a coffee break with the speed freaks and architecture students, the only people who stayed up later than me.

I knew it wasn’t good for me. I had a friend in college who somehow got eight hours of sleep every night, until he started hanging around with me and some other night-owls.

“I feel horrible,” he told me one day. We had stayed up until four studying for our morning classes. “I’ve never felt this depressed. I feel like the whole world is horrible and disgusting.”

“Oh, that’s just because you didn’t sleep enough,” I told him cheerfully. “I always feel like that.”

I remember how my professors never seemed able to comprehend how sleep deprived most of us were, especially in graduate school. After a night seminar, one professor asked us if we were going home to watch the same TV show that she was planning to watch.

Our jaws dropped in disbelief. She thinks we have time to watch TV?

“No, we have to study,” one of us said.

“What, now?” she asked in horror. “It’s nine-thirty!”

Another, crankier professor chastised us for our distraction during the last week of the semester, the week when we all had four twenty-page term papers due.

“What’s wrong with you people? It’s like you’re all on speed,” she said, in a stern voice, not a joking one. From the way she said it, it was clear she did not think this was an actual possibility.

Now I am the clueless professor, relatively well-slept and herding a flock of exhausted students of my own. Lots of the time they can barely keep their eyes open. They lay their heads down on the desk, lifting them only to send frantic text-messages and enjoy their breakfasts of candy and energy drinks.

If you ask them to make a time-management schedule of their week, you’ll see why they’re so tired. Their schedules are packed from morning to night each day. Lots of them work two jobs. These jobs might only total twenty or thirty hours a week—that seems to be a typical amount—but that’s enough to suck up every available hour that they could be studying. They go to school from nine to three, start work at four, get home at ten-thirty at night.

“When will you do your homework?” I ask them.

“At eleven,” they say.

“Do you think that’s actually going to happen?”

They smile grimly. “Probably not.”

Often it doesn’t, and they come to class with their work half-done. But for something important like an essay, they do stay up and work, and they come to my class angry, disgruntled, hating the world like I once did.

It’s my job to cheer these students up and get them to do things. I use my perkiest voice, trying to buoy the room with the helium of my enthusiasm.

Come on, wake up! It’s ten o’clock! That’s not even early!

This semester, though, I signed up to teach too many units. I have classes and meetings all day long. There seems to be enough time in a week to prepare for my classes or grade my papers but not both. I am back to the old student way of life, where there are twelve time-consuming things to do before Thursday and perhaps enough time to do three of them. I’ve been sleeping five or six hours on weeknights. In college, this would have been a good amount of sleep, above average. But now I have much lower tolerance for feeling horrible and hating the world, so it seems like pitifully little, especially as it adds up over the course of the week.

Now I remember what it feels like to be sleep deprived from too much work. It explains the flashes of resentment I see cross my students’ faces when I hand out their writing assignment, as though by giving them what they’re paying for—writing instruction—I am subjecting them to some horrifying injustice. They can’t help it. When someone asks you do to something impossible, it’s hard not to resent them just for a moment, even if you are ninety-five percent sure that you will eventually buck up and do the impossible thing.

These days I am just as resentful as they are. I hand their graded assignments back grudgingly and begin to ramble my way through the lesson I have been up planning since four in the morning. So what if I’m not explaining it very well; I only slept four hours. You can have me coherent and unprepared or prepared and incoherent—your choice. Okay, so I spelled a word wrong on your handout. I’m tired. I’m really, really tired. Screw you guys.

Part of my job is to uphold a system that causes our students to feel this way, not for just one bad semester but every semester. I feel guilty about this all the time.

“How can we expect them to sacrifice sleep and health when we’re not even willing to do it?” I ask one of my colleagues.

“They’re in college, we’re not,” she said. “We paid our dues when we were in college and now we have earned the right to get a full night’s sleep.”

It sounds like the simple logic of hazing, but it’s more than that. We really don’t think they’ll learn everything they need to know unless they have more work than is humanly possible to complete. That’s the logic of education: you need to cram in as much as possible, as much as can be done in eighteen or twenty hours of wakefulness. The future success of America rests on your shoulders, and every hour you sleep is time you could have spent working.

Slaughterhouse Five

I have very few regrets about never becoming a literary scholar.

Occasionally I get frustrated that critics don’t seem to notice the Brechtian influence in Tony Kushner’s plays (It’s really obvious. He talks about it all the time. Someone should notice it already). And I still get annoyed thinking about the complete misapplication of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood. I mean, you’ve got an opaque, experimental novel about abortion doctors and people turning into plants and mating with dogs in your right hand and in your left, an opaque, poststructuralist piece of critical theory about the horror people feel when their physical and psychological boundaries dissolve—how could this puzzle be any easier to assemble?

Please don’t stop reading. I promise this is going to get more interesting. Well, to me, anyway.

My real failure, my greatest regret, the reason I should have doggedly pursued a career in academia into whatever town-nobody-wants-to-live-in it called me to, was to declare this:

Slaughterhouse Five is the most brilliant novel ever written.

I am pretty sure I am the only person who knows this. The more I explain this to people individually, the more they stare at me blankly and say, I always meant to read that, the more convinced I become that it was my duty to spread the word on a larger scale, that this was my true calling in getting an English Ph.D., and that I missed my chance.

People who haven’t read Slaughterhouse Five, and also many who have, think of it as a science fiction novel. They should, because it is. But it’s also something much weirder, which is a rare and precious eyewitness war account.

When Britain and the United States firebombed the heavily populated city center of Dresden, Germany during the final weeks of World War II, Kurt Vonnegut was there, a prisoner of war hidden away in an underground meat locker. After the bombing, he and his fellow POWs were released into the rubble that had formerly been a great center of German art, architecture and culture.

So here is Kurt Vonnegut, a writer, one of a handful of American witnesses to an atrocity great enough to be called a war crime by some historians, since there seemed to be no strategic justification for it. It was a show of force, the destruction of life, beauty, and culture, for no reason except to stick it to the Germans for all the suffering they had caused. At least that’s Vonnegut’s perception of it—a heartless act of war committed by his own country, “a massacre” as he calls it. (Though when an acquaintance, hearing this description, reminds him of the concentration camps, he says, “I know. I know. I know.”)

For a writer, this nightmare experience was a gift. He was a witness, a survivor, specially authorized to speak. As such, he could write a memoir, a history book, a historical/cultural critique. Or he could write a war novel, the kind of gritty, naturalistic epic that you can only write if you’ve really been there, if you’ve earned the right.

Vonnegut explains all this in the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, a metafictional introduction that explains how he came to write the novel.

“When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen.”

It was all laid out for him. All he had to do was write it down. Simple. What makes the novel brilliant is that he did exactly the opposite.

First, he stalled for twenty years. Whenever anyone asked him what he was working on, he told them it was his Dresden book. But he wasn’t really writing it. “Not many words about Dresden came from my mind then—not enough of them to make a book, anyway.”

And then, when he finally did write the book, it wasn’t the true-life story of a true-life veteran who had been through hell and lived to tell the tale. Instead, it was a novel about time travel and aliens and mediocre Midwestern optometrists suffering from acute depression and possible traumatic brain injury.

The main character, Billy Pilgrim, experiences roughly everything Vonnegut did during the war: he is drafted in the late stages of combat, hastily trained and improperly outfitted, and abandoned behind enemy lines. As a prisoner of war, he survives the bombing of Dresden in an underground meat locker and is then freed by the Allied troups. He could be a literary stand-in for Vonnegut, a boy-soldier who had no business on the battlefield trying to be an adult.

But Billy has two science-fictiony quirks that make it clear that this novel will not be a straightforward, serious tale of war. The first is that during his brief military career, he becomes unstuck in time. From there on out, he flops spastically in and out of different episodes in his life, creating the twisty structure of the narrative, which begins with Billy being drafted and ends with him being rescued from Dresden, with the rest of his entire life story occurring in a spiraling succession of vignettes in between.

And then, in case that first quirk just seems like some kind of metaphor, there’s a second, much goofier one. In 1967, around the time when Vonnegut would have been completing the novel, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who hold him as a captive in a zoo and mate him with a human pornographic actress named Montana Wildhack.

Having aliens in the novel seems to clearly mark it as science fiction. But it’s not serious science fiction, the kind where all the fantastical events are physically plausible and scientifically justified and allegorically significant. No, these aliens are really, really silly. The Tralfamadorians are green, shaped like plungers, topped with a single hand that has an eye in the middle of it. They admit without guilt to destroying the universe during a failed experiment (they travel freely in time so they know how the universe ends). Even their name is silly. And their project of breeding two humans (both of whom just happen to have silly names and outsized secondary sexual characteristics) as a form of entertainment could not be any more self-consciously ridiculous.

It’s as though Vonnegut wanted to take the lofty story of his war experience, the couldn’t-get-more-serious historical account that he was specially authorized to tell, and scribble crazy zigzags all over it with mismatched crayons. He even talks about outlining an early version of the plot with crayons, making a tidy timeline for each character. But that’s not what he did. He scrambled his timeline into a giant, messy tangle, illogically topped with not one but two of the most hackneyed science-fictional tropes imaginable.

Of course, this chaos is orchestrated carefully, beautifully even. Every narrative thread is neatly tied up, every scene thematically significant. But the feeling of messiness, silliness, arbitrariness is what Vonnegut wanted. “It is so short and jumbled and jangled,” he tells his publisher, “because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”

Disgusted by his own authority to tell the serious, meaningful war story, Vonnegut takes that story and shreds it to a messy pulp, just to make the point: I will not tell a serious, meaningful war story.

I love about six hundred things about this novel, but this one first and most. To be given the special, authorized privilege to tell a survivor’s tale, and to sacrifice that privilege in the name of art, meaning, and human decency, is an act of beauty that breaks my heart.

Perhaps Vonnegut’s purposeful evasion of seriousness is the reason that his works do not receive the kind of critical attention afforded to great American postmodern authors. Almost all Vonnegut criticism seems to fall into the realm of explication—plot summaries, readings based on Vonnegut’s biography—rather than serious analysis that would explain the author’s significant contribution to modern literature and thought.

If I write that book of serious analysis someday, I will say this about the message (one of the messages) of Slaughterhouse Five: that it asks us to think about our own war stories. What did we learn from them? Are we better off for having gone through that suffering? And when we tell our survivor’s tales, complete with their morals and lessons, are we full of wisdom and insight? Or have we just convinced ourselves that we are, because it feels better to have something intelligent to say about a massacre?