Document Type
Reconsideration
Abstract
[First paragraph]
I always get suspicious when a book I'm looking for is hard to find. If I'm feeling paranoid in a post-Patriot Act sort of way, I imagine vast memory holes being stuffed with the writings of people like George Orwell and Philip K. Dick by legions of aspiring yuppies-- fit, good-looking, and totally uninterested in anything that requires reading. A gaggle of Cheneyesque men do a walkthrough, to make sure that they are destroying our intellectual heritage efficiently, and to remind them all that if they destroy enough knowledge, they might get promoted (even as the suits make preparations to send the jobs South). In my most recent paranoid nightmare, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Player Piano has been tagged for destruction. Agents, who look like a Hollywood version of me, comb the shelves of used book stores, and send any copies they find into the great abyss. A crystallized summary of the interaction is planted in my dreams through some kind of microwave ray or orbital mind control laser, along with the impulse to write it down. The whole transaction, the destruction of the American mind, can then be written off as the paranoid fantasies of someone like me-- "proof" that reading leads only to insanity. But since few used bookstores track inventory electronically, the process of eradication is slow and imperfect, and in this case, I managed to get a copy that slipped through the cracks.
Recommended Citation
Heckman, Davin "On Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Player Piano." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol. 5, no. 2, 2005, pp. 1–3.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss2/10