books
BY RICK LEVIN
Welcome to the Slaughterhouse
Kurt Vonnegut biography reads like a nasty tweet
B
ehind every great writer hides an asshole.
Dostoyevsky was a religious freak with a gambling
problem. William Burroughs plinked a slug through
his wife’s forehead. Faulkner guzzled a half-gallon of rye
every day before noon. Shakespeare only willed his wife the
spare bed.
I’m far from a great writer, but I sure can be an asshole
sometimes. It’s true. Maybe you should stop reading this.
Listen: Charles J. Shields has come unglued by loathing.
Among his other nebulous pastimes, Shields is a biographer,
and his latest subject is the late American countercultural
writer Kurt Vonnegut, author of some 20-plus works of
fi ction and non-fi ction. Shields’ book, And So It Goes — Kurt
Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt & Co.; $30), derives its title
from the fatalistic, cosmically sad refrain Vonnegut employs
throughout his 1969 masterpiece Slaughterhouse-5.
A self-declared atheist, pacifi st, feminist, humanist
and chain-smoker of Pall Malls, Vonnegut is an oddly
divisive fi gure: Adored by millions of fans and writers, he
nonetheless draws ire from critics who believe his brand of
absurdist, dystopic satire is best relegated to the genres of
science fi ction and young adult reading.
The fi rst half of Shields’ bio depicts Vonnegut’s early
life and burgeoning career, leading up to the publication
of Slaughterhouse-5. The writing is swift and engaging,
and Shields — with almost unlimited access to Vonnegut’s
archives — paints a lively picture of Vonnegut’s family life
during the Great Depression and his devastating experiences
as a solider in World War II. All of this background makes
for fascinating reading. Then something goes sour.
A writer’s literary tone is diffi cult to parse, but were I to
take a shot at deciphering Shields’ character from his words,
I might say something like this: Charles Shields exhibits the
food
kind of shocked disenchantment and psychological burn-out
suffered by many wrongheaded biographers who appear
constitutionally unprepared to confront the all-too-human
foils of their subjects. Shields just doesn’t have the stomach
for this kind of work; he is too anal and earnest and pie-eyed.
For instance, he seems dismayed to discover that Vonnegut
was given to occasional fi ts of anger, envy and obtuseness,
emotions that Shields almost invariably labels “immature.”
At some point, the biographer’s disappointment curdles
into rancor, and he can scarcely conceal his disgust for Von-
negut’s professional jealousies, his remoteness as a parent,
his ideological hypocrisies. As Shields unearths every venal
sin and ethical hiccup, his writing grows shrill, nit-picky
and condescending, sort of like a hall monitor on a grade-A
power trip. But in correcting one error, a fool often rushes
into its opposite, and Shields, a man once under the thrall of
Vonnegut’s writing, obviously feels it is his duty to call out
the real Kurt Vonnegut.
He becomes trite and wheedling, and prone to error. For
instance, Shields notes that Vonnegut, an avowed socialist,
once sampled caviar on fi rst-class fl ight (gasp!), but then rel-
egates to a footnote the fact that Vonnegut donated to a “res-
cue fund” for Richard Yates and, further, that he organized
another fund to pay for the medical bills of paralyzed author
Andre Dubus. Shields says that Vonnegut’s famous “chalk
talk” was published in A Man Without a Country, when in
fact it fi rst appeared nearly a quarter century earlier in Palm
Sunday.
It’s diffi cult to say exactly where Shields jumps the
shark. Whatever the specifi c moment, by the conclusion of
his biography the poor man has completely succumbed to
the kind of apoplectic outrage one witnesses in children not
getting their way. Am I calling Shields immature? Maybe.
More precisely, he seems the sort of reductive Manichean
who needs to believe in the catholic purity of immaculate
heroes living in an unambiguous universe of good vs. evil.
And here I yield the fl oor to Vonnegut himself, and bow
out: “I am not pure,” Vonnegut said at a 1973 rededication
Wheaton College Library. “We are not pure. Our nation is not
pure. And I insist that at the core of the American tragedy …
is the illusion engendered by World War Two: that in the war
between good and evil we are always, perfectly naturally,
on the side of good. This is what makes us so unrestrained
in the uses of weaponry.”
ew
BY ANDREW HITZ
Preserving Sacred Cultures
Ancient Jun is modern delicious
J
erry Smith’s quiet corner of the universe lies down
Willamette Street between Cappella Market and
Tsunami Books. Like many Eugene hippie-folk,
Smith is a private man; he doesn’t reveal much and, until
now, has never granted an interview. Even now he tells me
he’s been having second thoughts about this.
But despite this reclusion, Smith’s small health food
company, Herbal Junction, has caused quite a stir among
fermenters and foodies all across the country. Until only a
year or so ago, Smith was the fi rst and only known com-
mercial brewer of the probiotic drink known as Jun.
Smith sits his small frame in a chair across from me in
the tiny storefront and thanks an attendant as he’s handed a
cup of tea. His usual blend. I’m given a small glass of Flower
Power Jun — it’s golden colored and topped by a fi zzy lace
of white bubbles. There’s a musty smell of herbs in the air
and a buzz of activity in the back room, where a few workers
are blending teas. Smith says he wants to dispel the rumors.
Jun is, from a layman’s point of view, a drink similar in
many respects to kombucha. A major difference is that the Jun
culture prefers strictly green tea and raw honey to kombucha’s
sugar and cooler fermenting temperatures. According to
Smith, a true Jun culture is completely bacterial, whereas
kombucha cultures are a mix of yeast and bacteria.
Maintaining the integrity of that pure, bacterial culture
has become Smith’s life work and separates him, in that
respect, from all other purported Jun fermenters. He
even at one point collaborated with academics at Cornell
University, who gave him tips on how to keep out wild
yeasts. But it’s a constant battle, he says
“I’m trying to follow the sacred path of it,” says Smith.
“I’m practicing what I was taught.”
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It used to bother him that people were brewing, bottling
and calling their cultures Jun, but Smith says he’s let that
go. He recognizes the importance of drinking any healthful,
fermented drinks, regardless of what people call them.
“I used to have a lot of mixed feelings about it,” says
Smith, “but now it’s just gotten so out of control. I wish people
would just do their own thing, make up their own names.”
Smith was given his fi rst culture and taught to brew at
the age of 25 by a Chinese herbalist living in Wonder, Ore.
It was a 1,500-year-old culture that had been passed down
through Tibetan lore. But Smith says he was young and
inexperienced, and eventually he neglected the culture and
threw it away. He came back to the herbalist for another but
was turned away. Smith didn’t come across another one for
years; then, during a period of illness, he was gifted one by
a roaming Tibetan family. This culture was allegedly 800
years old, and it’s the one he uses today.
Smith says the original, 1,500-year-old unadulterated
culture has been used in fermentation at the City of 10,000
Buddhas monastery in Ukiah, Calif. Heng Shun, a monk at
10,000 Buddhas, says he was around when Jun showed up
there in the late 1970s.
“This was fi rst introduced to some of the monks in the
monastery by one of our lay-members from Eugene, Ore.,
at the time,” Shun says. “Several monks continued to use
the tea for a couple of years.”
Shun’s description of the Jun gifter aptly fi ts that of
Smith’s fi rst mentor: a profi cient Chinese herbalist, a lay
Buddhist monk who had been living in Oregon. Shun says
he believes that this person is now living in Hawaii.
Many of the Jun stories Smith can’t qualify. He says
most of them are contrived from bits and pieces of truth
he’s let out over the years, though now these stories have
taken on myths of their own. He says he knows nothing
about Loa Tzu ever possessing heirloom cultures, as one
tale would have it, and he can’t speak to the tales about the
anarcho-Buddhist Khampa monks-turned-warriors from
Tibet who travel on motorcycle with swords on one hip
and fl asks of Jun on the other.
Smith can say that Jun is indeed consumed throughout
the Tibetan highlands, and that a protégé of his who traveled
to Tibet found monks walking from one mountaintop
monastery to the next, with containers of Pu’er tea, yak milk
and Jun strapped across their chests.
You’ve probably seen Herbal Junction’s 6-ounce bottles
of Jun in stores like Sundance and The Kiva. The elixirs are
packed with medicinal Chinese herbs whose healing proper-
ties are further enhanced in combination with the Jun. The
Jun “opens the channels of the body,” Smith tells me, allow-
ing other medicines to catalyze within the body; he says this
is evidenced by his own healing process. At one point, Smith
says, he was even contracted to brew a special batch with
maple syrup for an ill Jerry Garcia, who was allergic to honey.
The stories of sacred elixirs like Jun will never have a
clear-cut history. And that’s where the beauty lies: in the
mystery of the sacred, preserved and known only by those
who choose to sit, learn and commune with them.
ew
EUGENE WEEKLY FEBRUARY 2, 2012 25