Wrapping Up / A D.I.Y. Vonnegut Semester Plan

Kurt Vonnegut in August 2006, less than a year before his death.

Here's a collection of obituaries and tributes to Vonnegut filed after his death in April 2007.  You might want to read over a few prior to Thursday's class, when we'll try to sum up our work this quarter and find some basic lessons and ideas to take away from the eight novels we've read:

• The New York Times

• The Guardian

• The Los Angeles Times

• The San Francisco Chronicle (an obit written many years before KV's death)

• NPR's Morning Edition remembers Vonnegut

• Time Magazine

• The Washington Post

Finally, here's one of Vonnegut's last televised interviews, with PBS' NOW in 2005:

So it goes, and you go as well, from the confines of this class on to (I dare to hope) a life-long relationship with literature.  I heard someone complaining before class started that she had nothing to read now that the school year was over, and believe me, I can sympathize.  The benefit to you having just spent the last ten weeks so thoroughly immersing yourself in Vonnegut's life and writing, however, is that you're primed to keep reading through his collected works (well, presuming that you actually liked the course), so here are my suggestions.

I'm starting with the idea of what I'd add to the book list should I have the opportunity to teach this class again under semesters.  In rough formulaic fashion, here's what I'd plan:

I will admit to being somewhat torn about the three additional books listed here.  Breakfast of Champions is not Vonnegut's finest hour, but it's probably the most useful book to add, since it makes connections between and fills out backstories of characters and places that are central to both Deadeye Dick and Galápagos and is largely focused on Kilgore Trout.  Mother Night provides a lot of backstory for Howard Campbell, who we meet in Slaughterhouse-Five, and also helps bridge the eleven-year gap between Player Piano and Cat's Cradle, but I'm personally not as enamored of Vonnegut's earlier style where he's feeling a little more bound by the rules of contemporary fiction.  Bluebeard is probably the best of the three books, but aside from a tiny connection to Deadeye Dick, it exists in its own world — still, not a bad choice if you're interested in learning more about Vonnegut's feelings on the purpose and usefulness of art, or to get more insights into his second marriage.  The Sirens of Titans (dedicated to Uncle Alex) isn't a bad choice either, particularly if you're into early sci-fi Vonnegut.  The only two books I'd steer clear of entirely (or at least until you've read the rest) are Slapstick (which at the very least has some worthwhile remembrances of Vonnegut's sister Allie and Uncle Alex) and Hocus Pocus (which doesn't).

What about the short story collections?  Well, I did consider using Welcome to the Monkey House for this class, but my feeling was that a) it can be difficult for students to transition from the macro-scale of novels to the micro-scale of stories, and b) those stories are conceived more for popular audiences, so they're not quite as substantive as Vonnegut's other writing.  If you're interested in some short attention span delights, however, there are four volumes altogether, including Bagombo Snuff Box and the two posthumous editions published in recent years.  What might be a better place to go are the volumes of essays, speeches, interviews, etc.: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons; Palm Sunday; Fates Worse than Death; A Man Without a Country.

And, after spending the last ten weeks telling you not to read it, I think you're prepared to bear the full brunt of Vonnegut's personality as revealed in Charles J. Shields wonderful biography, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut — A Life.  It's a fantastically thorough document of the author's life and times, and provides all sorts of useful background on Vonnegut, his family, his writing process and much more.  Not unlike many of the novels we've read, it ultimately feels incomplete and overwhelmingly sad in the end, but that's more the fault of Vonnegut's dog than Shields.

Interested in some postmodern fiction outside of Vonnegut?  Two authors whose names came up in class the other day, and who I can wholeheartedly recommend are Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan.

Barthelme's one of my very favorite writers, not to mention one of the most influential prose stylists in 20th century literature.  If you'd like to dip your toe in the water before buying anything, you can read a number of his best-known stories here.  Should be be eager for more, I'd suggest starting with the collections Sixty Stories and/or Forty Stories, plus the novels Snow White and The Dead Father (though start with the stories and work up to the novels).  When I first started reading Barthelme, the posthumous volumes containing the rest of his stories hadn't yet been published, so I had to track down the individual collections (all of which are pretty ubiquitous and cheap), of which my favorites are City Life, Amateurs and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts.

For Brautigan, most of his work is now available in omnibus editions reprinting three books under one cover.  His best known novel is Trout Fishing in America, and some of his other books published in those collections that I'm quite fond of include The Abortion, A Confederate General from Big Sur and Revenge of the Lawn, along with the poetry collections Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster.  Perhaps my favorite Brautigan book altogether, though one you'll have to hunt down on the used market, is The Tokyo-Montana Express.  You can find more info on him here.

Those of you who haven't had the Beat Generation class with me might want to check out Jack Kerouac (start with On the Road, then try The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, Big Sur) or William S. Burroughs (start with Junkie or Naked Lunch then try Exterminator!, Interzone or the Nova Trilogy novels).  Beyond that (but hey, you're running out of summer at this point, right?) here are a few other favorites I've taught (or would like to teach) in classes on postmodern American fiction:

• Susan Sontag — primarily an essayist/theorist, but her short story collection, I, etcetera is great
• Don Delillo — White Noise and Mao II are classics of the era
• Thomas Pynchon — The Crying of Lot 49 is a good introduction to his work
• Robert Coover — I've had great pleasure teaching The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. and Pricksongs and Descants
• Ron Loewinsohn — Magnetic Field(s) is a true sleeper — a marvelous book no one seems to know about
• E.L. Doctorow — Ragtime is where most folks start

Of course, my true love and focus over the past five years or so has been poetry.  If you're looking for reading suggestions in that genre, just drop me a line.

Galapagos — Final Observations

you know the score by now . . .

Weeks 9 and 10 "Timequake" (1997)

Kilgore Trout to the rescue!  Seriously!  You didn't think that Kurt Vonnegut would sign off from novel writing without giving his alter ego and greatest creation one last moment in the limelight, right?

Of course, Timequake almost didn't come to pass.  In his prologue, Vonnegut compares his struggle to bring this novel into being to the existential struggle of Santiago against his prize catch in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and explains how the unfinished manuscript that he calls Timequake One — "which did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be written in the first place" — was gutted and recycled to create our current text, Timequake Two.  He finished the manuscript, "a stew made from [Timequake One's] best parts mixed with thoughts and remembrances during the past seven months," one day after his seventy-fourth birthday.

Part of what makes this novel so fascinating — and a key reason why I chose this for the class instead of Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions or Bluebeard — is its unintentional and tragic, yet unavoidable, historical context, thanks to its central plot device.  Writing in 1997 about a timequake that would hurtle his characters from February 13, 2001 to February 17, 1991, Vonnegut had no idea that the September 11th attacks would happen and yet, we can't read Timequake without being indelibly haunted by that knowledge, and I think that, for anyone who reads this book from September 12, 2001 forward (as I first did in the spring of 2002), the book's resonance is greatly amplified — by our shared desire to "turn back the clock" to the simpler times before that day, and also in our sympathies for the book's characters, who, having survived the timequake will have to face yet another life-altering challenge a little over half a year later.

In a 1998 interview, Marylynn Uricchio asked whether Timequake would really be Vonnegut's final novel:

Q. Did you say Timequake was your last book so you couldn't change your mind?
A. I'm quite old. I'll be 76 in a few days. Some of this is an actuarial matter. I'm writing short stuff, I'm writing an op ed piece today about the hurricane in South America, but that's all I'm doing now. No more novels. No more books need be written.

He proved true to his word — while Vonnegut would publish several other books in his lifetime, including a slim volume of radio monologues, (God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, 1999), a collection of his early unpublished stories (Bagombo Snuff Box, 1999) and a book of essays (A Man Without a Country, 2005) he never did publish another novel, even if he often hinted that he was at work on one entitled, If God Were Alive Today. Several posthumous books have appeared as well, namely three odds-and-sods collections of unpublished stories, essays, speeches, etc.: Armageddon in Retrospect, Look at the Birdie and While Mortals Sleep.

Later in the same interview, in response to Uricchio's asking, "When your work is talked about 100 years from now, what do you want people to say?," Vonnegut offers an elegant summation of his life's work:

I doubt it will be talked about 100 years from now. I don't know. All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing. Humor can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. I'd be certainly pleased if 100 years from now people are still laughing.

He has another 86 years to go, but 14 years since that statement — and five since his death — I'd say that his reputation is (and will be) secure for a very long time.

Here's our reading schedule for Timequake:

• Thursday, May 24:  prologue - ch. 25
• Tuesday, May 29:  ch. 26 - epilogue

And here are a few supplemental reading links:

• "Vonnegut Stew," Valerie Sayers' New York Times review of the novel: [link]
• "Kurt Vonnegut Says He's Retiring (We'll See)," Paul D. Colford's Los Angeles Times article on Timequake and Vonnegut's career plans after its publication: [link]
• "Breakfast with Kurt Vonnegut," Uricchio's interview from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: [link]

Deadeye Dick — Final Observations

Deadeye:  [waking up from mid-class nap] Is it 1:45 yet?

Dick:  Nope . . . twenty minutes to go.

Deadeye:  Hey, what'd you get on the last quiz?

Dick:  Don't ask.

Deadeye:  Yeah, I got a 0.5, too.  How was I supposed to know that there wasn't an actual bird in Jailbird?

Dick:  I know!  Ugh, I'm sick of this class.  Why doesn't the teacher ever ask what I think about the book?  I want a chance to share my thoughts, fears and opinions in regards to contemporary literature.

Deadeye:  And why aren't there, like, more opportunities to earn a good grade?  What if there was a place on the blog where we could — optionally, mind you — say one last thing about the book that we didn't have a chance to say in class?

Dick:  That would be great, but this guy just doesn't care about his students!  Lucky for him, I'm not planning on showing up on the day we do evaluations.  Or, like, at all for the next two weeks!

Deadeye:  Hey, were we supposed to sign up for a presentation or something?

[ scene ]

Weeks 8 and 9: "Galápagos" (1985)

Over the course of our last few readings, we've seen a very different Vonnegut — one who's coming to terms with both the process of aging and his own shifting role in American arts and letters, and responding in kind with a strong pair of novels (Jailbird and Deadeye Dick) that are humanistic, character-driven affairs that stay largely within the realm of conventional (though still wild) reality.  This pattern will continue in Bluebeard, the last of four books marking a late high-point in Vonnegut's career (sandwiched between two of his worst offerings: Slapstick and Hocus Pocus), but in Galápagos, the author is more than happy to cast off the fetters of everyday existence and explore a fantastic, science-fiction future.

Nonetheless, Galápagos is very much a novel of its time: the worldwide financial woes that set the stage for the book's narrative speak to real-life stagnation in the early and mid-80s and it's no stretch to read the bacterial disease that makes all women but those on Santa Rosalia infertile as Vonnegut's attempt to address the AIDS crisis.  The Galápagos islands, likewise, serve not only as a setting for the novel but as a symbolic tie to Charles Darwin, who formulated his theory of evolution after investigating the novel ways in which the species native to the islands had developed in isolation.  In Jailbird, Vonnegut ruminates on the nature of the island and its occupants while describing scene at the Hotel Royalton's Coffee Shop on Walter's fateful first full day of freedom in NYC:

I thought to myself, "My goodness — these waitresses and cooks are as unjudgmental as the birds and lizards on the Galapagos Islands, off Ecuador."  I was able to make the comparison because I had read about those peaceful islands in prison, in a National Geographic loaned to me by the former lieutenant governor of Wyoming.  The creatures there had had no enemies, natural or unnatural, for thousands of years.  The idea of anybody's wanting to hurt them was inconceivable to them.

So a person coming ashore there could walk right up to an animal and unscrew its head, if he wanted to.  The animal would have no plan for such an occasion.  And all the other animals would simply stand around and watch, unable to draw any lessons for themselves from what was going on.  A person could unscrew the head of every animal on an island if that was his idea of business or fun (123-124 in my first edition hardcover, 174-175 in your paperbacks).

At the same time, while forces beyond human control do their part to shape the novel, it's worth noting that Vonnegut also finds fault within human action and intention — big brains and big ideas cause big problems.  While the novel's characters undergo physical transformations as they evolve, their brains change as well, getting smaller, and as far as Vonnegut is concerned (cf. this somewhat bombastic Los Angeles Times article), this is all for the best:

The big trouble, in Kurt Vonnegut's view, is our big brains. 

"Our brains are much too large," Vonnegut said. "We are much too busy. Our brains have proved to be terribly destructive." 

Big brains, Vonnegut said, invent nuclear weapons. Big brains terrify the planet into worrying about when those weapons will be used. Big brains are restless. Big brains demand constant amusement. 

"Our brains are so terrifically oversized, we have to keep inventing things to want, to buy," Vonnegut said with a shudder. "If you think of the 8 million people of greater New York charging out of their houses every day in order to monitor the planet, it is a terrifyingly destructive force. [...] 

"Among other things," he said of this giant computer lodged between humanity's collective ears, "it is capable of creating the Third Reich of Germany, which in fact so demoralized the world that I don't think we'll ever recover." 

The brain: "I think stupidity may save us," Vonnegut said. "I think we are too damned smart."

Finally, take note that the events of the novel take place in 1986, just one year after its completion, and the proximity is intentional on Vonnegut's part — if we don't wise up, he reasons, such fantastic events are not at all out of the realm of possibilities for the human race.

Here's our reading schedule for Galápagos:

• Thursday, May 17:  book 1, ch. 1 - 24
• Tuesday, May 22:  book 1, ch. 25 - book 2, ch. 14

And here are a few supplemental links:

• "How Humans Got Flippers and Beaks," The New York Times' review of Galápagos: [link]
• "Vonnegut Explores the Big Brain Theory," Los Angeles Times' review of the novel: [link]
• a second LAT review of the book: [link]
• an interview with Hank Nuwer that's largely concerned with Galápagos: [link]
• an NPR essay by Ron Currie, Jr., who names Galápagos one of his "Three Books to Help You Enjoy the Apocalypse": [link]
• "Evolutionary Mythology in the Writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.," Gilbert McInnis' 2005 essay, which originally appeared in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: [link]

Jailbird — Final Observations

Blah, blah, blah . . . either you know the drill and will respond in a timely fashion or you're not going to bother at all and when you stare at the great big F on your grade report you'll look to the heavens and beg: "Why?!?!?  If only someone told me that I was supposed to be making final observations posts!  If only there were more grading opportunities!!  If only I had bothered to read the books!!!"

Your Final Project

Like all good things, our quarter with Vonnegut has come to an end, but not unlike the "cleaning-up" that Billy Pilgrim and his fellow POWs find themselves doing in Dresden as World War II, we (well, you) have a little more grim and dirty work ahead of you.

It's a final essay, but it's not . . .

We've gone over the details of the final project more than once in class, but here's a more detailed breakdown of what I'd like to see from you.  In a literature class like this, one would expect to be asked to write a scholarly essay making some sort of critical argument that's supported by (con)textual evidence from the quarter's readings (all of which is properly cited in MLA format).  Vonnegut's work, however, doesn't necessarily call for the same response as other authors and so instead of a straightforward essay, I'd like you to produce a creative piece that — for all intents and purposes — achieves all of those same goals.  

Let's leave form aside for a second and focus on function instead.  Vonnegut's been dead for five years now, though he was as fiery a social commentator in his final years as he'd ever been . . . even more fierce, perhaps.  What I'd like you to do in your final project is to pick up his gauntlet and carry on in his stead.  Choose a contemporary issue that's important to you and write a creative piece that aims to capture your best estimation of what Vonnegut's stance on the topic would have been, in his style, and using anecdotes, examples, characters, etc. from the eight novels you've read this quarter as evidence to support that position.

How about some examples?

So how do you get the creative and the critical components working together?  First, pay attention to some of the hybrid writing the Vonnegut's doing in the latter years of his life.  As we've already discussed in our last class, the epilogue to Jailbird is an excellent model for your work, as are Vonnegut's bookend chapters (nos. 1 & 10) of Slaughterhouse-Five, Jonah's more meta-narrational moments in Cat's Cradle and the majority of Timequake.  This part fiction/part nonfiction approach will serve you well.  Remember that you don't need to tell a fully-formed story with a beginning, middle and end — think of it more in the mode of occasional storytelling, as if you happened to sit down next to a stranger at a bar and struck up a conversation, and don't forget Vonnegut's very helpful writing tip of having one particular person in mind when you're writing (he often wrote to his sister Alice).

The most useful tactic at your disposal, and a very Vonnegut-ian one, is to make extensive use of allegory in your work.  Of course, not only is Vonnegut an agnostic humanist who can see the value of faith for others and quote extensively from the bible, but he's also a big believer in one of Christ's favorite literary devices: parable.  There's perhaps no better (and more commonly used) example of this in Vonnegut's writing than Kilgore Trout, whose stories serve to make points in a more vivid way than mere explication ever could.  Likewise, think of the tangential characters who aren't directly connected to a storyline but serve an important purpose furthering the ideas behind the novels — like Powers Hapgood and Sacco and Vanzetti in Jailbird, or the brief mention of RFK and MLK in Slaughterhouse-Five.  Use Vonnegut the way he uses Kilgore Trout, or use Trout the way Vonnegut uses Trout, or use Vonnegut's other characters in the same fashion.

In terms of the argument you're going to make, you'll have to work through precedent — points of view expressed in the works we've read that you feel are applicable to the issue you're addressing.  Vonnegut's certainly opinionated and not at all shy about sharing his ideas, so you should have plenty of material to make use of in your piece.

Aside from all of the texts mentioned above, here — to give you a taste of Vonnegut's most pointed writing in a political mode — are a few superlative selections from Vonnegut's last published book, A Man Without a Country (2005), which collected a number of essays he penned for the news magazine, In These Times:

• "State of the Asylum," which includes a dialogue between Vonnegut and Trout
• "Cold Turkey," perhaps the most famous of Vonnegut's ITT pieces
• "Requiem for a Dreamer," the final dialogue between Vonnegut and Trout, who committed suicide soon thereafter (disregard the fact that he died in Timequake)
• "American Xmas Card 2004"

Additionally, if you're looking for tips on how to write like Vonnegut, why not take a look at his own advice about writing?


Anything else I should know?

Here are a few important guidelines for your final projects — fail to meet these requirements and, well, you'll fail(!):

• Length: 6-8 double-spaced pages — that's full pages, and not counting your works cited list, so to be safe, make sure your piece goes on to page 7.  If the spirit moves you and you find yourself writing a longer piece, please don't feel constrained by the 8 pg. limit (that's just a general ballpark length to aim for).  On the other hand, if you hand in a paper that's less than 6 full pages, you'll automatically receive an F (so don't do that).

• Formatting — particularly since you're sending your file to me electronically, it would not be wise to play around with margins, get cutesy with font sizes, etc.  12 point Times New Roman is lovely and easy on the eyes, to boot.  Barring that, Cambria or a similar serif typeface (serifs, don't ya know, are those little decorative doohickeys at the ends of the letter) will be fine.  I'm partial to the elegance Goudy Old Style (but that's just me).

• MLA citations and works cited list — you'll find links to MLA resources here.  Don't forget that you need to cite paraphrases and summaries of source texts in addition to direct quotations.

• No block quotes — there is, perhaps, no greater comfort to the unprepared last-minute writer than the block quote — just cram it all in there, making no attempt to trim the text (or disguise the fact that you're cutting and pasting from Wikipedia).  In formal essays of lengths longer than what you're being asked to deliver here, I might allow students to use one block quote in their essay, but there's no reason whatsoever for block quotes in a final project like this.

• Due date — Wednesday, June 6th at midnight.  Please send your final to me at my gmail address (which is my last name [dot] my full first name at gmail.com) as an attachment.  While the registrar's official deadline for grades to be posted is June 13th at 5:00 PM, by then I will be in New York buying too many books and drinking heavily after a long (though lovely) academic year (drinking water, that is . . . it's hot in New York in the summer).  When I get your paper, I'll download it to make sure that it opens without issue and then write you a little note confirming that I've received it.  Don't forget that late assignments lose a full letter grade for each day they're late and also be grateful that I originally set the deadline for the 5th, but in honor of Vonnegut's birthday being 11/11, decided to go with 6/6 (though not with a cut-off of 6pm).

Weeks 7 and 8: "Deadeye Dick" (1982)

In our post for Jailbird, I found myself returning to the opening lines of Slaughterhouse-Five's final chapter as an elegant evocation of 1970s cultural malaise that began with a few violent acts in the late 60s.  Now, as we begin our week with Vonnegut's 1982 novel, Deadeye Dick, we return to it once more — not to memorialize Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, but rather for the mention of Kurt Vonnegut's father and his gun collection, which factors heavily into the setting of Deadeye Dick.  

As we've discussed in regards to several of the novels we've read this quarter, Vonnegut had issues with both of his parents that made their way into his writing.  Still, it's not until we reach Deadeye Dick that we have Vonnegut's most sustained critique of his upbringing and his parents' failings, mixing thinly-veiled autobiography with fictional inventions to create the KV-analogue, Rudy Waltz.  This frankness was a long time coming — Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. died in 1957, but it's notable Vonnegut kept the "Jr." suffix through Breakfast of Champions (a novel that represents, appropriately, a death-of-the-self).  Conversely, it's fascinating to read the Waltz family against the hypothetical depiction of Vonnegut and his parents in heaven that begins Jailbird (which, though frustrated at times, does start with the touching wish that Vonnegut and his father might be better friends in the afterlife than they were on earth).

Should you be interested in more widely exploring Vonnegut's work at some point in the future, it's worth noting that aside from Midland City itself, a number of characters from books we're not reading this term can be found in Deadeye Dick — chief among them Dwayne and Celia Hoover (protagonists of Breakfast of Champions and Rabo Karabekian, protagonist of Bluebeard).

In a long and lavish review of Deadeye Dick for The New York Times — one marked, appropriately enough, by a retrospective mood  — Benjamin DeMott addresses Vonnegut's detractors and offers a lovely summation of what marvelous gifts he offers to readers of all kinds, along with a prediction of how their (and perhaps your) appreciation for his work might evolve in time:

I know that on some days this very odd writer is good medicine, whatever one's age: on the day when, for instance, you hear that the shelling hasn't stopped, or that the liveliest young mind in your acquaintance can't find work, or that it's been decided, in the newspapers, that the operations mutilating a loved one are no longer regarded as correct procedures. One reason for this is that Vonnegut's inexplicables are admirably plain, homely, abundant, up front; there's no epistemological complication, few philosophical conundrums, just the improbable mess of any probable human week. And the other reason is that there's no cruelty in the man. He is, evidently, playing; take away the ever-present question (namely, How on earth can you explain this?) and his activities might not be easily distinguishable from those of a child setting up and batting down toy soldiers on a rug. But gloating and meanness are excluded from the game, and the observing eyes are sad, humorous, kind.

I predict that many Vonnegutians will grow up and away from their favorite author. I also predict that, a decade or two after they do so, many will grow back. The old rule applies: As soon as you put on weight on this earth, you discover it makes a kind of sense to lose it.

Here's our reading schedule for Deadeye Dick:

• Thursday, May 10: Deadeye Dick ch. 1 - 15
• Tuesday, May 15: Deadeye Dick ch. 16 - epilogue

And here are a few supplemental links:

• full text of Benjamin DeMott's New York Times review: [link]
• Impress your friends with your knowledge of dreadful 90s one-hit-wonders — the band Deadeye Dick, best known for their 1994 single "New Age Girl," has obviously read Vonnegut: [link]

Slaughterhouse-Five — Final Observations

Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack in their Tralfamadorian habitat.

Here's our thread for you to post one additional thing — one interesting fact, one astute observation, one cogent comparison, etc. — about Slaughterhouse-Five that we did not discuss during our in-class conversations.

Your final observations don't necessarily need to be long, but they should be substantial and interesting, and rooted in the text itself (or its contexts).  Ideal thoughts should follow from openings like "did you notice . . ." or "isn't it fascinating that . . ." (though you don't need to actually say this).

Please post your observations as comments on this thread and be sure to include your name.  So that we can make a clean break in starting on our next book, and so you can have the weekend to yourself, the window for posting is between the end of Tuesday's class and the start of Thursday's class.  Finally, as is the case with the discussion leaders' posting of their questions on the respective novels' threads, these final observations are also "first come, first served," so you can't repeat what someone else has previously said.  You can, however, use someone else's post as a jumping off point for your own insights.