Story Shapes

Via io9: great illustrations (by Maya Eilam) of Kurt Vonnegut's theories of archetypal stories. There's certainly room for argument about these, but they're a compelling, elegantly simple way to think about narrative structure.

Happy 4th of July, Goddamn It!

Thanks to Henry from Chunklet for passing this on. And thanks to Keith Olbermann for having the boldness to get out there and say it. A salute to you, sir! Enjoy the 4th. America is still a good idea.

"When the United Sates of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, ...a few men... demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who loved expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone."

"Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."
-Kurt Vonnegut (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965)

God Bless America. Whatever those words mean.

After the semicolon: Kurt is up in Heaven now

“Do not use semicolons. They stand for absolutely nothing.”
-Vonnegut speaking with OSU students in his last official speaking engagement

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon.”
-Vonnegut talking with AP


There’s little I can say that hasn’t already been said in recent articles. Kurt Vonnegut was and is one my favorite authors, and he’s one more person I’m sad to have never met or known. Eighty-four is certainly a good run, and I’d felt for some time that he was ready to go after he’d ceased writing. He was fond of saying that writing stories made one’s soul grow. I suppose his soul was fully grown. So he stopped. So it goes.

I’ll miss the way he saw the world, and I’m glad he affixed as much as he did to paper. I only wish I’d had a chance to shake his hand and say, “Thank you for taking the piss out of most everything. And for caring. Thanks most of all for that.”


"Do you know what a Humanist is? I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

“We had a memorial services for Isaac a few years back, and at one point I said, 'Isaac is up in Heaven now.' It was the funniest thing I could have said to a group of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in Heaven now.' That's my favorite joke. "

-Kurt Vonnegut for “In These Times,” 11/6/03