Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories
2,001,278
Published 2010-10-30
All Comments (21)
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This is really cool. It's like a cross between a college lecture and a stand-up comedy routine!
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"Off-scale happiness" sounds a lot better than "lives happily ever after"
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Such a wonderful dry humor. He is one of my all time favorites. "Goddamnit!"
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Kurt Vonnegut was a true artist with an unrivaled literary voice. This man lived an incredible life, one that will forever be immortalized in his many short stories, novels, and essays. The day after Kurt Vonnegut passed in 2007, I was set to give a presentation on Vonnegut's life and works in my high school english class. It crushed me to have to add "and so it goes" to the end of the presentation. This is one of my favorite of Vonnegut's speeches, wish I could have seen him speak in person!
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I was fortunate enough to attend one of his speaking engagements. I can’t imagine his take on these dark times… he is sorely missed.
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"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt"
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One of the great humorists in American history... "What, incidentally, was a pregnant mother of two doing, operating a vacuum cleaner on Mother's Day? She was practically asking for a bullet between the eyes!"
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The same man who wrote the short story called "The Big Space Fuck."
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If things had not worked out for Kurt Vonnegut as an author he likely would have had a brilliant career as a standup comedian. His jokes and timing are spot-on. I can imagine growing up watching a cutting-edge but very insightful sitcom called Vonnegut.
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Can you imagine the horrible state your life must be in when you thumbs-down a 4 minute video of Kurt Vonnegut explaining fiction?
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Elsewhere Vonnegut wrote 8 rules for the short story and ended it by saying that Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that. The first rule was "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted." Vonnegut's stories always did that, although the dark irony of his stories often had characters near the bottom of the chart from B to E. So it goes.
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01:25 "Somebody gets into trouble - gets out of it again." He just described 'life'.
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I started reading Vonnegut when I was 15 and I have to say it introduced me to a huge amount of knowledge. There will never be another like him.
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I love "off scale happiness"!!!!
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Some of his works were brilliant. Short story recommendation is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Some hard-core prophecy. And so it goes.
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Wow! What treasure to have this lecture preserved. I didn't realize he had such a sense of humor.
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I saw this lecture at the University of Kansas in the late 80's.
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"...Oh God dammit."
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almost word to word similar to his lecture at the Case Western Univ when he's older. But damn … what do I care … if it isn't nice, I don't know what is! Thank you Mr. Vonnegut. You make my day, Sir!
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I absolutely love this clip - I must have watched it 20 times and it still never fails to make me grin!
