Tag: vonnegut

violent-darts:

handypolymath:

trojantok:

“What has been my prettiest contribution to the culture?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiography Palm Sunday. His answer? His master’s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.” The elegant simplicity and playfulness of Vonnegut’s idea is exactly its enduring appeal. The idea is so simple, in fact, that Vonnegut sums the whole thing up in one elegant sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”

(via Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago | Open Culture)

The laughing of the audience has this particular discomfited edge to it. Like Vonnegut was telling tales out of school and they had to keep reminding themselves his observations were jokes.

“Ha ha! Stories on a graph, so amusing!”

And Vonnegut’s like, “Yeah, humans are absurd, but don’t worry, eventually you’ll realize it’s kind of cool to see what we design stories to do.”

Just like pots, just like spearheads, stories are purpose built works of creation humans make for each other.

The thing I find really interesting is that while we didn’t have the pretty pretty graphs (we had graphs, they just weren’t pretty) this … showed up as a thing being taught alllll through my undergrad.