Writer Wisdom: The Best of Kurt Vonnegut
The Best, 2/13/18
The Best is our daily compilation of cool stuff we’ve found IRL and around the web. Every day we will share what we are reading, watching, listening to, doing, or pondering. If you have suggestions for what we should include in future segments, let us know in the comments below!
Top stories
The Joy and Sorrow of Rereading Holt’s “How Children Learn” — A summary of John Holt’s great insights about children’s learning.
Ebb and Flow of Norepinephrine Colors Emotion — “Press play on your earliest happy memory. Your presence is transported to the past, where you feel temperature change, see younger versions of family members interact and even smell the succulent aromas around you. A vivid experience drenches the senses and embosses an indelible memory on the brain’s surface. Why do some remember (and even dream) in exquisite sensory detail, while others watch only monochromatic versions of their past? The answer lies in their genes.”
The Answers Are in Front of You — The answers to life and business might be sitting right on your bookcase…🤔 Here are nine inspiring books and what you can learn from them.
Reading
Slaughterhouse-Five — A Novel
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
Deadeye Dick — A Novel
This is my first time reading Deadeye Dick and I love it so far!
“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.”
Harrison Bergeron — A Short Story
This is an interesting short story that analyzes what happens when people mistakenly pursue equality of outcome instead of trying to equalize equality of opportunity.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way…
Listening
Kurt Vonneguys — A Podcast by Cracked
This is an amazing — and hilarious — podcast about all thinks Kurt V!
Start Here: Kurt Vonnegut’s Take On ‘1984’ —
This episode discusses Kurt Vonnegut’s very first book, Player Piano — a satirical story about the horrors of automation.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. -Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
Watching
Watch: Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories
“There’s no reason why a simple shape of the story can’t be fed into computers…”
Pondering
On writing:
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
“If you want to make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”
“Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business — you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.”
“Novel writing doesn’t breed serenity. It is lying, you know, and the novelist has to spend a lot of time during the course of his writing worrying about whether he is going to get away with his lies. If he fails to, his novel isn’t going to work.”
On Life:
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
