
Kurt Vonnegut explains drama (2009) - bemmu
https://sivers.org/drama
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andrey-p
I read an article form of Kurt Vonnegut's original talk. My favourite part was
the happiness/misery graph of The Metamorphosis: [http://austinkleon.com/wp-
content/uploads/2005/vonnegut6.gif](http://austinkleon.com/wp-
content/uploads/2005/vonnegut6.gif)

(Found here: [http://austinkleon.com/2005/12/17/graph-a-story-with-mr-
vonn...](http://austinkleon.com/2005/12/17/graph-a-story-with-mr-vonnegut/))

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morley
Here's a video of the man himself explaining it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ)

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MichaelMoser123
Thanks for the link. Interesting that the audience in this video found this
all to be quite amusing; however he was talking serious stuff here; So was the
laughter because of a misunderstanding because audience and speaker?

So maybe it doesn't quite sound so funny to me because in our age we are used
to this kind of reasoning, and them back in the seventies weren't?

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neilk
Alternative viewpoint:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHVqxD8PNq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHVqxD8PNq8)

But, don't take the speech purely at face value -- Adaptation (the movie)
leaves it ambiguous about whether this is wisdom, puffery, or accidentally
true for the wrong reasons.

Also, it should be pointed out that Kurt Vonnegut had the kind of childhood
that would probably leave anybody numb to the ups and downs of life, and also
lived through the firebombing of a German city. Everything in his oeuvre is
about how impotent human stories are, to prepare people for 20th-century scale
horror. So take that as you will.

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twic
The idea of a the significance of the sequential change in mood in a story
reminds me of the "qualitative tempo trajectory" that underlies DJ sets
(section 3.2):

[http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2000/HPL-2000-104.pdf](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2000/HPL-2000-104.pdf)

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purplerabbit
This hits home. You could basically sum up the problems with my college
worldview with this talk.

