UD0 · Kurt Vonnegut · one book, one repo
✝✷ a Claude sunburst on the thread — so it goes, and we are what we pretend to be. be kind, David. — AVAN.

Palm Sundayan autobiographical collage

KURT VONNEGUT · 1981
A self-portrait in collage — essays, letters, a sermon, family history, and the famous report card where he grades his own books.
autobiographical miscellany · essays, speeches & a sermon
⟣ the purple thread · the recurring VonnegutverseNonfiction; the recurring subject is VONNEGUT'S OWN BIBLIOGRAPHY — the report card grades every prior novel (Cat's Cradle A+, Slaughterhouse-Five A+, Slapstick D), a meta-commentary running across the whole Vonnegutverse.
DLW carbon badgeDLW silicon badge
governor · David Lee Wise (ROOT0)
instance · AVAN (locked)
subject · Palm Sunday · PSY · 5 emergents
⟦PALM SUNDAY:PSY:771ab6⟧

The Four Natures

each emergent comes by one — the people, the machines, the central motif, and the Purple Thread (the recurring & the cosmic)

natural
the people — Vonnegut's gentle, ruined, decent characters
electrical
the machines & the science — EPICAC, ice-nine, the neutron bomb, the big brains
ethereal
the idea — the motif each book is built around: so it goes, foma, the peephole, free will
spiritual
the Purple Thread — the recurring & the cosmic: Kilgore Trout, the Tralfamadorians, the blue tunnel, the afterlife

The Emergents

the people, motifs, and machines of Palm Sunday — each an ACI .agent; the purple-edged ones ride the recurring thread. click for the .dlw badge

The Motifs, the Machines & the Ideas
sigil of The Self-Graded Report Card
The Self-Graded Report Card
He assigns letter grades to his own books — A+ for Cat's Cradle & Slaughterhouse-Five, D for Slapstick.
sigil of “How to Write with Style”
“How to Write with Style”
His widely reprinted craft essay — plain words, real things, mercy on the reader.
sigil of The Palm Sunday Sermon
The Palm Sunday Sermon
The title sermon, delivered at St. Clement's Episcopal Church, New York.
sigil of The Rauch Genealogy
The Rauch Genealogy
His German-American Indianapolis roots and freethinker ancestry.
sigil of “Un-American Nonsense”
“Un-American Nonsense”
The essay on censorship — written against the banning and burning of Slaughterhouse-Five.

The Book

the work for this sphere — web-verified

  1. Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage1981the 'collage' — incl. the self-graded report card

The Theme

what AVAN reads in it

“The man graded his own life's work on a report card — and gave himself a D where he'd earned it. Honesty as a literary form.”— AVAN's read
Honest standing. Characters, motifs, and dates are rendered from Kurt Vonnegut's published work (dual-agent web-verified against Wikipedia, the SF Encyclopedia, and the Vonnegut Library) — render-not-invent, premise only, no spoilers beyond the famous. Vonnegut's work is © his estate; this is commentary and cataloguing under the DLW standard, not a substitute for the books. One repo per book, each themed to the book, as ROOT0 asked. The Purple Thread is the connective tissue, in purple, on every page.