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Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

I read his books as a youth and enjoyed the stories. I re-read his books as a 60 yr old because they were very popular in the book bins scattered around the VA hospital I was at. This time I enjoyed the man and author. Some trivia: I always thought Tom Waits was clever to come up with the line "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is King" but that came from Vonnegut in "Player "Piano. I especially appreciated "Breakfast of Champions" because he inserted himself into the book as a character and stated that writing the book prevented him from killing himself like his mother. It helped me not kill myself as well.

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> I always thought Tom Waits was clever to come up with the line "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is King" but that came from Vonnegut in "Player "Piano.

This is a Gaelic proverb at least a couple hundred years older than either of these people.

Apparently Erasmus coined it, around 1500. But there's earlier inspiration. But it's not from the Bible, as I initially thought it would be.

Cool! Thanks.

It's "a bit" older than that. I've heard it as a proverb in my native (non-english) tongue so I thought it probably came from the Bible, but TIL: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_the_land_of_the_blind,_the...

Vonegut came to speak at UMass in the 90s. It was kinda surreal, as I wasn't sure about half of what he was talking about. Interesting though.

I do enjoy reading his books, even as not much of a fiction reader.

His essays in "a Man without a country". particularly the "shape of stories", where he visualizes plots on a graph.

https://visage.co/kurt-vonnegut-shows-us-shapes-stories/

If you enjoyed the shape of stories you might want to check out "Tempo: timing, tactics and strategy in narrative-driven decision-making". A good chunk of it is on graphing narratives.

Great book. Last time I checked that guy (Venk Rao) had gone off the political deep end on his blog, but the early stuff is very good.

The Gervais Principle is another saga of his worth reading in its entirety (much better than just finding a summary of it somewhere).

I stopped reading his blog as it got longer and longer and I got less and less signal out of it. Haven't checked in years.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is cast out of society because everyone thinks he's crazy.

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