Handicapper General

The late Kurt Vonnegut graded his own works. It's in here somewhere, scroll down, etc. I am not interested in the aspect of Vonnegut that wrote books. That part leaves me cold. But rather than place himself in history with his classroom-style grades, Vonnegut said he was comparing "myself with myself." Which makes sense, because Kurt Vonnegut reminds me of nobody more than my high-school chemistry teacher, who graded purely on a curve, and invariably gave out as many A's as F's.

It's bad for your test-writing style, and I think I can see the same influence on the late author's novels. After all, why bother to write a book , if the best it can do is push Breakfast of Champions across the curve? If nobody is going to compare you to Charles Dickens, and you're going to be "idiosyncratic" no matter what you do, all that's left is to decide whether you want to write an "A+" book or a "D" book.

In the end, Vonnegut seems to have chickened out. His personal reckoning contains 3 times as many A's as D's, and no F's, i.e. Kurt Vonnegut says his books are all pretty good. If it comes to that, I'm pretty sure my chemistry teacher just gave everyone a B+ at the end of the year. You might as well. When it comes to cheap gags, nobody who dies this week is going to beat Johnny Hart. If he and Kurt Vonnegut were graded together on a scale, well I certainly know who would be getting the pity B+.