Part 1: What book is being referred to here?It sold more than a million copies in Germany in its first year. Nazis were beginning their rise to power at the time, and they hated the book because it portrayed World War I as misguided and pointless. It was one of the books they publicly burned in 1933. When the film version of the book premiered in Berlin, Nazi gangs attacked the theater.
Part 2: Read it.
It's Shakespeare's birthday. A few factoids from the Writer's Almanac:He was the first writer to invent or record many of our most common turns of phrase, including "foul play," "as luck would have it," "your own flesh and blood," "too much of a good thing," "good riddance," "in one fell swoop," "cruel to be kind," "play fast and loose," "vanish into thin air," "the game is up," "truth will out" and "in the twinkling of an eye."
I never read this one before today. It's Walt Whitman:Once I Pass'd through a Populous City
Is there anyone who can't relate to this?
Once I pass'd through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain'd me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together--all else has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.
I've never even heard of this guy, but I need to read him. From today's Writer's Almanac:It is the birthday of Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist Nikolai Gogol, born in 1809 in Sorochinsk, a town in what is now Ukraine.
Russians are funny.
Gogol wrote about his childhood in Ukraine, and some of his writings featured the devils, witches, and demons of Ukrainian folklore. These writings led to his book Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka -- a book that delighted the Russian literary world and made Gogol an overnight celebrity.
His novel Dead Souls (1842) was a satire and is considered to be Gogol's masterpiece. Gogol also wrote two famous stories, "The Nose (1836)," about a nose that disappears off the face of a collegiate assessor, is found by a barber, and then parades all around St. Petersburg, and "The Overcoat (1842)," about a man who acquires an overcoat and then dies of a broken heart when it is stolen. Gogol once wrote of his comic works, "The merriment observed in my early works corresponded to a certain spiritual need. I was subject to fits of melancholy which I could not even explain to myself and which may have originated in my poor health. To distract myself, I imagined every conceivable kind of funny story. I dreamed up droll characters and figures out of thin air and purposely placed them in the most comical circumstances."
The writer Dostoyevsky once famously remarked, "We have all come out from under Gogol's overcoat."
BTW, today is also the anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's debut album.
Here's a nice new blog, The Lunatic Express, logging the round-the-world exploits of writer Carl Hoffman, who explains the reason for his journey thusly:We’re lucky. The world is on the move; people aren’t just in their villages anymore, and most of them are subject to horrendous travel. Buses that turn over and plunge from cliffs. Commuters literally crushed to death on the trains in Mumbai. Planes that might not leave at all, or worse – you’re 25 times more likely to die on an African airline than on an American one.
Hoffman's eventually going to write a book about his travels. And apparently he's not kidding about the hazards of his travels. Today he's in Colombia and writes:
So I’m off to circumnavigate the globe, traveling as the rest of the world must – on the world’s slowest, most crowded, or most dangerous, buses, boats, planes and trains. I want stories, yes, but perspective, too. I want to see the world in a new light, a new way. I want to meet these people.Regarding bus safety, the government of Columbia was progressive: since 2004 it required bus companies to post safety statistics in every ticket window. At first the stats for my bus didn’t seem too bad – only 18 accidents, eight injuries and six deaths. But that was only for the first two months of 2008. And no one seemed to have died on other lines. Oh well, I bought a ticket and settled in.
A hundred years ago writers traveled around the world and then wrote books about it when they returned home. Now we get to follow along during the first-draft. Pretty cool.
Douglas Adams would have been 56 today. It's still hard to believe he was gone so young. This is a quote of his that I hadn't read before today:"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
I can relate to that!
From today's Writer's Almanac, an excerpt of:Leaving Kansas City
by George Bradley
Kansas City depends a lot on the way
You look at it. If you approach from the West,
It takes on a certain weary beauty:
Misguided, uninspired, familiar.
But driving through from the East,
It's just another group of grubby people
After you thought you'd passed all that. ...
On the only radio station, a voice explains,
In an accent you wouldn't have thought possible,
The most practical way of doing something
It would never have occurred to you to do.
The voice is distant and doesn't seem aimed at you. ...
There is a place called Colorado where you will,
Of course, be very glad to arrive, where the others
Wanted to go; and you will sit smug in the shade
High up on a mountain, feeling the wind
Send shivers over your body, looking back
At the great sickening swoop of the plain
And think it part of a grand design:
Satisfying, necessary, even beautiful.
A nice quote from Madeleine L'Engle, who would have been 89 today:
"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
After the death of Norman Mailer, who was noted for his tendency to swing for the fences and either hit a home run or embarrass himself, Joel Achenbach has blogged a two-part series on creativity, titled "When Genius Bombs."
I'm going to quote it at length because I like it so much. Emphases are mine.
Geniuses mess up too. This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.
There is bad Beethoven. There are failed Picassos. There are incorrect theories by Albert Einstein. Duke Ellington would be the first to say that some riffs worked better than others. In the 1940s Orson Welles made both the instant classic "Citizen Kane" and the instant trivia answer "The Lady From Shanghai."
Just because you are a great composer named Wagner doesn't mean that everything you do will be Wagnerian.
(snip)
The problem with "genius" is that it doesn't give the great talents their due for working hard and plodding through difficult problems and taking chances and knowing which ideas to dump and which to deliver. Geniuses create the same way total ding-dongs create. Geniuses still have to put on their paint one stroke at a time.
Picasso would paint something, look at it -- at this point it would fetch a staggering price simply because it was a Picasso -- and then just paint over it, start again, because it wasn't good enough.
W.H. Auden once said, "The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor."
(snip)
George Bernard Shaw talked about the "field theory" of creativity, borrowing a term from physics. Good ideas do not exist alone but in a larger field of imagination. As a young man Shaw wrote five novels. Can you name one? Shaw had to work through his novelist phase before he could arrive, in his late thirties, as a playwright.
Shaw believed in productivity -- just keep writing, was his advice to everyone. Norma Jenckes, a Shaw scholar at the University of Cincinnati, says Shaw's attitude was that "you had to write yourself through all sorts of things, and then something might become your masterpiece."
Herein lies the lesson for everyone, the pros, the amateurs, the dumb-dumbs, anyone who has ever tried to think creatively. Humans are by nature a creative species, but we have to learn to manage our creativity, feed it, weed it, prune it, whack it back if necessary. We have to forgive our mistakes. No one is always brilliant.
Children instinctively know this. It is only as they grow up that society drums into their little noggins the fact that they're without real talent and ought to put down the crayons and the finger paint and learn to watch television like everyone else.
(snip)
The academics who study creativity have concluded that geniuses come up with ideas and analyze situations pretty much like everyone else. "Nobody is a genius simply because of the shape of their head and their brain," says Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard. "People get ideas. Nobody knows where ideas come from. And they try to work them out. And people who are the best artists are very good working out the implications of those ideas. But it's not the case that every idea is a good idea."
(snip)
Within a field such as math, someone can be good at one thing and inept at another. The mathematician Henri Poincare could not add. He wrote, "I must confess I am absolutely incapable of doing an addition sum without a mistake."
(snip)
Mark Rosenthal, a curator at the National Gallery, applies the rule to artists: "The really good ones are trying extremely hard every time out. They're always trying to make a masterpiece, they're always trying to do something wonderful."
He says that being creative is a lonely job. Every artist's studio is the same. There is one chair. The artist paints half the day, and sits in the chair the other half of the day, looking critically at the art. "There's only one chair because artists work alone. And they sit there. I'm sure if we could be transported back to Rembrandt's time, it'd be the same thing. There'd be one chair."
(snip)
Robert Sternberg, a Yale psychologist and co-author of "Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity," says creativity has three aspects:
1. Synthetic. You have to generate ideas. Geniuses come up with a lot more ideas than everyone else. "In most fields, the people who really are well known are prodigious. They're large-volume producers. But you don't even realize that in their repertoire is a lot of junk. You just don't hear about the junk," says Sternberg.
2. Analytic. You have to know which ideas are the good ones. J. Carter Brown recalls the prayer that the esteemed art critic Bernard Berenson used to say: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily idea, and forgive us the one we had yesterday."
3. Practical. You need to know how to market the idea. How to pitch it.
(snip)
Leon Botstein, the composer, says you can't plan your breakthroughs. You just have to keep plugging away, and wait, and hope.
"Breakthrough is not when you want it, it's not when you expect it. It's a function of the constant activity. It is only the constant activity that generates the breakthrough."
And what causes the constant activity? It's not money. It's not glory. It's an "inner necessity," he says. Unless you have this inner necessity to create, you'll probably never do anything of brilliance, Botstein believes.
"Without constant, almost irrational, obsessive engagement, you'll never make the breakthrough," he says. "The difference between you and the person you consider great is not raw ability. It's the inner obsessiveness. The inability to stop thinking about it. It's a form of madness."
So this is what separates the great ones from the rest of the world. It is not simply that they are smarter, savvier, more brilliant. They are geniuses because they can't stand to be anything else.
"I Used to Be But Now I Am" by Ted Berrigan. My favorite lines:I used to be part of the problem,
But now I am the problem.
From today's Writer's Almanac:"[Writing a novel is] like creeping along on your belly with shells exploding around you. It's only occasionally that there's a ceasefire and you can get up and run."
From today's Writer's Almanac:In 1969, he moved to his family's farm in Oregon and spent much of the rest of his life raising cattle and sheep and growing blueberries. He joined the local school board and coached wrestling and taught a creative writing class.
That would be pretty cool, having Ken Kesey on your school board.
His last novel was Last Go Round (1994), an old-fashioned Western based on the pulp fiction he'd loved reading when he was a kid. He died in 2001.
Ken Kesey said, "The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths."
According to this harmless little quiz, I am Ulysses, by James Joyce. To wit:"Most people are convinced that you don't make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you're saying now makes tons of sense.
That's fair enough, I suppose. Especially the first paragraph. If only people could hear what's going on inside my head, they'd actually think I'm being quite coherent.
What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant.
Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero."
I'm not sure about the Greek folk hero thing, though.
... by W.B. Yeats, courtesy of Writer's Almanac:Wine comes in at the mouth
Nice.
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
Good stuff: A promotional site for "No One Belongs Here More than You" by Miranda July.
From the Writer's Almanac, I learned that the same guy co-wrote Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider. I would never have guessed that.
It's the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, born in Alvarado, Texas (1924). He co-wrote the screenplays for the films Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Easy Rider (1969).I really like that quote about writing to astonish.
Terry Southern said, "The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish."
If Ludwig Bemelmans hadn't drawn pictures on his walls, he'd never had written "Madeline."
Anyway, from today's Writer's Almanac:It's the birthday of the author of the "Madeline" books, Ludwig Bemelmans, born in Meran, Tyrol, Austria (1898). He was rebellious as a child. He went to many different schools, but he failed out of all them, so his family sent him to work with his uncle, who owned a chain of hotels. When he shot and almost killed a waiter for one of the hotels, his parents gave him the choice of reform school or emigration to America. He chose America and arrived in New York when he was 16 years old.
I wonder if writing on walls gave him the inspiration for the crack on the ceiling that had the habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit.
He worked at a series of hotels and then started his own restaurant, which became very successful. He didn't think about becoming a writer until a friend in the publishing industry happened to see his childlike drawings on the walls of his apartment. His friend suggested that he write and illustrate a children's book.
And so he wrote his famous book Madeline (1939) ...
