I like Cheerskep's focus on failures. Most geniuses are failures because they do stuff that doesn't meet the societal standards or templates. Society never needed an airplane but once it was developed it became central to the new template for society. Society could've gotten along without the Polio vaccine or Leonardo Da Vinci, or Cezanne or Einstein or Freud albeit in a cruder state of being. Genius provides what isn't needed at a given time and usually it's met with resistance or ridicule. Remember those very first consumer computers? I do and I recall how they seemed like useless toys. Ditto when photography came on the scene, and so much more. Genius is ahead of the curve or hopelessly irrelevant. Its tough to tell the difference until hindsight is available. With sprinters, you know what success and failure will be before the race begins. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, March 25, 2011 6:11:17 PM Subject: Re: New PBS series on creative genius I've read a very great deal about writers at work (and I've written a bit myself). It reminded me of Tolstoi's line about happy families being all alike, while unhappy families are each unhappy in their own ways. It also remind of interviews with athletes after a contest. Winners very, very seldom have something interesting to say. I want to hear from the losers (though even there athletes are rarely articulate.) Sprinters are the quintessential bad interview. "I just gave it a hundred ten percent!" What CAN the poor sprinter say? All the training in the world is not going to give you white-fiber fast-twitch muscle tissue. It may help build up the leg-strength and therefore the stride-length, but rate of speed comes from length of stride times frequency of turnover, and if you're not born with fast-twitch fiber, you'll never be a great sprinter. Long distance runners are much more comparable to artists, in that they can be interesting when they tell you when and how they went wrong. Writers who describe their stumbles, their outright errors, can be interesting -- and even informative. I once assembled a book, AFTERWORDS, NOVELISTS ON THEIR NOVELS, that was at its best when it conveyed the struggle. The PRODUCT of "perfect ease" may be gorgeous to behold, but the picture of the PROCESS, an account of one flawless step after another, is dull and frustrating to read. Variorums can be engaging as we see early versions of works that turn out to be great. And a writer who can cite a flaw of his, and accurately explain something about what led him wrong, can be enlightening. In an early play of mine, I diligently bent myself to planting the justifying seeds of certain later events. When a good director said to me, "I was one step ahead of you too much," he didn't have to say another word: I knew immediately what I'd done wrong. And I learned something I could carry with me into later work.
