Even The Best Minds Have Their Bad Days

 
“WHEN GENIUS BOMBS (1995)”
by Joel Achenbach

[This column by Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach was posted on “Achenblog,” the writer’s blog on the Post website, on 24 January 2013.  It’s an extension of a shorter version that ran in the print edition on 16 April 1995 in the “Sunday Arts” section.  Achenbach’s thesis is that “Geniuses mess up too.  This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.”  He provides examples of bad art by the world’s masters as evidence of this.]

(I posted about half of this piece some years ago on this blog, and will now paste in the whole thing. Titled “When Genius Bombs,” the story originally ran 4/16/1995 in the Sunday Arts section, which at that time was under the stewardship of [David James] Von Drehle [b. 1961; Washington Post arts editor, 1994-95]. Though the references to Bill Clinton [William Jefferson Clinton (b. 1946); 42nd President of the United States: 1993-2001] date the piece a little, and I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way today — it’s painfully glib, and where are the footnotes??? — I think in general it holds up well and has the redeeming quality of being essentially right about the nature of genius.)

Scene IV. Another part of the forest.

Enter DEMETRIUS and CHIRON, with LAVINIA, ravished; her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out.

Dem. So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak,
Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and revish’d thee.

Chi. Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,
An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.

Dem. See, how with signs and tokens she can scrowl.

Chi. Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands.

Dem. She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash;
And so let’s leave her to her silent walks . . .

That’s “Titus Andronicus” [Act 2, Scene 4; written between 1588 and 1593]. It’s by [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616], early in his career, in his “Pulp Fiction” [1994 crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963)] phase.

The basic plot is, everyone stabs and rapes and mutilates everyone else while speaking in verse, and then they all die. Lavinia’s may be the worst speaking role in the history of the stage. Character development is not the play’s strength. At the beginning of the play Titus Andronicus is a cruel warmonger; by the end, he’s exactly the same, a cruel warmonger.

Die, die Lavinia, and thy shame with thee;

[Kills Lavinia].

And, with thy shame, thy father’s sorrow die!

For centuries, Shakespearean scholars have been stumped by the play. It’s so . . . awful. Mention “Titus Andronicus” to Harold Bloom, English professor at Yale and policeman of the Western canon, and he immediately says, “Boy, is that bad. It’s just a bloodbath. There’s not a memorable line in it.”

The Bard, bad? How’s that possible? Isn’t Shakespeare the greatest writer in the history of the English language, pulling away from the pack like Secretariat at the Belmont? How could the same guy write “King Lear” [thought to have been composed sometime between 1603 and 1606] and this crappy thing?

[Secretariat (1970-89) was a champion thoroughbred racehorse who was the ninth winner of the American Triple Crown (1973), setting and still holding the fastest time record in all three of its constituent races (Kentucky Derby in May, Preakness Stakes in May, Belmont Stakes in June). The first Triple Crown winner in 25 years, his record-breaking, 31-length victory at Belmont is often considered the greatest event in horse racing history. The horse’s margin of victory and winning time (2′24″) are records that still stand.]

Here’s the best explanation: Geniuses mess up too. This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.

There is bad [Ludwig van] Beethoven [1770-1827; German composer and pianist]. There are failed [Pablo] Picassos [1881-1973; Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theater designer]. There are incorrect theories by Albert Einstein [1879-1955; German-born theoretical physicist; best known for developing the theory of relativity]. Duke Ellington [1899-1974; jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra] would be the first to say that some riffs worked better than others. In the 1940s Orson Welles [1915-85; director, actor, writer, producer, and magician; known for his innovative work in film, radio, and theater] made both the instant classic “Citizen Kane” [1941; RKO Radio Pictures; often called the greatest film ever made] and the instant trivia answer “The Lady From Shanghai” [1947 film noir; Columbia Pictures; considered a disaster in America when released but now regarded as a classic of film noir].

Just because you are a great composer named Wagner [1813-83; German composer, theater director, essayist, and conductor] doesn’t mean that everything you do will be Wagnerian. Leon Botstein [b. 1946; Swiss-born American conductor, educator, historical musicologist, and scholar], a composer and president of Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], says of Richard Wagner’s “Centennial March” [1876], “It’s a dog. He did it for the money.”

[Wagner’s Centennia March (sometimes American Centennial March) was commissioned by the city of Philadelphia, site of the Centennial Exhibition (10 May-10 November 1876), the first world’s fair to be held in the United States, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The commission, for which Wagner was paid $5,000—a huge sum at the time, worth $150,000 in 2025—was recommended by Theodore Thomas (1835-1905; German-American violinist, conductor, and orchestrator; founder and first music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), a great Wagnerian advocate who was very disappointed with the work when it arrived. According to some sources, the composer quipped to friends that the best thing about the march was the fee he received for writing it.]

The Beatles [English rock band formed in Liverpool; 1960-70; widely regarded as the most influential band in Western popular music]: geniuses, right? Explain, then, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” [1968]. Explain “Run for Your Life” [1965].

You’d better run for your life if you can, little girl.
Hide your head in the sand, little girl.
If I catch you with another man, that’s the end-ah, little girl.

“Even outstanding people have phenomenal failures. That’s why so many people don’t achieve success, because the first time they fail they think they can’t be successful,” says Dean Keith Simonton [b. 1948; Distinguished Professor Emeritus; known for research in the fields of genius, creativity, leadership, and aesthetics], a psychologist at the University of California at Davis and author of “Greatness: Who Makes History and Why” [Guilford Press, 1994]. In his book he writes, “Creative geniuses stumble; they trip; they make horrible mistakes. Their highest and most acclaimed successes are constructed on the low rubble of humiliating failures.”

Genius is a romanticized form of intelligence and talent. We like to imagine that genius emerges from the artist like perspiration, dripping all over the place. When the reputation of a creative genius reaches a certain point — the super-genius status of a Leonardo [da Vinci (1452-1519); Italian polymath of the Renaissance; painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect] or a Shakespeare or a Beethoven — there is a natural tendency among scholars to save every sketch, note, letter, scribble, coffee stain and discarded hankie from the hand of the Great One. John Lennon [1940-80; English singer-songwriter, musician, and activist; founder, co-lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles; songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney (b. 1942; English singer, songwriter, and musician; played bass guitar and piano, and sang lead vocals with the Beatles; one of the most successful composers and performers ever) is the most successful in history] wrote some short stories; they were promptly labeled “Joycean” [characteristic of the writing of James Joyce (1882-1941; Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic); in a style employing innovative verbal style, often involving stream-of-consciousness, complex language, and experimental techniques] by admiring critics.

Over time the master artist takes on the character of a superbeing, a cartoon genius. A piano is to [Franz] Liszt [1811-86; Romantic-period Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, and teacher] as a hammer is to Thor, God of Thunder. We can imagine Beethoven composing by day and solving baffling murders by night.

The problem here is not that geniuses are overrated. If anything, the intellectual fashion is anti-genius, anti-masterpiece. There are academic circles in which it is considered daft to believe that some individuals are smarter and better and more talented than others. Suggest such a thing and people will look at you like you’re an imbecile.

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. [Unless, of course, they’re Jackson Pollock (1912-56; major figure in the abstract expressionist movement; renowned for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing household paint onto a horizontal surface; see "Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA)” [4 March 2016]) or Morris Louis (1912-62; one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting; his signature method was pouring diluted acrylic paint directly onto unprimed canvas; see “Morris Louis” [15 February 2010]). ~Rick]

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 [1907-73; British-American poet] once said, “The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor.”

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.

But if geniuses can fail, then perhaps there is hope that the converse is true: That the mediocre minds of the world, due to luck, courage, or the random distribution of quality, are not immune to spasms of greatness.

Picasso’s Fakes

There’s an anecdote about Picasso, possibly apocryphal, that illustrates the phenomenon. An art dealer was trying to sell a painting by Picasso to a potential buyer. The buyer said he wasn’t sure of its authenticity, and wanted the artist himself to vouch for it. Picasso was summoned. He looked at the painting and said it was a fake. The buyer left. The dealer was perplexed. He turned to Picasso and said, “Didn’t you tell me yourself that you painted it?” “I did,” said Picasso. “I often paint fakes.”

That’s the standard response of many scholars when faced with something lousy by a great master. Can’t be real, they say. Gotta be by someone else. Often the only reason to doubt the authenticity of the work is simply that it’s not so hot. It’s just unacceptably mediocre.

For example, desperate scholars have occasionally argued that Shakespeare didn’t write “Titus Andronicus,” or that he had a collaborator. Shakespeare himself never put his name on any published version — he surely knew it was dreck [Yiddish for ‘crap,’ ‘junk,’ ‘trash,’ from Dreck, German for ‘dirt’]. His contemporaries gave him authorial credit, but that did not squelch the theory that it was, at the very least, a collaboration, and the “bad parts” have been blamed on some knucklehead named George Peele [1556-96; English translator, poet, and dramatist]. But in 1943 the scholar Hereward T. Price [1880-1964; born in Madagascar; English author and professor of English at the University of Michigan], after poring over all the evidence and theories, wrote [in “The Authorship of Titus Andronicus,” published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (42.1)], “We must conclude, however regretfully, that Shakespeare was the author of ‘Titus Andronicus.’”

Mistakes and errors are integral to the process of creation. As the poet James Fenton [b. 1949; English poet, journalist, and literary critic] said in a recent lecture at Oxford, the text of which was reprinted in the New York Review of Books [42.5 (23 March 1995)], “For a productive life, and a happy one, each failure must be felt and worked through. It must form part of the dynamic of your creativity.”

George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950; Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist] 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.

[The novels: Immaturity (1879), a semi-autobiographical portrayal of mid-Victorian England; The Irrational Knot (1880), a critique of conventional marriage; Love Among the Artists (1881), an exploration of themes of romance, artistic integrity, and socio-political commentary; Cashel Byron's Profession (1882), an indictment of society; An Unsocial Socialist (1883), the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism.]

Shaw believed in productivity — just keep writing, was his advice to everyone. Norma Jenckes [1943-2022], 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.”

Geniuses work hard. They’re prodigious. They can’t stop themselves from churning out work. Thomas Edison [1847-1931] couldn’t stop inventing. Joyce Carol Oates [b. 1938] can’t stop writing. Shaw published 55 plays. Milton Avery [1885-1965] spewed paintings by the museum-load; when asked how he got inspiration, he said by going to the studio every day.

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 [b. 1943; developmental psychologist], 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.”

Here’s a bad idea: “Wellington’s Victory.”

Beethoven composed it [in 1813] to celebrate a British victory over an army commanded by Joseph Bonaparte [1768-1844; French statesman, lawyer, and diplomat], Napoleon’s [1769-1821] brother. It is often compared unfavorably to another piece of bombast, the “1812 Overture” [1880] by [Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky [1840-93; Russian composer]. Jim Svejda [b. 1947; music commentator and critic], in “The Record Shelf Guide to the Classical Repertoire” [Prima Publishing, 1988], says, “As if it weren’t bad enough losing most of his army to the Russian winter and then getting mauled at Waterloo, poor Napoleon . . . also had to have his nose rubbed in it by two of history’s supreme masterpieces of musical schlock [Yiddish: something of cheap or inferior quality; junk]: Tchaikovsky’s refined and tasteful 1812 Overture and this embarrassing garbage by Beethoven.”

One need not buy it to listen to it. You can go to the Library of Congress, to the Music Division.

”‘Wellington’s Victory’ doesn’t quite work at the gut level,” concedes Sam Brylawski, a recorded-sound specialist, as he fills out the request slip. “But it’s not like listening to someone in the basement on an out-of-tune guitar.”

The request slip goes to a person at a desk. Somewhere, unseen, a record album is pulled and dusted. After about 10 minutes the album jacket, minus the album, appears, enclosed in plastic, on a dumbwaiter. The person at the desk says into a telephone, “The listener is ready.” From the other end of the line, someone decrees that you go into listening booth No. 9.

In the booth you punch a button labeled “Talk.” A voice says hello. You say you’re ready to listen. A moment later, “Wellington’s Victory” has begun.

You hear drums in the distance, faint.

They get louder. Faster. Then they get much louder and much faster. The army is approaching.

Trumpets! Or maybe bugles. They are bugling with great fanfare.

Then: Flutes, gentle, chirpy, happy, a Yankee Doodle sort of thing, like what you’d imagine a fife-and-drum outfit playing, and then some loud strings, and then an army approaches from another direction, with more drums and trumpets and a little fussy-personage music with a triangle tinkling in the background, and finally the battle royal explodes, with cannon noises and gunshots, the drums pounding, trumpets blaring, the room almost shaking with banging and whanging and thudding and thumping. If they could play it in Sensurround, you’d get injured.

Someone had the temerity to write a bad review of the piece as soon as it came out. Beethoven was incensed. He wrote a note in the margin of the review:

“You wretched scoundrel! What I excrete is better than anything you could ever think up!”

(Of course he didn’t really write “excrete.” He wrote in German. And he used a word that made the point much more graphically.)

[The offending review of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory was by Gottfried Weber (1779-1839; German music theorist, musician, and composer), and appeared in the German music magazine Cäcilia (which Weber founded) in 1825.

[Beethoven’s marginal reply in German was, according to my search: Ach du erbärmlicher Schuft, was ich scheisse ist besser, als was du je gedacht. That translates, more literally than Achenbach’s rendering, as ‘Oh you pathetic wretch, what I shit is better than what you ever thought of.’ (Scheissen is the German verb ‘to shit.’ Now you know.)]

Crossing Genres

Leonardo da Vinci notwithstanding, genius usually doesn’t carry over from one genre to another. Harold Bloom [1930-2019; literary critic] says, “[Miguel de] Cervantes [1547?-1616; Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists] was a disaster on the stage. He wrote very bad stage plays, like the ‘Siege of Numancia’ [sic: ‘Numantia’; ca, 1582]. It’s his most famous play. It failed. Badly.”

Within a field such as math, someone can be good at one thing and inept at another. The mathematician Henri Poincare [sic: Poincaré; 1854-1912; French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science] could not add. He wrote, “I must confess I am absolutely incapable of doing an addition sum without a mistake.”

Even within a masterpiece there can be a flub — “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” [1884 in Britain; 1885 in the U.S.] may be the greatest American novel ever written, but in the final few chapters Tom Sawyer suddenly reappears, and there’s a tortured sequence where Tom tries to engineer the liberation of the slave Jim even though Jim isn’t locked up and they could all just walk away. Tom thinks it must be a dramatic liberation. Huck sort of tags along. Unfortunately it’s too late to edit that part out.

Brilliant minds screw up for all sorts of extra-artistic reasons. Maybe they are doing something just for the money. Maybe they’re sick. Maybe they’re no longer sick — some scholars think Edvard Munch [1863-1944; Norwegian painter] (“The Scream” [1893]) lost his edge after he had psychiatric treatment, says J. Carter Brown [1934-2002], former director of the National Gallery of Art [Washington, D.C.].

Another problem is overreaching. That’s what happened to Einstein. He was a very smart man. Indeed he may have been the smartest human being on the planet in his day. But he could also be, relatively speaking, a moron.

In the first two decades of the century Einstein was on a roll like the scientific world hadn’t seen since Isaac Newton [1643-1727; English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author]. Einstein discerned, through thought experiments, that the universe obeyed fantastic principles of relativity, and that Newtonian physics, while valid, was still only an approximation of reality. He enveloped Newtonian physics in his new theory of relativity, which we would explain here if we knew anything about it other than clocks move slowly in really fast spaceships.

He followed the special theory of relativity with something even more intellectually astonishing: The general theory. Special, then general.

Then he tried to do something bigger. He wanted a unified field theory. This would be a theory that somehow linked gravitation with electromagnetism. That was the bridge too far. Eight decades later it still hasn’t been done. In his mad quest Einstein refused to accept many of the new orthodoxies of quantum mechanics. He thought the universe was fundamentally deterministic — that one thing followed another in a predictable fashion. His colleagues said nuh-uh. The universe is probabilistic, they said. Can’t be sure of anything.

“He was very uncomfortable with the Uncertainty Principle,” says Frank Wilczek [b. 1951; theoretical physicist, mathematician, and Nobel laureate (Physics, 2004)], a professor of natural science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where Einstein worked for several decades. Wilczek has frequent reason to think of Einstein — he lives in Einstein’s house on Mercer Street. “It is a pity that he might have made further great discoveries if he had taken quantum mechanics to heart. As great as he was, he certainly could have done better in those last 35 years.”

[The Uncertainty Principle, first introduced in 1927 by German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-76), is a core concept in quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small. In simple terms, it states that you cannot know both the exact position and momentum (speed and direction) of a particle at the same time. The more accurately you know one, the less accurately you can know the other. This isn’t due to limitations of our measuring equipment, but rather a fundamental property of nature at the quantum level, according to the theory.]

One can understand Einstein’s instinct, though. He believed in himself. He did the special, he did the general, why not the unified? He knew there was something more out there, a mystery at the fundament of creation, and it would have been unnaural not to seek to solve it.

You start reconfiguring the universe, it’s hard to stop.

One Chair

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.”

Rosenthal sits surrounded by Rothkos [Mark Rothko (1903-70); Russian-born American abstract painter]. They are big, bold canvases, abstract, a visual language not everyone can understand, but which Rosenthal finds profoundly moving, like listening to magnificent music.

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.”

Robert Sternberg [b. 1949; psychologist and psychometrician (scientist who studies the measurement of people’s knowledge, intelligence, skills, and abilities)], a Yale psychologist and co-author of “Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity” [Free Press, 1995] 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.

Creative ideas can be applied in unlikely places. Sternberg cites the example of a 3M [formerly the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company] engineer who was trying to make a strong adhesive. He screwed up and made a weak adhesive. So then he asked himself: Of what use might a weak adhesive be? This led him to invent Post-It notes.

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 [1865-1959; art historian specializing in the Renaissance] 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. This is the part of creative genius where someone like Madonna [b. 1958; pop singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress] excels.

Sternberg mentions Bill Clinton as a political genius who hasn’t mastered all three of these steps. Clinton is most adept at steps 1 and 3. He synthesizes boatloads of ideas, and in the right forum he’s a smooth salesman, bordering on slick. But he doesn’t self-select very well. “His good ideas get lost in the klunkers,” says Sternberg.

They Can’t Help It

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.

Shakespeare wrote 24 masterpieces, by Harold Bloom’s count. Almost his entire output appeared in a 20-year period. At his peak he managed 13 plays in seven years. They weren’t too shabby: “Much Ado About Nothing” [1598-99], “Henry V” [1598-99], “Julius Caesar” [1599-1600], “As You Like It” [1599-1600], “Twelfth Night” [1599-1600], “Hamlet” [1600-01], “Merry Wives of Windsor” [1600-01], “Troilus and Cressida” [1601-02], “All’s Well That Ends Well” [1602-03], “Measure for Measure” [1604-05], “Othello” [1604-05], “King Lear” [1605-06], and “Macbeth” [1605-06]. As a general rule, when a creator creates most, the creator creates best.

F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940; novelist, essayist, and short story writer] experienced the flip side of that rule. His first novel, “This Side of Paradise” [1920], established him as a popular, promising novelist. He soon wrote another novel [The Beautiful and Damned (1922)] and then a couple of years later came his masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby” [1925]. Then he began to struggle. “Gatsby” was hard to follow. He began a book called “Tender Is the Night” but couldn’t finish it. Years passed. He drank a lot. He dithered. He partied with his expatriate friends in France. Still he didn’t finish the book. His wife had a nervous breakdown. Finally after eight years of labor he completed it [1934]. The novel has some terrific parts. It also has some parts that are cringe-inducing.

Linda Patterson Miller, a professor of English at Penn State, says, “I keep going back to that book, ‘Tender Is the Night,’ thinking it’s got to be better than it is.”

She cites one passage as particularly horrible. It’s when Dick Diver returns to his hotel with the young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. Diver is married. His wife, Nicole, is sleeping nearby. But he and Hoyt are infatuated with each other. They go into Hoyt’s room.

“When you smile — ” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth.”

But he was too late — she came up close against him with a forlorn whisper.

“Take me.”

“Take you where?”

Astonishment froze him rigid.

“Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it — I never expected to — I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t. I want you to.”

Prof. Miller says, “It’s absolutely childish and embarrassing to read.”

Fitzgerald wound up going to Hollywood to write screenplays — artistic death. Meanwhile he cranked out short stories for magazines. Did it for the money. Drank. Drank some more. Died young [44].

It’s a sad story. But the most creative minds know better than anyone else the difference between a “Gatsby” and a “Tender Is the Night,” between a “Titus Andronicus” and an “Othello.” Genius recognizes itself, and its counterfeit.

In his notebook, Fitzgerald jotted down his thoughts on seeing his brilliance dissolve into mediocrity:

I have asked a lot of my emotions — one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high . . . because there was one little drop of something — not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

Once the phial was full — here is the bottle it came in . . .

April evening spreads over everything, the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paintbox.

[Joel Achenbach reports on science and health.  He joined the Washington Post in 1990 as a feature writer in the Style section.  In 2005, he joined the Sunday magazine, writing features and a weekly humor column, and started the newsroom’s first blog, “Achenblog.”  He was part of the team that produced a series of stories about the opioid epidemic that was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service in 2020.

[In 1999, Simon & Schuster published his examination of the scientific and cultural fascination with extraterrestrial life, Captured by Aliens.  His 2004 book, The Grand Idea (Simon & Schuster), described George Washington’s plans to bind the young nation together through commerce along the Potomac River.  His 2011 book A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea (Simon & Schuster) told the story of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill off of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico and how the blown-out well was finally plugged.]

More Odds & Ends

 

[I enjoyed putting together “Theater Odds & Ends,” posted on Rick On Theater on 23 January, so much that I decided to do another compilation of short pieces from various sources.  This time, I’ve avoided theater articles and gone with a gallimaufry of “vintage” articles of curiosity value.] 

“THE RECYCLERS: FROM TRASH COMES TRIUMPH”

Reported by Bob Simon 

[The transcript below is from “The Recyclers” which aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes on 17 November 2013 (and re-broadcast on 18 May 2014). The producer was Michael Gavshon.]

Ever heard of a town built on a garbage dump? We hadn’t until earlier this year when we visited a community on the outskirts of Asuncion, the capital of the tiny, impoverished South American country of Paraguay. It’s called Cateura and there is trash everywhere – in its streets, its rivers, in people’s backyards – but we decided to take you to Cateura tonight, not because of the poverty or the filth, but because of the incredible imagination and ingenuity of the people who live there. Our story is also a reminder that, ultimately, music will triumph everywhere and anywhere.

Garbage is the only crop in Cateura and the harvest lasts 12 months a year. It is Cateura’s curse, its livelihood and the only reason people live here, providing hundreds of jobs to peasant farmers who were kicked off their plots by large land owners. They are the Trash Pickers. It is their profession. They sift through the stench 24 hours a day, scrounging for anything they can sell – 10 cents for a pound of plastic, five cents for a pound of cardboard [equivalent to 14¢ and 7¢ in 2025].

You’ll be amazed at what else people here are doing with this trash . . . just look and listen.

This is the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura [Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura]. The violins are fashioned from oven trays, the cellos from oil barrels. Even the strings are recycled.

The saxophones and trumpets are made from old drain pipes, the keys were once coins and bottle caps. This drum skin used to be an X-ray plate, the guitar from dessert tins.

The idea came from environmental technician Favio Chavez. When he came to Cateura and saw the kids working and playing on this miserable hill, he came up with the idea of starting a music school to lift the kids’ lives out of the trash.

From the start, Favio realized that even if he could raise the money, new instruments were out of the question. A factory-made violin would cost more than a house here and would almost certainly get stolen. But these fiddles aren’t worth a dime.

They are the handiwork of trash worker and carpenter Don Colá Gomez – three days a week he goes to the dump to find the raw materials.

Then, in his tiny workshop at the edge of the dump, he goes to work. Favio first asked him to make a violin. But this Stradivarius of South America had never seen one or heard one. [Italian craftsman of string instruments Antonio Stradivari (c. 1644-1737) made superb and highly prized instruments that now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to several million.]

BOB SIMON: But do you realize how unusual it is?

DON COLÁ GOMEZ: Yes, that’s the way it is. When you need something, you need to do whatever it takes to survive.

He was soon making three violins a week, then cellos and finally guitars, drums and double basses . . . out of trash.

Take a look and listen to what Colá has created. Fifteen-year-old Ada Rios has been playing for three years now. Today, she is the orchestra’s first violinist.

BOB SIMON: The first time you went and saw the orchestra you saw all these instruments with all these different colors. Were you surprised when you learned that they were made from trash?

ADA RIOS: Yes. I was very surprised because I had thought that trash was useless. But thanks to the orchestra I now realize that there are so many different things that can be done with the stuff.

Cateura didn’t exist before Paraguay’s capital Asuncion started dumping its trash here [1984]. The town grew up around the garbage and became one of the poorest places in South America.

Twenty-five hundred families live here now. There is hardly any electricity or plumbing. The drinking water is contaminated. Many of the children move from broken homes to crime and drugs.

But Ada and her younger sister Noelia, who plays the cello, say that music has become their salvation, the centerpiece of their lives. And who do they have to thank for that? Their grandmother, Mirian.

She is a garbage worker, collects bottles in the streets of Asuncion, carries them back to Cateura to sell. Ten cents a pound. Three years ago, Mirian saw a notice advertising free music lessons for children. That’s how it all began.

BOB SIMON: Why did you want them to learn music?

MIRIAN RIOS: Because I always wanted to be a musician-- or play an instrument. Actually I wanted to be a singer. Sometimes our dreams do come true. Maybe not in our lives, but through people that we love very much.

ADA RIOS: When I play the violin I feel like I am somewhere else. I imagine that I’m alone in my own world and forget about everything else around me and I feel transported to a beautiful place.

BOB SIMON: Can you describe that beautiful place?

ADA RIOS: Yes. I’m transported to a place that is completely different to where I am now. It has clear skies, open fields and I see lots of green. It’s clean with no trash. There is no contamination where we live. It’s just me alone playing my violin.

Every Saturday, this drab school yard is transformed into a multi-colored oasis of music. The kids flock here to learn and to play.

Cateura is a long way from Juilliard, but these music students are just as dedicated as those prodigies in New York . . .  and they don’t get rained on like the kids here. Paraguay is in the tropics and you are reminded of that all the time. But the band plays on.

The veterans –15-year-olds – are teaching the novices. Many are barely big enough to hold a violin. The music can’t compete with the downpour but there is refuge in a classroom.

Favio Chavez says that music teaches the kids respect and responsibility, not common commodities in the gang-ridden streets of Cateura.

FAVIO CHAVEZ: These values are completely different to those of gangs. If these kids love being part of the orchestra – they are absolutely going to hate being part of a gang.

For the first time, the children are getting out of Cateura, performing around the country and to Chavez, the Pied Piper of Paraguay, that’s the most important thing. They are being seen. They are being heard.

FAVIO CHAVEZ: These are children that were hidden, nobody even knew they existed. We have put them on a stage and now everybody looks at them and everybody knows they exist.

That’s mainly because of a documentary that’s being made about the orchestra called “Landfill Harmonic.” Last November, the producers put their trailer up on YouTube [Landfill Harmonic - the "Recycled Orchestra"]. It went viral . . .  the orchestra began getting bookings world-wide. It is such stuff as dreams are made on.

The film which follows their remarkable journey through concert halls in Europe and America will only be released next year but already instruments are being donated and that’s not all – the kids are getting help.

Paraguay’s most famous musician, Berta Rojas [classical guitarist; b. 1966 in Asuncion; with over a dozen albums, she has performed all over the world alone and with renowned international musicians and had received many awards and honors from many countries], flies down regularly from her home in Maryland to offer master classes.

Remember Noelia, Ada’s sister, the cellist? Berta is teaching her how to play the guitar.

BERTA ROJAS: This is – an – a story that is filling my heart and my soul with so much inspiration.

BOB SIMON: When you first heard them play, what went through your mind?

BERTA ROJAS: I couldn’t believe that you could make music with trash. I couldn’t believe it. And I thought, “Oh my God, this is the best thing that had happened in Paraguay in so many years.”

And when you talk to the parents, you hear what you hear from poor people everywhere. They want their kids to have a better life than they’ve had.

Jorge Rios is Ada and Noelia’s father . . .

BOB SIMON: If Ada becomes a professional musician, she’d probably be leaving town. How would you react to that?

JORGE RIOS: Yes, the truth is if you asked that question to every parent here they would say they would leave this place if they could. I, of course, would like her to have a better life than the one I’ve had. And if she leaves I hope she takes me with her!

What’s hard to believe is that most of the parents and the people of Cateura had never heard the children play. That was about to change. A concert was finally scheduled. There were banners in the streets, the local radio station was ready to broadcast. The church was transformed into a concert hall.

The children wore their finest. This was, after all, opening night. It could have been New York.

All the students were on stage for the finale. Some of the musicians were performing after just one rehearsal.

The parents were proud, of course. But just listen to the girls’ grandma Mirian.

MIRIAN RIOS: I would say it’s a blessing from God. People used to humiliate us and call us “trash pickers.” Today they are more civilized, they call us the “recyclers.” So I feel that this is a reward from God. That our children who come from this place . . . can play beautiful music in this way.

And here’s a final note from the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura. Go on, send us your garbage, we’ll send it back to you . . . as music.

[Since this segment was aired, the orchestra has toured South Africa with the heavy metal band Metallica.  They’ve since performed internationally with Stevie Wonder and the American heavy-metal bands Metallica and Megadeth.

[They were hoping to raise enough money to build a music school for their community on the edge of the dump.  In 2015, construction of the building was begun and the school opened in 2016, just before Landfill Harmonic was released.

[The documentary Landfill Harmonic (2013) was produced by Juliana Penaranda-Loftus and directed by Graham Townsley; executive producers were Alejandra Amarilla and Rodolfo Madero. 

[Bob Simon (1941-2015) covered most major overseas conflicts and news stories from the late ’60s to his death in a car accident.  He contributed to 60 Minutes since 1996.]

*  *  *  *

“AN EXPLANATION FOR HICCUPS? DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH”

by Meeri Kim 

[This article was originally published in the “Health & Science” section of the Washington Post on 3 June 2014.]

It happens in the blink of an eye: Your breathing muscles contract, your vocal cords clamp shut, and out comes that unmistakable sound.

“Hic.”

We all get hiccups from time to time. So do cats, rats and human fetuses. Perhaps you ate too quickly, got too excited or drank something carbonated. Or you are coming out of anesthesia after an operation. But often there’s no clear trigger. Doctors don’t know what purpose they serve, nor do they know how to make them go away.

In other words, the humble hiccup remains largely a mystery. And just as theories abound on causes and cures, so do home remedies.

“People have very interesting interventions: Scare me, hurt me, tickle me, drink for 90 seconds, drink upside down for 90 seconds,” said internist Tyler Cymet. “But these aren’t based in science.”

Cymet, head of medical education at the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, performed a five-year study involving 54 hospital patients with hiccups. Beginning in 1995, he tried a wide range of treatments, including breath holding and strong medications, but he ended up with a null result: None of the techniques proved effective in ridding patients of their hiccup spells.

[Osteopathic medicine in the United States is a form of scientific medicine which today scientifically and legally overlaps with non-osteopathic (allopathic) medical science and practice. Before the 20th century, osteopathic medicine emphasized the patient’s health and treatment by manipulation of the musculoskeletal system and on the diagnostic significance of patient lifestyle and environment.  Some osteopathic physicians (OD’s) still include such treatments alongside allopathic medical treatment for a few of their patients, but their training and practices today are indistinguishable from those of allopathic physicians (MD’s).]

“I think the jury is in that nothing works: It starts and stops on its own, and that’s about it,” he said.

But why do we do it in the first place? Some researchers propose it is a fetal digestive reflex that guards against breathing in amniotic fluid while in the womb. Or an early way to train respiratory muscles for breathing after birth.

Another theory posits that hiccups date all the way back to our amphibian ancestors. The classic pattern of breathing in followed by an abrupt closing of the glottis is seen particularly in tadpoles when they use their gills rather than their lungs to breathe. The tadpole’s brainstem tells a flap to close the glottis upon inspiration to prevent water from entering the lungs. This allows the water to pass through the gills. The hiccup reflex may have persisted up the tree of life even though it no longer serves any purpose.

What is agreed upon and well known, however, is the mechanism of a hiccup. Referred to in medicine as singultus, it is defined by a sudden contraction of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles — located within the spacing between the ribs — followed by snapping shut of the glottis, the space between the vocal folds within the larynx. The quick spasm of inhalation colliding with the closed larynx causes the characteristic sound and bodily jerk.

The peanut butter fix

Most experts also agree that hiccups involve a neuronal circuit starting with the phrenic and vagus nerves. The vagus nerve extends from the brainstem to the abdomen, while the phrenic nerves send signals from the brain to the diaphragm.

While hiccups are little more than a temporary annoyance for most of us, they can become all-consuming. Coleen O’Lear, a home page editor at The Washington Post, hiccups nearly every day — sometimes just occasionally, other times in fits.

“When I get them rapid-fire, they are pretty high-pitched and sound ridiculous,” O’Lear said. “It is physically uncomfortable.”

The 29-year-old has had hiccup spells for as long as she can remember; doctors say they may be linked to acid reflux disease, which she has had since she was a baby. She has tried every home remedy she has heard of: spoonfuls of sugar, holding her breath, deep breaths, drinking upside down, sucking on lemons. Some may work temporarily; most fail completely.

But one thing does work: eating a spoonful of creamy peanut butter very slowly. O’Lear thinks it has something to do with coating her esophagus, but Cymet believes it has more of a mental calming effect.

“The peanut butter is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy, where you’re controlling your breathing and thinking about what you’re doing instead of getting anxious,” he said.

Although her newsroom colleagues are entirely accustomed to them, O’Lear still finds the hiccups frustrating.

“People don’t know how to react to it,” she said. “Most of the time, they bless me.”

The chronic hiccuper who stepped into psychologist Duane Hurst’s office two years ago got so fed up with her five-year-run of daily hiccup spells that she initially requested an invasive procedure to crush the phrenic nerve, effectively paralyzing her diaphragm. Hurst, of the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., thought such a procedure was far too extreme and instead offered to try a technique called heart rate variability biofeedback.

Flipping back and forth

Our nervous system controls involuntary bodily functions, such as heartbeat and blood vessel contraction, via two complementary branches. One branch stimulates responses related to our fight-or-flight instinct — increased heart rate, dilated pupils, sweat secretion — while the other initiates the rest-and-restore mode.

Some people are oversensitive to stress stimuli and flip too easily back and forth between the two — perhaps a beneficial trait when man was a target of predators, but not as helpful in today’s world, where it can lead to unwanted anxiety. A quick fight-or-flight response that once saved man from cave bears and saber-toothed cats can kick in at inopportune moments, such as at a meeting with the boss or while merging on the highway.

By measuring the interval between heartbeats, doctors can track the interplay between the two branches and the extent to which they are battling each other: One ups the heart rate, while the other slows it down.

For the woman who had considered having her phrenic nerve crushed, Hurst used an electrocardiogram to detect variability in her heart rate and instructed her to take carefully measured breaths. The idea was to help her find a respiration rate that would activate her rest-and-restore mode, rebalance the nervous system and ease stress.

“Not many people are aware that they can use their breathing in a systematic way,” Hurst said. “Each one of us individuals has a breathing sweet spot.”

Once she started paced respiration, she began to calm down — and then, suddenly, no more hiccups. One biofeedback session was all she needed.

“Her hiccups literally stopped when she was in the chair,” Hurst said. “She is going on two years of being symptom-free.”

This was the first hiccups case for Hurst, who typically uses heart rate variability biofeedback to treat migraines, tension headaches, fibromyalgia [a condition characterized by chronic pain, stiffness, and tenderness of the muscles, tendons, and joints], anxiety disorders and irritable bowel syndrome. Similarly, Cymet has used breathing exercises, cognitive behavioral therapy and even yoga or Pilates for the hundreds of hiccupers he has seen over the years. Overall, he estimates a 20 to 25 percent success rate.

But he says most people don’t need to worry unless the hiccups interfere with respiration or eating.

“Everybody gets them, but we don’t know why — we don’t know if [in terms of evolution] it’s adaptive or maladaptive,” Cymet said. “We’re still in the dark ages of understanding hiccups.”

[In evolution, an adaptation is a trait that is (or has become) more helpful than harmful, in contrast with a maladaptation, which is more harmful than helpful.]

[This article caught my eye because, when I was a schoolboy—I remember it mostly in middle school—I had a . . . well, a hiccup problem.  I didn’t get them as frequently as Coleen O’Lear, but when I got the hiccups in class, it was disturbing to the teacher and my classmates, and embarrassing to me.  Once they started, they wouldn’t stop, and I’d sit there hiccupping while doing my work. 

[The teacher would sneak up on me from behind and smack my desk with a ruler to try to scare the hiccups out of me.  It never worked.  I tried holding my breath and at home, Mom would get me to drink water slowly or upside down, but none of that worked.

[To make matters worse, if I got the hiccups once, I’d invariably get them again, sometimes twice more sometime during the day.  It was a given.

[One day, I had a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon and while I was in the doctor’s office, I started hiccupping.  When the usual folk remedies failed, as usual, the doc said he had something that would help.  He gave me a large, white pill that I was to chew up and swallow—it was slightly chalky but didn’t taste too bad—and I did as he instructed.  Seconds later, the hiccups stopped and stayed “off” the rest of the appointment—and never returned that day.

[Whenever I was in his office and the hiccups started, he gave me one of the pills, and they’d stop.  I never asked him what the pills were, and to this day, I don’t know.  I suspect now that it was a placebo and that the relief came from the placebo effect because he was the doctor and he told me the pill would help—so I believed him and it worked.

[Years later, I discovered that the pills looked and tasted almost exactly like antacid tablets.  I imagine that’s what they were—and maybe there was some actual medical application to the relief from the hiccups from a dose of antacid.

[For whatever reason, the hiccup attacks stopped a few years later.  I didn’t get them in high school or college, and certainly not in the army.  I still get hiccups occasionally, like anybody else, but not often, and they go away on their own.  And they don’t come back again a few hours later like they did when I was a ’tween.

[But what I’d like to hear is why some people spell it hiccough?  Never mind why we do it—someone explain that to me!

[Meeri Kim is a freelance science journalist based in Philadelphia.  She has a PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania and has contributed to the Washington Post since 2013.] 

*  *  *  *

“MATTER: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON WRITING”

by Carl Zimmer 

[This article was originally published in the “Science Times” section of the New York Times on 24 June 2014.]

A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.

That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used f.M.R.I. [functional magnetic resonance imaging] scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down—or, in this case, lay down—to turn out a piece of fiction.

The researchers, led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany, observed a broad network of regions in the brain working together as people produced their stories. But there were notable differences between the two groups of subjects. The inner workings of the professionally trained writers in the bunch, the scientists argue, showed some similarities to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports.

The research is drawing strong reactions. Some experts praise it as an important advance in understanding writing and creativity, while others criticize the research as too crude to reveal anything meaningful about the mysteries of literature or inspiration.

Dr. Lotze has long been intrigued by artistic expression. In previous studies, he has observed the brains of piano players and opera singers, using f.M.R.I. scanners to pinpoint regions that become unusually active in the brain.

Needless to say, that can be challenging when a subject is singing an aria. Scanners are a lot like 19th-century cameras: They can take very sharp pictures, if their subject remains still. To get accurate data, Dr. Lotze has developed software that can take into account fluctuations caused by breathing or head movements. For creative writing, he faced a similar challenge. In previous studies, scientists had observed people doing only small tasks like thinking up a plot in their heads.

Dr. Lotze wanted to scan people while they were actually writing. But he couldn’t give his subjects a keyboard to write with, because the magnetic field generated by the scanner would have hurled it across the room.

So Dr. Lotze ended up making a custom-built writing desk, clipping a piece of paper to a wedge-shaped block as his subjects reclined. They could rest their writing arm on the desk and scribble on the page. A system of mirrors let them see what they were writing while their head remained cocooned inside the scanner.

To begin, Dr. Lotze asked 28 volunteers to simply copy some text, giving him a baseline reading of their brain activity during writing.

Next, he showed his volunteers a few lines from a short story and asked them to continue it in their own words. The volunteers could brainstorm for a minute, and then write creatively for a little over two minutes.

Some regions of the brain became active only during the creative process, but not while copying, the researchers found. During the brainstorming sessions, some vision-processing regions of volunteers became active. It’s possible that they were, in effect, seeing the scenes they wanted to write.

Other regions became active when the volunteers started jotting down their stories. Dr. Lotze suspects that one of them, the hippocampus, was retrieving factual information that the volunteers could use.

One region near the front of the brain, known to be crucial for holding several pieces of information in mind at once, became active as well. Juggling several characters and plot lines may put special demands on it.

But Dr. Lotze also recognized a big limit of the study: His subjects had no previous experience in creative writing. Would the brains of full-time writers respond differently?

To find out, he and his colleagues went to another German university, the University of Hildesheim, which runs a highly competitive creative writing program. The scientists recruited 20 writers there (their average age was 25). Dr. Lotze and his colleagues had them take the same tests and then compared their performance with the novices’.

As the scientists report in a new study in the journal NeuroImage, the brains of expert writers appeared to work differently, even before they set pen to paper. During brainstorming, the novice writers activated their visual centers. By contrast, the brains of expert writers showed more activity in regions involved in speech.

“I think both groups are using different strategies,” Dr. Lotze said. It’s possible that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice.

When the two groups started to write, another set of differences emerged. Deep inside the brains of expert writers, a region called the caudate nucleus became active. In the novices, the caudate nucleus was quiet.

The caudate nucleus is a familiar part of the brain for scientists like Dr. Lotze who study expertise. It plays an essential role in the skill that comes with practice, including activities like board games.

When we first start learning a skill—be it playing a piano or playing basketball—we use a lot of conscious effort. With practice, those actions become more automatic. The caudate nucleus and nearby regions start to coordinate the brain’s activity as this shift happens.

“I was really happy to see this,” said Ronald T. Kellogg, a psychologist who studies writing at Saint Louis University. “You don’t want to see this as an analog to what James Joyce was doing in Dublin. But to see that they were able to get clean results with this, I think that’s a major step right there.”

But Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, was skeptical that the experiments could provide a clear picture of creativity. “It’s a messy comparison,” he said.

Dr. Pinker pointed out that the activity that Dr. Lotze saw during creative writing could be common to writing in general—or perhaps to any kind of thinking that requires more focus than copying. A better comparison would have been between writing a fictional story and writing an essay about some factual information.

Even the best-designed scanning experiments might miss signs of creativity, Dr. Pinker warned. The very nature of creativity can make it different from one person to the next, and so it can be hard to see what different writers have in common. Dr. Pinker speculated that Marcel Proust might have activated the taste-perceiving regions of his brain when he recalled the flavor of a cookie. But another writer might rely more on sounds to evoke a time and place.

“Creativity is a perversely difficult thing to study,” he said.

[One paragraph here really struck me.  Dr. Martin Lotze remarked after one examination of the brain activity, specifically in the caudate nucleus, of the two groups of writers:

When we first start learning a skill—be it playing a piano or playing basketball—we use a lot of conscious effort. With practice, those actions become more automatic. The caudate nucleus and nearby regions start to coordinate the brain’s activity as this shift happens.

[When I was working on my acting MFA, I had the good fortune to have as my acting teacher an actress, Carol Rosenfeld, with whom I’d already been studying for a couple of years before I followed her to Rutgers for the MFA program.  She knew me and my work very well by this time. 

[Carol, of course, came to see all of her students’ performances in the many university productions---and we grad students were is great demand, so we acted a lot over those two years.  (I had an additional attribute that made me a utility player at Rutgers: I was older than most of my classmates, so when an “old” man was needed, I was at the top of every director’s mind.)

[Carol was always careful not to instruct us or coach us or direct us while we were in production, but she would give us a critique after the show closed if we wished.  After one role, I went to her and explained a new feeling I had while working on that part—something I thought was a small break-through.  Something that used to cause me great angst wasn’t bothering me anymore.

[What Carol explained to me was this: I’d reached a point in my artistic development where I no longer needed to make conscious decisions regarding my “technique”—the external decisions and adjustments I made to particularize a role.  My personal working method now included technique as an integral aspect.  I’d become more relaxed and comfortable with my work, making choices, whether physical or emotional, organically and naturally.

[What used to be affectation was now habitual behavior.  There’s no doubt that this new-found ease had come directly from a conscientious study of acting technique and several years of conscious practice in performance; but it was now part of me and operated automatically as I prepared a role.

[I think that, in acting terms, is what Lotze was talking about with the writers he was examining.  When I read that section of Zimmer’s article, I said, “Hey, that’s me.  That’s what happened to me in The Wood Demon and what Carol told me was the result of my work.”  Good ol’ caudate nucleus!

[Carl Zimmer (born 1966) is a popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity.  The author of many books, he contributes science essays to publications such as the New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic.  He’s a fellow at Yale University’s Morse College and adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University.  Zimmer also gives frequent lectures and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio’s Radiolab, Fresh Air, and This American Life.]