Book Reviews

Creativity: An Invitation to Play

Genius, for Thomas Alva Edison, was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Adam Moss, former editor of New York Magazine, comes to much the same conclusion in The Work of Art.

Moss interviewed more than 40 artists, including composer Stephen Sondheim, novelist Michael Cunningham (The Hours), playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America), filmmaker Sofia Coppola (“Lost in Translation”), dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp, “This American Life” host Ira Glass, as well as painters, sculptors, visual artists, chefs, cartoonists, and other highly creative people. Key for all of them is the intense experience of inspiration—an idea, an image, a musical phrase—but then begins the work.

Nobel laureate poet Louise Glück well articulates the agony and the ecstasy of the creative process. The ecstasy: “This engagement is as absorbing as nothing else I have ever in my life known,” she says. “The whole of the self is utterly engaged in something that seems more important than anything in the world.” She describes a natural high where the self is participating in something greater than the self and beyond the self, a sense that one is a co-creator with a mysterious partner who knows you better than you know yourself.

And the agony: Those moments of dormancy, of No-Flow, of being cut off from that creative partnership are for her “a torment,” usually turning her “despondent.” During such times, “I feel doomed,” she says. “But I don’t react to those feelings by trying to eliminate them through diligence or intelligence, because what’s needed is not diligence or intelligence. What’s needed is an intervention of something outside yourself, better than yourself, but with access to yourself.” Outside yourself? asks Moss. Sounds otherworldly. Yes, she admits, for her it is.

Like Glück, many of those interviewed understand the process to be more about listening and discovering than actual creating. “I don’t think I’m gifted,” said the painter Francis Bacon. “I just think I’m receptive.”

So, what to do during those down times, when the muse, or the spirit, or the subconscious isn’t communicating? “I just wait,” says Glück. “For me, the really hard thing about writing is how much patience you need to have.” She adds, “I mean you can will things, but whenever I’ve tried to do that, the poem just goes to hell. Becomes a contrivance. An arrangement made with a mind instead of a discovery.”

Creative writing teachers urge their students to “just get words down on paper.” But too often, without that creative connection, you’re left with only a bunch of inert words on the page. Glück advises, “If you want a discovery that will surprise you, too, you just have to wait.”

Surprise and discovery have always been part of the creative process. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood likened it to being a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat. Art happening is “the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn’t put there.”

The other message from Moss’ survey of artists is that, while we can’t control the 1 percent inspiration, we can decide to engage in the 99 percent of genius that’s perspiration. We can do the work of art.

For many artists, creativity is an act of play. Composer Brian Eno sees play as essential to learning and living fully, an activity that most of us lose as we grow older. He says children learn through play; adults play through art.

Anyone can make art, Moss argues—which is not the same as becoming a great artist, and anyway, that may be the wrong way to think about creativity and art. The cartoonist Lynda Barry notes how differently we think about art than about, say, riding a bicycle. “When we hop on a bicycle, no part of us thinks that we’ll be able to win the Tour de France, but with art, we think if we’re not really good at it, we can’t, or shouldn’t, do it.” Her point is we can still enjoy the bike ride, even if we’re not Lance Armstrong or Eddy Merckx. It’s the same with the process of creation. It’s the playing, the “engagement,” that’s important.

Moss is finally left with the mystery of the creative process. Maybe someday science will solve it, but until that time, the best we can manage is to explore the mystery ourselves by participating in it when lightning strikes, when the spirit moves us, when the opportunity arises, and let ourselves become engaged in something greater than ourselves.

Do-It-Yourself Obituary

Bud Stanley writes obituaries for a living. Forty-four, divorced and adrift, he’s living his life on automatic, coasting along without aim or purpose. The book opens with a work colleague setting Bud up on a blind date. The woman arrives. She’s attractive, smart, personable—and accompanied by her ex-boyfriend with whom she’s just reconciled. The date is not a great success.

Returning home, Bud begins drinking, and “in the muddled, whiskey-soaked place where terrible ideas pose as good ones,” he starts writing his own obituary: Bud Stanley, the first man to perform open-heart surgery on himself, died today in a hot-air balloon accident…Stanley was married anywhere from four to nine times. His ex-wives, all friends, praised his unique lovemaking technique, one they said could last upward to twenty-eight seconds. The obituary adds that he was a member of the Jamaican Bobsled Team, ninth in line to the British throne, and the inventor of toothpaste…You get the idea. This drunken exercise would have been innocent, good fun, had Bud not accidentally uploaded his obituary into the wire service system.

The next morning, he is promptly placed on leave, an administrative step prior to being fired. Howard, his boss, mentor and friend, tells him, “I don’t think anything matters to you anymore, Bud. And that kind of breaks my heart…You are an obituary writer who does not understand the first thing about life.” Reading this modern urban tale, I kept hearing the Beatles circa 1965: He's a real nowhere man/ Sitting in his nowhere land/ Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

In a scene mirroring the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), Bud learns he can’t be fired because the system now has him listed as deceased.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little confused. I’m not dead.”…

“For all intents and purposes, you are dead to the company. Which is why you have rights.”

“But if I were alive?”

“You’d be fired and we would end your COBRA due to negligence on your part.”

“So I’m better off dead?”

“Certainly in terms of health and dental, yes.”

I See You’ve Called in Dead begins as a funny, breezy beach read, but as Bud starts taking stock of his “nowhere life,” the story expands emotionally, prompting readers to examine how we live our own lives—or don’t. Through a series of incidents, he begins to understand that the measure of a life is not in the quantity of its years but in the quality of its moments. Or as the Stoic philosopher Seneca expressed it: Life, if lived well, is long enough. By the end, Bud is writing a very different obituary for himself.

Warning: Amid the many laughs, there will be tears.

Poetics of the profound

At the beginning of the 19^th century and well into the Industrial Revolution, William Wordsworth wrote: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/ Little we see in Nature that is ours;/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Wordsworth’s sonnet was both a lament and a warning: With the benefits of science has come “disenchantment.” We have outgrown the old mythologies with their gods and spirits. But we have lost a sense of the sacred and our connection to it. This is the theme of Cosmic Connections by esteemed Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor.

For Taylor, poetry is much more than pretty words. It can point to a profoundly different way of perceiving the universe and our place in it (“What does poetry do? It begins to transform our experience.”)

Ancient cultures viewed the cosmos as a meaningful and interconnected whole. However, with Newton and the Scientific Revolution, there came a perceptual shift. The universe was now understood as a machine governed by natural laws. This mechanistic view understood the cosmos as a vast, impersonal system of forces, waves and particles, and eliminated the kind of spiritual connection that once gave meaning and purpose to human lives. “God is dead,” claimed the German philosopher Nietzsche.

Re-inventing Huckleberry Finn. Again.

This graphic novel reminded me of the pleasure I once enjoyed reading Classics Illustrated comics as a child: the bright colors, the vivid drawings, the story flowing from one panel to the next in a cavalcade of images, they all fed my young imagination. It’s how I first “read” The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, and other classics.

The book industry officially recognized graphic novels as a unique genre in 2001, and ever since then they have become increasingly popular, particularly with younger readers. Over the years, they have continued to gain visibility and legitimacy as an art form, especially after 1992, when Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the holocaust, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Though primarily a visual art form, the graphic novel can convey narrative, nuance, and insight. This is certainly the case with Big Jim and the White Boy, a re-imagining of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It joins other recent retellings, or extensions, of Mark Twain’s classic, like Robert Coover’s Huck Out West (2017), where Huck as a young man witnesses the “winning” of the West—the gold rushes, the homesteaders, the Indian wars, the massacres—that was a formative chapter in this nation’s history; or like last year’s National Book Award-winning James (2024) by Percival Everett, retelling Twain’s tale from the point of view of the enslaved character Jim.

A novel for our time.

People read novels for different reasons. Probably most read for a good story. We read some novels for the beauty of their language (Think Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead) or to learn something new, or experience vicariously what we would never experience in our own lives. We also read novels to expand our world. It’s rare to find one novel that can do all this, but Richard Powers’ amazing Playground does just that, and more.

Author of the 2018 Pulitzer-prize winning The Overstory, Powers tells interlocking stories of four people over a half century. Todd Keane is on the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence (“I was helping to build the next big way of being.”) He shares a close and competitive relationship with best friend Rafi Young, for whom life is decanted through literature. Both are in love with Ina Aroita, who finds her meaning through art. Meanwhile, ninety-something Evie Beaulieu, whose father developed the first aqualung, has found life most fulfilling in the ocean. Together, these characters’ lives embody the novel’s main themes.

Powers’ story is as capacious as the Pacific which Evie spends her life exploring. Through his exquisite prose, we share her exhilaration in the watery underworld, amid its abundant life. He makes an argument that our planet should be called Ocean rather than Earth. (“Ninety percent of the biosphere is underwater!”) We terrestrials are in the minority.

Bigfoot and his followers

In preparation for this month’s sQuatch Fest at the Cowlitz County Expo Center, you might bone up on the legend and lore of the big, hairy guy with this recent (2024) book by John O’Connor, which offers “the secret history” of Bigfoot—as against, what, the standard, well-known history? (One suspects the influence of a marketing department.)

O’Connor began by reading Robert Michael Pyle’s 1995 Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, judging it “far and away the most literate of the Bigfoot literature.” “It was the first book I’d read during my research, which was probably a mistake, as it seemed to have said it all.” (We’ll return to this point.) O’Connor starts his own exploration by visiting the sage of Grays River, finding the good gray poet-naturalist to be a delightful, entertaining raconteur.

From Grays River, O’Connor begins a wide-ranging trek that takes him to Maine, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, northern California, as well as familiar parts of the Pacific Northwest.

Turns out the “kooks” were right

We here at the Pentagon would like to clarify our denials of the past seventy years regarding Unidentified Flying Objects. We staunchly maintain that UFOs do not exist, but, ahem, well, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) do. We apologize for any confusion.

For more than a half century, UFOs have been the Pentagon’s best kept non-secret. They have debunked and dismissed hundreds of credible sightings and discredited witnesses as kooks or frauds or crazy. What’s surprising is that it was done so brazenly. Over two weekends in 1952, multiple UAP were seen in Washington DC, including over the White House. They were viewed by hundreds of eyewitnesses and appeared on the front pages of major newspapers. Air Force pilots pursued and even fired at them. A thorough investigation found that it was “flocks of birds.”

In March 1966, Michigan neighborhoods saw multiple strange craft over several days that “dove, hovered, climbed, and disappeared—only to reappear.” Government investigators announced it was “swamp gas.”

Horrors of both supernatural and natural kinds.

In 1950, 12-year-old Robert Stephens, Jr., fights off a teenage boy who is making aggressive sexual advances on Robert’s sister. Robert is black, the older boy is white and the son of a prominent citizen in the Jim Crow south. You know immediately it’s not going to go well for Robert. He’s sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory notorious for its brutality and from where some boys never return. This is where the horror begins.

Robbie enters the cruel system, quickly learning rules for survival from his friends Blue and Redbone—how to not-see what they witness, how to avoid the sadistic Warden Haddock—and adopts the dread the boys feel at being sent to the “Fun House.”