The New York Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It’s all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but the reality is that true mental illness is rarely conducive to acts of creation. Virginia Woolf, for instance, couldn’t write when she was experiencing one of her “episodes”: the onset of depression was “like a death,” she wrote. Nevertheless, as Woolf’s journals make clear, her writing was still profoundly influenced by her mental illness. Here is I how describe Woolf in my book:

Woolf’s writing style was deeply rooted in her own experience of the brain. She was mentally ill. All her life, she suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns, those horrible moments when her depression became suffocating. As a result, Woolf lived in fear of her own mind, exquisitely sensitive to its fevered “vibrations.” Introspection was her only medicine. “My own psychology interests me,” she confessed to her journal. “I intend to keep full notes of my ups and downs for my private information. And thus objectified, the pain and shame become at once much less. (…)

Woolf never recovered. Her constant state of reflection, her wariness for hints of the return of her devastating depression, left an indelible scar on her writing. “Nerves” is one of her favorite words. Its medical varieties–neurosis, neurasthenia, nervous breakdown, neuroasthenic–continually enter her prose, their sharp, scientific pang contradicting the suppleness of her character’s internal soliloquies. In Woolf’s diary, notes on form were always interwoven with comments on headaches.

In other words, Woolf’s mental illness forced her to think about her mind, which fueled her modernist writing style. But the illness itself was an obstacle: she wrote in spite of it, not because of it.

That said, there are some interesting connections between schizotypal individuals - schizotypy is a mental condition that resembles schizophrenia, albeit with far less severe symptoms - and creativity, at least as measured in the psychology lab.

{ Jonah Lehrer/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Jackson Eaton }

This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness.

I have just written the word ‘infinite.’ I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end — which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order).

On some shelf there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god. Many wandered in search of Him. For a century they have exhausted in vain the most varied areas. How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A’s position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity … In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe.

{ Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, 1941 | Continue reading }

photos { Libraries photographed by Candida Höfer }

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa collects intertwining stories, all of them set in whole or in part in Spain, with a large and colorful cast of Gypsies, thieves, inquisitors, a cabbalist, a geometer, the cabbalist’s beautiful sister, two Moorish princesses (Emina and Zibelda), and others that the brave, perhaps foolhardy, Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines, or reads about in the Sierra Morena mountains of 18th century Spain, while en route to Madrid. Recounted to the narrator over the course of sixty-six days, the novel’s stories quickly overshadow van Worden’s frame story, and the bulk of the novel’s stories revolve around the gypsy chief Avadoro, whose story becomes a frame story itself; eventually the narrative focus moves again towards van Worden’s frame story and a conspiracy involving an underground — or perhaps entirely hallucinated — Muslim society, revealing the connections and correspondences between the hundred or so stories told over the novel’s sixty-six days.

The stories cover a wide range of genres and subjects, including the gothic, the picaresque, the erotic, the historical, the moral, and the philosophic; and as a whole the novel reflects Potocki’s far-reaching interests, but especially his deep fascination with secret societies, the supernatural, and so-called Oriental cultures. The stories-within-stories of the novel sometimes reach several levels of depth, and characters and themes — a few prominent themes being honor, disguise, metamorphosis, and conspiracy — recur and change shape throughout. Because of this rich interlocking structure, the novel has drawn favorable comparisons to such celebrated works as the Decameron and the Arabian Nights.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Back in the 1960s, the Polish director Wojciech Has’s “The Saragossa Manuscript” screened at the San Francisco Film Festival. Garcia saw it, fell in love, and bought a print which he gave to the Pacific Film Archive on the condition that they would screen it for him whenever he asked. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola also fell under the film’s spell, and eventually they all raised money to have the print restored. The resulting three-hour “Saragossa Manuscript” will screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (through April 10), and even a cynic will quickly see how it can seduce the unwary.

{ NY Sun | Continue reading | Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100}

photo { codooaustin }

University of Florida professor Michael Moulton thinks copyright law protects the lectures he gives to his students, and he’s headed to court to prove it.

Moulton and his e-textbook publisher are suing Thomas Bean, who runs a company that repackages and sells student notes, arguing that the business is illegal since notes taken during college lectures violate the professor’s copyright. (…)

But if a professor’s lectures are copyrighted, aren’t students already infringing just by taking the notes in the first place?

Yes, Sullivan answers, student notes do infringe, but they are protected infringement.

“That’s absolutely fair use,” Sullivan said.

What if a student took notes, but didn’t copy anything verbatim from a professor’s lecture, and then decided to publish the notes online or sell them?
“While that may not be slavish copy, the notes would be a derivative work and a copyright holder has the exclusive right to create derivative notes,” Sullivan said.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

Every now and then, someone who is brilliant says something stupid — often the result of spending too much time riding a jet stream of high praise. Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple Inc., did such a thing last month when he all but declared the death of reading.

Asked about Kindle, the electronic book reader from Amazon.com, Jobs was dismissive. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” he told John Markoff of The Times, “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

This is nonsense on several levels. But before we get to reading, let’s stipulate that Jobs is deserving of his 2007 ranking by Fortune Magazine as the most powerful person in business. Anyone who can cause revolutions in five industries, as Fortune noted, is a titan — capable of touching a billion lives.

His life story is inspiring. An adopted child, he drops out of Reed College in Portland, Ore., but remembers the calligraphy classes when he designs the typography for the Macintosh. Gets rich. Gets fired. Gets cancer. Survives all three. Takes acid, wanders around India, dates exotic older women. Marries. Has kids. Loves the Beatles, and cites their creative tension as a business model. Gives great commencement speech at Stanford, concluding: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude.

Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

image { Apple II “Simplicity” Brochure, 1977 | Mac Mothership }

related { Hello }

{ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 248 }

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After Ulysses, James Joyce spent nearly the remainder of his life working on his final masterpiece, a book he kept veiled in secrecy, referring to it only as “Work In Progress.” Purely in terms of literary technique, Finnegans Wake (completed in 1939) is probably the most astonishing – and controversial – book ever written. (…)

Finnegans Wake does not describe a dream; the text is a dream. Or at least, it comes as close as Joyce could bring it to imitating a dream. (…)

In order to establish a sense of timelessness and to reflect this cyclical nature, even the overall structure of the book is circular. Ideally Joyce felt that Finnegans Wake should have been bound in a loop, so you could start reading anywhere, never really “finishing” the book; passing around and around again, absorbing more each time, a spiral winding its way into your mythic subconscious. Indeed, the book begins in the middle of a broken sentence, it’s first half dangling at the end of the book, anxious for the cycle to begin again.

{ The Modern Word | Continue reading }

{ first page | Finnegans Wake begins in the middle of a sentence… }

{ last page | …and ends in the middle of the same sentence, to loop back to the begining. }

A Buddhist Koan says: “The master holds the disciple’s head underwater for a long, long time; gradually the bubbles become fewer; at the last moment, the master pulls the disciple out and revives him: when you have craved truth as you crave air, then you will know what truth is.”

{ Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments }

photo { Dennis Stenild | S Magazine, 1 }

Q: Were you present when your picture was taken?

Q: Was it you or your younger brother who was killed in the war?

Q: Can you describe the individual?
A: He was about medium height and had a beard.
Q: Was this a male, or a female?

Q: You say the stairs went down to the basement?
A: Yes.
Q: And these stairs, did they go up also?

Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke that morning?
A: He said, “Where am I, Cathy?”
Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Susan.

{ Disorder in the Court | Fractured Moments in Courtroom History }

photo { Square America }

{ The Gentleman’s Magazine, digitized by Google }

I am currently reading a book entitled The Lost Books of the Bible. Being interested in Bible history, I thought it might be an interesting diversion, but I was not prepared for what I found. It claims that when Jesus was young, he killed a couple of boys and a schoolmaster because they displeased him. Jesus comes off as an arrogant bad seed in these supposedly ancient texts.

My question is: were these books truly a part of the original Bible, and if they were suppressed for obvious reasons, does the Catholic Church, or any church for that matter, acknowledge their existence? How do they explain Jesus’s bad temper? Is this why there is very little about Jesus’s youth in the current Bible? — Dan Olmos, West Hollywood, California

No question, the kid portrayed in the “lost books” isn’t exactly the Prince of Peace. After recounting three murders in two pages, one passage concludes, “Then said Joseph to St. Mary, henceforth we will not allow him to go out of the house; for everyone who displeases him is killed.”

The “lost books” are part of the apocrypha, quasibiblical works not included in the official Bible. There are several dozen of these, dating from both Old and New Testament eras and exhibiting considerable variety in length, completeness, and credibility. A few of these were considered inspired in some corners of the early church but were ultimately excluded from the formal canon for one reason or another. (…)

In 1820 a number of the apocryphal books were compiled into a sort of alternative Bible called the Apocryphal New Testament. This was republished in 1926 as The Lost Books of the Bible and reprinted in 1979; the last version is what you saw. The original works were a serious attempt to advance bible study, but the subsequent publications, arguably in 1820 and certainly from 1926 onward, were an attempt to sell books by creating scandal.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

illustration { Christophe Riffaud, Pussy Magnets }

previously { Who’s the Fucking Bomb? | The Look of Ethics }

{ House Industries | Agent Provocateur Knickers with Book }