“The pleasure that comes, for me, is in writing a book and in writing the book well, and in spending a lot of time in getting it right and in understanding the real world, and it is the power game, the seduction game, whatever. And then creating a book that goes out in the real world. So half the game of life is doing something that you love and in engaging in it deeply and it’s study and your field and whatever you produce. But that’s only half of it, because if you don’t understand the social part, then the book that I write — if I don’t know how to deal with people, and I don’t understand human nature, and I can’t market my book and my editor hates me, and my agent doesn’t know how to work with me — I could love my book but it won’t get out there, it won’t get published, it won’t have success and I won’t be happy.”
– Robert Greene
Yale Speech Pt 2., Source ~ x
Author: Martin Rose
On Individuality
“Putting out our individuality is the only way we’re going to get power in this world.”
– Robert Greene
Yale Speech Pt. 1, Source ~ x
Quote
“I think we pay a high price for the exile of feeling in education.”
— Sir Ken Robinson
On Creativity, Sir Ken Robinson
An excellent talk on schools killing creativity by Sir Ken Robinson. Worth the time, because the man is clearly an excellent speaker, incredibly engaging and surprisingly funny.
Gresham College Lecture on the relationship between Genius and Madness
Keep in mind, I do have differences of opinion, but I’m presenting it because the professor brings up interesting discussion points.
For instance, I’d posit that there are just as many female genius/madness types as there are men, but they’ve been relegated to obscurity in most cases. Culture and society ushers women into the background and usually punishes them for their genius/madness while men are rewarded. Who is to know how many women, and POC as well, have been forgotten by history due to these biases? And who is to say a genius does not in fact, become mad by the very action of being suppressed by social and cultural systems and norms? Madness then seems a very sane reaction to a genius dealing with an ocean of masses who are, in essence, of lower intelligence than the person they seek to control and relegate, usually because their genius is so overwhelming and frightening, and a threat to their status quo.
Evidence Submitted, Exhibit A
I received a belated message from my father that was several months past due. At first nauseated, at second horrified, and then once I was past the initial phases, fascinated by how much my father’s missives read like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man.
Adventures At The Thrift Shop
I traipsed through thrift shops picking up random items today. Some days are like that. Oddments find their way into my hands. I’m not one given to coincidence yet there seems a flow to things I can’t escape. I found a jar for mead and haunted old books looking for the rare and unusual before I found a hardbound cover of something French and gothic. I think the pages are held together with angst, which is probably more substantive than what’s holding most books together these days. A dove cote. A notebook adorned with the images of clocks and timepieces. Time, of course; I can’t escape the feeling it runs out.
Copyright
I read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture years ago — at least before 2008. It’s 2013 and Aaron Swartz killed himself. Copyright is at the core of all this. The exchange of free ideas. I am irrevocably moved. One cannot simply go to sleep at night and believe everything will be fine in the morning. This is more than pirates downloading movies and music. I am physically ill over this. Ill in a way that is hard to describe.
Hard Winter
Hard winter. Pipes frozen on the east end and an empty knocking in the copper deep in the belly of the house. A finch sickens and balances between life and death, talons gripped in a fist. My father’s mug shot made visible. We measure things this time of year in how long we can make them last. Fortune and food both.
I sweep through the rooms and empty it of knick-knacks and old photos and oddments. I keep looking for Lloyd Alexander’s signature and the man scrawled it into my notebook when I was 9 and I am unwilling to believe it was lost in the years and the moves. It is somewhere here. I can hear its heartbeat in the walls and the books and the journals even if I have to burn every single one to find it.
Martin Rose 