A Russian Pill for the Postmodern Blues

By Emily Walls

My generation is obsessed with irony. In Internet comments, Tweets, TV shows, and face-to-face conversation, we seem incapable of authenticity. April Ludgate of Parks and Rec is our poster child, but of course the poster is hung only in tongue-in-cheek self-reference. The writers of The Simpsons summed it up more than a decade ago in this gag from "Homerpalooza."

Irony and its cousin, metaphor, can be powerful, but I think when we use them exclusively, we dilute their virtue. In literature and art, our authors and filmmakers most often use metaphor to expose truth, and they are effective. American Beauty, Pan's Labyrinth and Toy Story 3 deftly expose deep longing within us, but they do it parabolically. In our art, subtlety is king, and irony is second in command. We are, in fact, so steeped in irony, much like the Simpsons characters, that straightforward declaration is uncouth, even vulgar. It's all right, we suppose, in the proper media, like Opinion sections and documentaries, but it is repugnant and amateur in fiction. We've seen it done poorly too many times to give it credence. Saved, Robinson Crusoe, Remember the Titans, even parts of my favorite book of all time, Jane Eyre, stumble into didacticism. In response, we stick with ever-faithful metaphor. Because we have only learned to draw stick figures, we eschew portraits altogether, but I believe that the realism of a Rembrandt can be just as stirring, sometimes more so, than the abstractions of a Picasso. Or in unambiguous terms, metaphor is useful but not all-encompassing, so when we reject explicit storytelling—both in plot and dialogue—we needlessly limit our expression.

This Picasso (1937) is good.

This Picasso (1895) is also good.

For proof, let's look to the master of straightforward dialogue, Fyodor Dostoevsky. His characters in The Brothers Karamazov are as ideologically diverse as they are fascinating. When I read the story last summer, I was two hundred pages in before I realized the plot had barely moved. The characters were so engaging, their dialogue so provocative, I had not noticed the glacier-esque plot. What's more, their conversations were philosophically charged, so much so that if I were inclined, I could spend weeks dissecting and studying each exchange. I'm not exaggerating. I often found myself mentally developing curricula for imaginary book circles I led (with an iron fist and a garish hat).

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky takes the best conversations you've had in the last decade, your wandering thoughts in the shower, your quiet reflections at night just before you fall asleep, and your meditations on sermons and speeches, divides them among a dozen characters, and gives them back to you in organized and clear discussion. Consider the following dialogue, a small portion of a discussion on the problem of evil:

...and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to 'dear God' in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears! Not worth it, because her tears remained unredeemed. They must be redeemed, otherwise there can be no harmony. But how, how will you redeem them? Is it possible? Can they be redeemed by being avenged? But what do I care if they are avenged, what do I care if the tormentors are in hell, what can hell set right here, if these ones have already been tormented? And where is the harmony, if there is hell?...I don't want harmony, for love of mankind I don't want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I'd rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can't afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket....which is what I am doing. It's not that I don't accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket."

The entire novel is filled with conversations on compassion, faith, God, sin—the biggies. When I read it, I was struck by the dialogue's unique style. It challenged me, not just as a reader, but as a human being, to explore my own thoughts. I could see my own ideas through the characters' vantages, and although Ivan, Dmitri, and Alyosha were not always able to articulate their convictions, the words they used sounded like my own inner monologues. I shared in their struggles to understand, and I grew more decisive as they did.

And that's what is missing from modern storytelling, precisely because our stories are not modern at all—they are postmodern. Our dialogue in art reflects our actual dialogue, which is largely either waffling and noncommittal or insolent and satirical. When we take offense at every opinion and villanize every solid stance, not for its substance but for its existence, it's no wonder that our literary characters hint rather than declare. We have rebelled forcefully against modernism and now fall too often into insipidity. Authentic, straightforward storytelling is difficult to master, but it's a valuable tool too often overlooked.

Metaphor can be powerful and effective, but we overuse it to our detriment. Let's add another skill to our repertoire: candor. Both in art and in life, let's peel back the layers of ambiguity and for once, naked and raw, say what we mean.

A 12-Bar Christmas Carol, Sung by a Chorus of Vikings: An Assessment of Led Zeppelin

By Josh Corman

The Ghost of Zeppelin Past

Robert Plant (left) wore those jeans from 1968-1971,
when he finally had to be cut out of them.

For probably four solid months after I got my driver's license, my in-car listening pattern went something like: I, II, III, IV, Houses of The Holy, Physical Graffiti; repeat, with little variation. If you're wondering why Presence, In Through the Out Door, or Coda didn't join the rotation, it's because I'd heard that those three albums represented a pretty sharp decline in quality, and since I could not at that time imagine a reality in which everything the Great Zep touched did not turn instantly and irrevocably into gold, I avoided them, just in case it was true. Instead, I added the live compilation BBC Sessions into the mix and was waiting in line at Wal-Mart when How the West Was Won, their remastered three-disc live album culled mostly from their swaggering prime, went on sale. Led Zeppelin stormed the castle, and they almost took the keep. Many were the moments (most of them probably right in the middle of "When the Levee Breaks") when I sat in contemplation, wondering if Zeppelin had not indeed taken over the title of my favorite band of all time.

I stopped wondering after a while. The Fab Four built an impenetrable fortress atop my musical mountain, and Zep was content to set up residence on a minor outcrop just below the summit, where they have stayed ever since.

I know I'm throwing a lot of metaphors at you, but this is important.

A few months ago, Emily, Jonny, and I were having a conversation about possible VI pieces, and Emily intimated that she had an idea that had been brewing for quite some time, but that she wanted to run it by me first. Led Zeppelin had started to annoy her, she said. She probably heard the breath catch in my throat and imagined me going into cardiac arrest, because she took speedy pains to qualify her position. Mostly, she chalked it up to living in Los Angeles and being pummeled with Led Zeppelin by just about every radio station upon which she stumbled. "Stairway to Heaven," "Kashmir," and "Whole Lotta Love," over and over and over. She said she still "liked" them (I could hear the air-quotes in her voice) in some general sense, or maybe it was that she "understood" why some people - some people, as though she'd forgotten who she was talking to - really like them, but they just weren't for her anymore, except in small doses.

So she wanted to write a piece about how Led Zeppelin had reached critical mass in her life and how this saturation had driven her to confer upon the mighty Zep that most damning of honorifics: overrated.

Gasp. Shudder. The horror.

I gave Emily's idea an immediate thumbs up. I wanted a crack at writing the response, after all. Well, like I said, that was months ago. Time has run out, and I'm launching a preemptive strike, as it were (from what I understand, those always end well).

The Ghost of Zeppelin Present


This will not, despite all appearances, morph into a diatribe on why Led Zeppelin is incredible and Emily (or anyone else) is insane for believing otherwise. The truth is that Emily's proposed piece actually got me thinking. As I considered all that I might say in response to her claims of Zeppelin's limitations, I actually saw more legitimacy in them than I would have believed.

So I went back to the source. I threw on III (For those not prone to "getting the Led out," Zeppelin's first four albums were designated simply by Roman numerals) and tried to listen through the ears of someone who didn't once adore this music so intensely that it bordered on solipsism. This is an intensely difficult endeavor, as you might imagine. Thankfully for the sake of the experiment, the first track on III is "Immigrant Song," which, if I'm guessing, is probably in the top six Led Zeppelin tunes currently played on the radio. (The others are probably, in some order, "Stairway," "Kashmir," "Whole Lotta Love," "Heartbreaker," and either "Black Dog" or "Rock and Roll.") I've never thought of this song as one of Zep's best efforts, but then, I wouldn't consider any of the songs I've just listed among my personal Top Ten. I mean, they all have a seat at the bargaining table (except maybe "Kashmir," which has always seemed lacking), but after the initial shine wore off, they all settled far below my personal view of the band's apex.

I would wager that for a great many people—a majority of them like Emily, who has heard other Led Zeppelin, but for whom the radio hits have come to represent most of what the band is—these few songs have presented Zeppelin as a horribly repetitive group with little to recommend it beyond sheer bombast.

Now, none of this is to say Oh, if only the sad masses got to know the brilliance of Led Zeppelin's deep cuts, they'd be instant converts. That is condescending and doesn't really do much general Zeppelin discourse. I'm simply pointing out that, like a lot of bands, Zeppelin's most radio friendly songs don't really do the band justice. On III alone, after "Immigrant Song," we're treated to an acoustic folk-boogie ("Friends"), a slow-burning blues howler ("Since I've Been Loving You"), a sing-along pop gem ("Tangerine"), and a bluegrass-infused ramble ("Bron-Y-Aur Stomp"), mixed in among the straight-ahead rockers (and even then, "Celebration Day" and "Out on the Tiles" reflect the group's versatility and flair better than "Immigrant Song"). The point is, anybody who is repeatedly and almost exclusively bludgeoned with only the brawny heavyweights in Zeppelin's catalogue is bound to find them lacking.

The whole 'seeing the band through different eyes' thing didn't do much to change my perception of Led Zeppelin, but I can openly admit now what I may not have been able to before. Phil Tallon wrote a few weeks ago about Parks and Recreation, and how Amy Poehler's character on that show loves her hometown both in spite of and, in some cases, because of its flaws. That's how I feel about Led Zeppelin. I know that seven-minute drum solos on studio recordings are needlessly indulgent, but I love "Moby Dick" anyway. I know that it's hard to take a band seriously when no fewer than three of their songs feature overt references to The Lord of the Rings (even if you love The Lord of the Rings), but I don't care. Led Zeppelin hit me at a time in my life and in such a way that I don't know that anything could completely pry them out now. They're excessive and silly and self-serious and obnoxious, but I don't care.

The Ghost of Zeppelin Future


It may sound from all this like I'm still that sixteen-year-old kid with a stack of Zeppelin CDs in my passengers seat, all those albums still cycling through my stereo. But the truth is that until today, I hadn't listened to a whole Led Zeppelin album in a long time, maybe as long as a year. Writing this brought me back to them, and before I popped III into the CD player, I was a little worried that the magic would be gone. But I feel that way all the time about a bunch of my favorite things. I've often worried that I don't really like The Beatles as much as I claim, that I've just become complacent, that I've kept them atop my personal musical totem pole out of habit as much as for any other reason. I've done the same thing with the Star Wars films and The Lord of the Rings novels.

I become legitimately concerned about these things. And then the first chord hits, or I watch that yellow text crawling across space, or I read the first few lines, and I ready myself for a long-awaited party.

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

It's the End of Summer As I Know It (and I Feel Fine)

By Josh Corman

Clever Alice Cooper Reference

Arne Duncan and President Obama plotting the destruction of summer.
Hilarious.

When I was a kid, I heard the old expression, credited to Ben Franklin, that you can count on just two things in this world: death and taxes. With all due respect to our most quotable founding father, I  disagreed from the moment I heard the quip. For most school-age children in this country, the concepts of both death and taxes are mere abstractions, their inevitability a distant, vague proposition. So if eight-year-old me had been allowed to amend Franklin's aphorism, I would have added to it something that I really did feel would happen every year like clockwork, something I felt was my God-given right as an American, something I would fight for, if it came to that. Death? Sure. Taxes? Fine. But the thing I could always count on? Summer vacation.

From early June through mid-August for every year of my public education, I was free. I played in the yard, watched or played baseball six hours a day (and organized, reorganized, and shelved baseball cards for another two—great practice for bookshelves or record collections), ate lunch whenever I wanted, went swimming, jumped on the trampoline, skipped stones (seriously), learned the game of golf, and read every book I could get my hands on, among about a hundred other things. It was wonderful, even when it was boring. Summer vacation was how I learned to be by myself, to find entertainment off the beaten path, to terrorize my little sister in inventive new ways. Without it, I'm sure I wouldn't be the person I am today (nor would my sister, for that matter, but her nightmares are down to two nights a week, tops).

Increasingly, though, the rumblings from those highest of higher-ups in education spell doom for the traditional summer vacation. Death and Taxes indeed.

Time on Our Hands


The first question to ask about the end of summer vacation is why? Why put an end to this most beloved of childhood rituals?

The answers from those dark, nefarious forces aiming to squelch everyone's good time are surprisingly persuasive. On the one hand, the discussion over America's global competition in the academic realm has taken center stage. Both President Obama and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, have taken pains to point out the need for more globally competitive students as they outline proposals and policies. Chief among the president's suggestions has been lengthening the amount of time students spend in school, either by extending the school day or the school year. My knee-jerk reaction as a teacher (it would have been the same when I was a student) is to boo loudly and frequently, but if I'm honest, I know that my vitriol is primarily the result of selfishness. I like being done with work before 4:00 PM, and I love having summers off.

But if I look at the issue more objectively, that is, if I try to see the issue simply in terms of problems and solutions, it seems, initially at least, difficult to argue with a longer school day and a longer school year. Consider, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his fantastic book Outliers, that students in many Asian and European countries spend about 250 days a year in school, compared to the average American student's 180-190. Kids in the U.S., especially those with long summer breaks, are shown routinely to retain fewer of the skills and less knowledge than those who have a shortened summer vacation. This is even more true for kids in lower socio-economic strata, because it's likely that they're not being read to or taken to museums or enrolled in summer camp programs that might help bridge some of the wide gap between school years.

Isn't it obvious that kids who spend 25% more time learning to master skills will be better at those skills (and potentially given more time in which to master them, meaning fewer rushed lessons and fewer kids being turned off math because they took longer to understand its underlying principles)? Isn't it clear that taking immense amounts of time without any sort of targeted instruction throws an enormous wrench into kids' ability to learn?

Of course it is. But you and I both know that it isn't the whole story, either.

What We Do With the Time That Is Given to Us


I graduated high school with somebody who went to MIT. One of my best friends is at NYU law school. Another friend has studied at Oxford. All of these people had lengthy summer vacations. They all engaged their minds in a variety of ways, looked for education in a broader sense, everywhere they could. The latter two goofed around a lot and spent a lot of time doing things that no sane person would consider intellectually beneficial. And yet, there they are, smart, decent human beings with a lot to offer the world.

I'm less concerned with asking the question, "But what would they have been able to accomplish with all that extra learning time?" than asking, "What would they have missed out on if they'd been cooped up in a classroom sixty-five extra days a year?" The reason the second question interests me more is that I think I know the answer to the first one, but I'm much less certain about the second. I would hope that they would have still developed some of the same extra-curricular interests and met the same friends and been able to use their time free from school to experience some of the incredibly formative moments of their youths, but I don't know if that's accurate.

Thinking about this makes me realize how delicate a balance the relationship is between structured learning time and those moments which are, at least on their surface, totally removed from intellectual or academic concerns. I would distrust anyone who said we didn't need both, but I have no idea what the exact balance between the two should look like.

Perhaps we can take a clue from Sir Ken Robinson, whose TED talks are among the most viewed in the website's history (his first one, titled "Schools Kill Creativity," is actually #1). Robinson points out that schools very often do a piss-poor job of adapting to the needs of students whose strengths lie outside of the traditional spectrum of academic subjects (math, science, languages, etc.). He claims that an alien looking down on Western education could only conclude that its purpose is to produce university professors. Think about the kids you went to school with. Who finished at the top of the class? What was most valued in those students by their teachers? Maybe you're like Emily, who in her post on creativity last week admitted that she had submerged her more creative instincts in the interest of more measurable academic skills. (She was class salutatorian, by the way.) How many kids are like her? How many aren't capable of succeeding in school like she did because their intelligence isn't as varied or adaptable as hers? How many feel like they aren't good at anything only because what they were good at wasn't valued by their schools? Robinson says it's this last thought that bothers him most.

And it should. Because when it comes to education reform, we assume that students should essentially be treated the same, that there's one way to define intelligence and that, therefore, the most practical answer to the question, "How do we make our schools better and our students stronger?" is to make the school day longer and shorten summer vacation, rather than question the value of what we're teaching them to be.

Maybe we will have to spend more time in school. But first, we should ask ourselves what the value of time outside of school is and see if we can't learn a little something from summer vacation that would apply nicely inside a classroom. What if we used those extra sixty-five days to let kids explore their passions and interests outside of the core content subjects? What if we acknowledged that just because kids are out of school, that doesn't mean that they aren't learning constantly, turning themselves into the types of people we want to succeed in our culture—not just because they're smart or they did well in school, but because they're assured of who they are, confident in what they do, and capable of a more rounded view of the world.

If we fill our schools with students like that, they will leave school and build a richer society once they're out in the world. I'd take that outcome, even if we still finish behind France in the TIMMS test, 'cause I bet we'd beat their asses in Calvinball.

On Creativity, Continued: Execution

By Jonny Walls

I've spent the last thirteen years in pursuit of a career in creativity. In high school and a few years beyond, it was music. For the last six years, it's been film.

On Wednesday, Emily posted an incredibly insightful piece about the importance of creativity. Creativity, she argues, belongs to everyone, even those, like herself, who grew up erroneously believing themselves uncreative. An important tenet of Emily's thesis is that creativity is often undervalued, sometimes to a startling degree, in our modern mindsets. I agree, and so propose we keep the creativity train rolling through the weekend.

Now What?

So you're fresh off Emily's rousing call to creative arms and have found your mind flooded with fresh ideas and memories of youthful schemes that went ever undone. You've discovered a new spring in your step that you forgot ever existed. You're floating on the winds of hope and rediscovered wonder.

Well I'm here to bring you back down.

Creativity isn't all excitement, fleeting images, and wild experimentation; it requires application as well. It's not enough to rediscover the slumbering bear of creativity hibernating in the wintery cave of our subconscious; we must brave the beast and wake it. (A decidedly uncreative analogy, yes, but deliciously ironic. Am I right?)

I've by no means been a paragon of creative success and innovation, but I have figured a few things out along the way.

Hold on there, Jackson...

Let's dispel a popular myth that creativity and organization are somehow dichotomous. Somewhere floating around is the notion that creatives are all free-spirited, wind riding forest sprites who could no more condescend to bother with good grammar than they could tidy their work spaces (not that they could ever be contained by any such conformist cubicles of oppression anyway.) Granted, every mind works differently, but it has been my discovery that organization is not only in harmony with creativity, it is a distinct aid unto it.

For me, anything from a messy work space to haphazard digital file management can act as a creativity suppressant. Even if only on a subconscious level, clutter is just one more thing to preoccupy our mind-power and weigh our creativity down. If I'm editing a film, I shouldn't be wondering where, out of five possible locations, one particular root file may be. I want to dedicate my concentration to the flow of the story and the rhythm of the piece. Knowing that every file is safe and cozy where it ought to be is downright liberating. Clear out the clutter, overthrow disorganization, and watch your creativity blossom, unhindered.

It's All Been Said More Effectively Before

In the last two years, not including all of my paying work, I have edited a now published book, co-written a travel memoir exceeding 100,000 words (three drafts), written a feature length screenplay (eight drafts), written twenty-seven blog entries, collaborated on a friend's graphic novel, performed all parts for and recorded a song, performed drums and contributed to arrangements for a friend's music project, written, directed and edited a short film, written three short stories, worked on numerous friends' projects and short films, am currently writing another feature length screenplay, am currently collaborating on a web series, and am in pre-production for another short film I wrote and will direct.

Oh, and I made a board game.

Yes, landing on Waffle House right out of the gate does earn you an extra turn.

Please understand, I'm not trying to impress you. (What a sad attempt it would be.) What I mean to point out is, I could have done more. I should have done more. I spent a lot of the last two years sitting on my ass, browsing the internet and wasting time. I spent more time staring at Facebook and espn.com than I did on all of those projects combined. Imagine what I may have accomplished if I had cut my wasted time in half.

I'm not the busiest person in the western hemisphere. There were times (extended times) when business was slow. But even when I was working every day, I would find time to get my own creative work done. If you are serious about uncorking your creativity, you have no excuses. You must sit down, clench your teeth, and do something. Talk can be good. It can help you organize your ideas, to flesh them out, but it only takes you a fraction of the way. We need tangible results here, people. Get it done. Write that story. Go to the store, buy the materials, clean out the garage, and start painting. Find someone with a camera and a Mac and shoot that short film. Do it.

Collaboration is Key

When I was slogging through a drastic revamp of my screenplay a few weeks ago, I hit a brick wall. I couldn't get through a certain obstacle, no matter how I tried. I wracked my brain and spent days, literally, in misery. Finally I called a friend. He already knew the basic story, so I talked him through the specific points of my issue, and he started throwing around ideas, and then I started throwing around ideas based on his ideas, and then new ideas were born out of a seed that his ideas planted in my mind, and then he began sprouting new ideas based on my new ideas, and then two of our ideas collided in mid-air and showered sparks and caught the couch on fire, and the next thing I knew I was picking ideas like fruit off of a tree (and treating my idea-burns). It was like a laser bouncing back and forth between two mirrors, gaining intensity by the moment. (I have no idea if that actually works.)

When I finish a screenplay, a story, a rough cut, anything, I don't pat myself on the back and congratulate myself on a job done. I send it to every willing person I know. I sit down with a group of seven or eight friends and read through my screenplays aloud. I let people watch rough cuts and hope they'll catch any awkward cuts that eluded my tired eyes. I tell them that I appreciate their praise, but what I really want is the criticism. There is simply no way to squeeze every bit of juice out of an idea with one pair of hands alone. A second pair will come in from a different angle and hit a fresh patch of that same fruit that you didn't even know was there.

You don't have to keep every idea. I certainly don't. Remember, it's your vision that in the end must be accomplished. Sometimes the ideas I'm given go straight in the trash. Sometimes they lead to separate ideas I keep. Sometimes I take the ideas outright and claim them as my own (the true secret to creative success), but I am always, always, better for it. Collaboration is the anvil upon which any and all singular visions can be molded to size and made perfect. No exceptions.

In Summary...

Creativity is part inspiration, part execution. As Emily pointed out, sometimes the inspiration bit is cast aside before it even has a chance to take root. But just as often, the seeds of inspiration are planted and left untended. Creativity doesn't just happen. While geniuses like Steinbeck and Wes Anderson and Van Gogh and Thom Yorke tend to make it seem effortless, it's an illusion. It's anything but.

Now go. Wake the bear.

By Jonny Walls

On Creativity

By Emily Walls

Imagine this: You are locked in a windowless room on the second story of a commercial building. You have with you a handful of binders, a legal pad, one (1) pen and one (1) green marker, several paperclips, a stapler, a Norman Rockwell calendar, and a desk. On that desk you have a computer, which is equipped with Word and Excel only. No Internet. No phone. No one else. How many hours do you think will go by before you begin composing a 29-stanza poem about a young girl who brutally murders a Microsoft icon?

For me, the answer was 114 hours.

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher announced one day that the school would be offering an extra art class for those who showed particular giftedness in the visual arts. She passed out a small test—a single page with three simple shapes that we were to draw at double size—and explained that if we were interested in the class, we could submit our completed exams and wait for the results.

I was excited. I had never produced anything less than A material in all subjects, I was already participating in an accelerated school program, and I was motivated. Chance of rejection: zero.

So I gave up my recess that day to stay in and work on my test, painstakingly measuring each shape with a ruler and carefully copying the shapes at twice their sizes. I handed in my paper, confident that I would be accepted. A few days later, my teacher posted a paper with the names of accepted students, and I was horrified to discover that my name was not among them. I did not understand then what I know now: Art is not about rulers and grids.

I walked away from my fourth grade experience with new perspective on my place in the artistic community, and though I gained valuable humility and insight into the nature of art and creativity, I simultaneously bought into a profound fallacy that all creativity equals visual art. Since I was not good at drawing, I reasoned, I must essentially lack creativity. Add to that the further segregation of subjects in school and exposure to right-brain/left-brain concepts, and I became fully convinced that I simply was not a creative person. There were creatives and there were non-creatives, and I was the latter.

I built my education on this false premise, concentrating on subjects that could be measured, skills that could be calculated. I had a natural aptitude for writing, but I feared the demands of creative writing courses, so instead of majoring in English in college, I majored in business. I took finance and accounting courses and learned about target markets and interest rates.

And I was right about certain things. I am crazy good at whipping up spreadsheets. I have a talent for organizing ideas, and I can make order from chaos. I’m good at creating systems that make processes faster and smoother. Plus, I have great spatial reasoning, which comes in handy for packing cars on road trips.

Do you know what I suck at? Picking out two colors that look good together. Telling the difference between Arial and Helvetica. Knowing what “white space” is. Layering clothing.

I spent six years post college keeping myself in the lands of Reason, Logic, and Fact, because creativity was not for me. I worked several different jobs – some I liked, some I didn’t – and for one month of 2011, I took a temp position working in a windowless office on the second floor of a commercial building, my only companions a desk, a handful of office supplies, and Microsoft Word. One hundred fourteen working hours and 29 stanzas about murder later, I came to an important – no, essential – conclusion: Creativity belongs to everyone.

I was contracted to work forty hours per week in that position, but the job I was hired to do sometimes took me one hour per day to accomplish, and one time just seven minutes. I begged for more work from my supervisor and coworkers, but they told me there was nothing more for me to do and that I should go to my office and read for the rest of the day. Eyes can only take so much small print, so I spent an alarming number of hours staring at a blank wall. After a few of those hours, I was amazed to find my mind teeming with crazy ideas – comic strips, stories, poems, and the like. I built cities out of staples and file folders. I made origami Star Wars figures. I drew pictures (crude though they were) and made up characters. I wrote Verbal Infusion's first post with pen and paper at that desk.

I found that when you strip away the distractions, your mind will fill the void with your own unique thoughts, and your mind is alive and alight with creativity, even if you’re the kind of person who thinks Papyrus is the font of the future.

That temp job is long over, but I learned from it that I need to make time for reflection and doodling, that I need to intentionally seek inspiration. So I now set aside time to check out my friends' design work on The Fresh Exchange and A Pair of Pears. I watch TED Talks every now and then to see what brilliant people are doing in fields wildly different from my own. I take breaks from romantic comedies to watch movies that challenge me mentally and amaze me visually. And after I’ve done that, I sit quietly and think. And then I create.

Links to the Present - 4/24/12

We here at the Infusion are taking Tuesdays to share a little of what's caught our fancy over the preceding week. We call it "Links to the Present." Peruse our offerings and give the article titles a click.


A Point of View: In Defense of Obscure Words - BBC columnist Will Self derides the paucity of personages amenable to engaging with obstreperous parlance (the lack of people willing to read works that use difficult words).

Insane 'Tube Transport' Will Zip You From New York to L.A. in 45 Minutes - This brief animation lays out the general schematic for an energy-efficient travel system that could probably make your commute shorter than the time it takes for you to key your car's ignition.

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: Eight Experts on Who's Greater - Tired of seeing endlessly reductive internet polls and rankings that unfairly simplify legitimately complex debates? Me neither! Seriously though, some heavy duty Russian scholars tackle the age old question while simultaneously giving me a hankering for Borscht and The Brothers Karamazov.

Five Things Alfred Hitchcock's Films Taught Me - On the lighter side, the British Film Institute's Heather Stewart (no relation to Jimmy, presumably) noted recently that Hitchcock might deserve to be on Britain's national curriculum alongside Shakespeare. Ann Billson contemplates what the Master of Suspense can teach us.

This is just horrible.  In another sector of "British film," this couple pays 750 pounds for what some are calling the worst wedding photos ever. As you will see they are...shockingly bad. According to this source for the same story, part of the reason for the blurry photos was a self-proclaimed "epileptic photographer" who couldn't safely use a flash. There is nothing funny about epilepsy, but maybe, just maybe, that guy is in the wrong business.

Swan Songs

By Josh Corman

What If?

What if John Lennon had been shot in 1969 rather than 1980? What if, just weeks before the release of Abbey Road, the most significant member of the most significant musical group in history had left this world? And what if, instead of leaving behind a fully recorded, mixed, and mastered piece of visionary art, John had struggled to finish some of his compositions. What if only half the vocals had been laid down, or what if he had never quite been satisfied with the guitar on "Come Together?" What would the rest of the group have done? What would the release day for Abbey Road have looked like if fans knew, beyond any doubt, that the last glimpse into John Lennon's genius, moving full steam ahead, would come on October 1st, 1969, and that it really didn't look like what he would have wanted out there?

What a shame it would have been, obviously. It's sad enough when a towering creative figure dies at the end of a long, productive life and career, or even when they die young, but with their best creative days likely behind them. But when a Kurt Cobain or James Dean goes, right at what should be the apex of what they've striven to give the world? We listen to that last record or watch that last film, and we search for something, some flicker of the promise we know we've lost, and it comforts and pains us all at the same time.

The Pedestal

The most fascinating novel ever written about taxes and accounting.

For a number of reasons, I looked forward with near unhinged madness to this year's Spring Break. Besides all the usual perks of a work-free week, I had been saving something very important: David Foster Wallace's final novel, The Pale King. The combination of wild anticipation and anxiousness with which I had looked forward to reading Wallace's final work (he committed suicide in 2008 after a long, troubled battle with depression and addiction) was something that I hadn't experienced since reading the final Harry Potter novel in 2007. In that case, I was only anxious because I wanted so badly to love the story and discover the answers to questions I'd been asking for years. The Pale King brought with it a different layer of emotion. This was the last time I would read a novel by one of my three favorite writers of all time, and knowing you're losing a character doesn't feel nearly as bad as losing an author. I had devoured Wallace's previous two novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest, near the beginning of last year and read one of his two nonfiction collections, Consider the Lobster, the previous Christmas. In the time between reading those works and opening The Pale King, I had watched approximately ten hours of interviews with Wallace, read his Kenyon College Commencement speech, "This is Water," probably fifteen times, and gobbled up every interview, profile, and review I could find written about the man or his work.

This is dangerous behavior. I'd put DFW on a pedestal. Rarely, if ever, does anything good come from putting a writer, musician, actor, or sports star on a pedestal. Creating hopelessly high expectations (especially for a dead person) leads mostly to deflation and letdown because of the narrow pathway it leaves for our idols to tread. Take Cobain as an example (my Verbal Infusion contract requires me to make mention of Nirvana or Kurt Cobain no fewer than twenty times per year; I'm trying to add a few tallies to that ledger). When In Utero came out, a lot of people were disappointed with the record's raw sound, but that disappointment didn't really stem from the quality of In Utero. Rather, it was that In Utero didn't sound enough like Nevermind for many fans' tastes. They had created a Platonic version of Nirvana in their minds, and when In Utero didn't mesh with that narrow conception of what the band should be, they reacted unkindly. History has a way of salving the sting in most instances like this (and it certainly has for Nirvana's second album), but time and again the pedestal effect plays itself out.

And so, having placed The Pale King on a pedestal next to its author, setting aside a week to read it during which I would have plenty of time and focus to spare and essentially creating an environment in which the book could do little but disappoint me, I finally read the thing.

Man, did it hurt. The Pale King is funny, poignant, and philosophical, and it shows flashes of brilliance that even Steinbeck can't match for their harrowing, pummeling pathos. And now, 560 pages later, it's all gone. I knew this ache would come. The effect of feeling, for real, that I would never get to engage with this voice (in this form, at least; Wallace has short fiction collections and one more nonfiction collection that I'm working hard to create pedestals for) in a fresh way again. It doesn't feel like regret, exactly, but it stings in kind of the same way.

The Afterglow


One of the hardest feelings for me to describe to people is that of having just finished a book that you know is going to stick with you for a long time. The words are simultaneously buzzing around in my head, striving to leave a singular impression and quickly fading from memory. What's left is usually just a holistic impression that feels unworthy of the massive effort that you know went into what's been read.

My immediate holistic verdict was one of gratitude and awe. Gratitude because when Wallace died, his editor put a tremendous amount of work into marrying the three hundred or so neatly typed pages that represented the most complete part of The Pale King and then cobbling the rest of it together using found notes, rough drafts, and computer files. The result is, as the cover indicates, unfinished, a word that only adds to the ache I mentioned earlier. The awe I felt wasn't new. The way guitar players are in awe of Hendrix or Morello, poets in awe of Whitman or Eliot, actors in awe of Brando or Lewis, that's the feeling even two or three consecutive DFW sentences make me feel. The fear that "unfinished" meant "lacking quality" vanished pretty quickly. The Pale King met the immense challenge I had set for it, but it made me wonder about what will come next.

David Foster Wallace is my John Lennon (even though John Lennon is also my John Lennon, he was dead five years before I was born, so it doesn't work the same way), my Kurt Cobain, my James Dean. He left behind a few thousand pages, and as I've worked through them, I've thought about this end point often. The way I see it, I've got one of two choices: I can convince myself that finishing Wallace's last novel is tantamount to losing a best friend, develop an unhealthy literary solipsism where I see everything through the DFW lens, thereby ensuring that I hate ninety-five percent of what I read because it doesn't measure up, or I can acknowledge that it's been a hell of a ride, that my twelve pound copy of Infinite Jest isn't going anywhere, and that Wallace will always be there, waiting to be reread and rooting for me to find something that's just as great as he was. Instead of being bummed or even afraid because I've read his every word, I should just appreciate what he gave me and move on.

That second choice is really the only choice for us, if we want to enjoy our favorite pastimes, but I don't know if it's the one we choose most often. If you saw the story in the news about the Tupac Shakur hologram closing out Dr. Dre's set at the Coachella music festival last weekend, you might understand what I mean. Tupac was a titan of his field, to be sure, and for much of the last seventeen years, a lot of hip-hop fans have been hung up on what his loss meant, and what his death cost in terms of his art. It's a callous way to approach the loss of a life, but when we lose an artist, it's hard not to think about their work first, because it's really the only connection we have to them.

The concept of a rapping Tupac hologram is weird, but it's also frightening. Dr. Dre, the man who dreamed up the idea, has said that this is only the beginning for this technology and that there are plans to send the hologram on tour. How long do you think it took for someone to call Yoko Ono's or Courtney Love's agents and pitch the idea of a Beatles or Nirvana reunion. I can only pray that neither one of them would have the audacity to give such a plan the thumb's up, but until I hear a definitive "no," I'm going to be a little nervous. But there are those who might get excited at the prospect. I am afraid of these people.

See, I don't want to be somebody who can't let go. I won't ever read a new David Foster Wallace novel or listen to a new Beatles record or see a new Heath Ledger movie, and I need to be okay with that. Increasingly, I think I am.

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman