Francesca Penchant
Brendan Connell knows his decadence!
My favorite pieces in this collection are the humorous ones that parody Decadent Movement stories: the man who falls in love with a vase; the man who falls in love with a decapitated head; and the man who falls in love with his sword. These stories bring to mind Rachilde's
“Is there a law against carrying a can opener in your pants?”
This play is so well crafted and funny. Laughed out loud. Loved the absurdist vibe. I'm still thinking about the deeper themes—about corporate-think and political binaries.
One Million More to Go is one of those cool plays that spark conversation after the performance. Plan to read again.
The most detailed writing book I've ever seen. Rubin really did his homework. I love that he refers to more than just popular movies and tv shows—like so many other recent writing books—but also novels and plays, new and classic. He even uses a popular game as an example.
And his advice to “max-out the middle” is a gem: fight sagging-middle syndrome by going emotionally crazy in the middle, challenging your protagonist to the breaking point. (He uses gut-wrenching James Baldwin novel If Beale Street Could Talk to illustrate this.) It's something I'd never heard of. Worth the price of admission.
Making your characters “work at the top of their intelligence” was a new one, too. Put your characters in situations where they have to figure things out—readers want to see characters who are fighting to survive, inspired, pushed, changed.
Rubin knows his stuff. So passionate about stories! (It didn't hurt that I listened to the audiobook, with Rubin's intense East Coast delivery.) Worth a second read!
“After school, I dash off to the local library and find a book about human intelligence. I flip through the pages and come face to face with a terrifying chart. At the top is listed the average IQ of PhDs. I am way lower than this number. Tentatively, I go down the list. College graduate? Closer, but still no cigar. My blood pressure is rising. Semi-skilled laborer? In my dreams. After some time, I finally find my range: ‘Lucky to graduate high school,' it says. In a fit of panic, I throw the intelligence book as far as I can with an audible ‘F**k!'”
This passage describes the author's dawning realization, before college, of the discrepancy between his dreams of attending Yale and what his low IQ tests predicted for him.
My interest in reading this book was to find out how artists and writers like I could use human intelligence research to nurture our work. It provides many ways to do that.
It is an effective book because Kaufman has skin in the game; he describes his own experiences (alongside his research findings), as a kid whom teachers labeled “special education,” and how he overcame the predictions of that label because an observant teacher intervened. That teacher gave Kaufman hope and self-confidence, while his parents were giving him the opposite by following what experts were telling them.
Kaufman went on to achieve miraculous things that school year, and later, because he had found passion, inspiration, positive mindset, self-regulation, deliberate practice, his domains of talent and creativity, and his mentors: things that studies say produce high achievement.
But I can relate to Kaufman's experiences, because when I was a kid, my doctor told my mother that I was “mentally retarded”—because I drew people without fingers. Just circles for hands.
Luckily, my mother thought he was an idiot. And, luckily, she saw my intelligence.
And I'll add the complication that my doctor was a white male and my mother and I were females of Puerto Rican descent—a complication that Kaufman highlights throughout his book: that IQ tests—and testers—are biased against people of color.
Early on, Kaufman makes the point that IQ tests were created by people. Fallible people. Fallible white European male people. Fallible white European male people who created these tests relatively recently, in the nineteenth century, in ways that were, at times, completely arbitrary.
He describes Alfred Binet (1857–1911), a French psychologist, as the inventor of the first practical IQ test. To give you some perspective, Binet worked at La Salpêtrière in Paris, a hospital known for its public displays of their female “hysterics.” Even though Binet acknowledged the limitations of his IQ test versus the remarkable diversity of human intelligence, teachers and school administrators have given IQ tests inordinate power over children's futures. And, thus, self-appointed (and community-appointed) authorities and evaluators label unconventional children as disabled.
So it's gratifying that Kaufman concludes, “We are all capable of extraordinary performance; the key is finding the mode of expression that allows you to create your own unique symphony.”
Like Kaufman, because an adult saw my intelligence and believed in me, that gave me the fire to go on to college and grad school and complete projects that I've been passionate about.
As a kid, when I drew people, fingers weren't necessary. Because the person I drew had her hands in fists.
There are some affirming ideas in this book.
“The outcome cannot matter.... You will keep making your work, regardless of the outcome. You will keep sharing your work, regardless of the outcome. You were born to create, regardless of the outcome. You will never lose trust in the creative process, even when you don't understand the outcome.”
“Not expressing creativity will drive people crazy.”
“Done is better than good.”
“When it's for love, you'll do it anyhow.”
“Since when did creativity become a suffering contest?”
“What would you do even if you might fail?”
“You are worthy ... regardless of the outcome.”
When you have writer's block, be like Tristram Shandy and get dressed up.
“Dress for the novel you want to write.”
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.”
—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Monsters Under Glass is a tour de force by Professor Jane Desmarais, editor of Volupté, the interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies. The general reader's unfamiliarity with such influential European fin-de-siecle authors and artists as Rachilde, Lorrain, Huysmans, Montesquiou, Redon, and Beardsley doesn't negate the importance of this book. Kudos to Desmarais for expanding the scholarship of Decadent literature!
“Work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.”
“I will join in no protest for the boss to put more stuffing in my bunk. I don't even want the bunk. I want the boss's bed.”
“I want the front of the house, and I'm going to keep on trying, even if I never satisfy my plan.”
“I have been in sorrow's kitchen, and licked out all the pots.”
“I want to be swimming in art, to be surrounded by other artists, to make things that are unwieldy and weird and learn from my mistakes, to devote myself to creativity.”
“Maybe I want relationships that are like dresses. I need room to twirl.”
“Last night, I held my own hand and imagined it was yours.”
“On the eve of one of my fortnightly female-impersonation sprees, the reader probably supposes that I would be happy in anticipation. On the contrary, a great weight of sorrow and anxiety always oppressed me. There was of course an attraction which drew me to the city, but it was more than counterbalanced by the realization of the risks of my losing my then enviable position in life, and the dread of the danger I had to put myself in, in order to obtain the satisfaction of my instincts. A peculiar phenomenon was vivid images of violent blows in the face, since I had been the victim of such a number of times. But even apart from the dread of the real dangers, even if there were no such dangers, an overwhelming feeling of sadness and anxiety always came over me as the time to go forth on my peculiar quest approached.
“On the eve of a female-impersonation spree during this period, I always felt like a soldier on entering a great battle from which he realized he might never come back alive, or like a murderer on the eve of his electrocution.
“On such occasions I habitually sang to myself: ‘Why oh why should we be melancholy, boys,
Whose business 'tis to die?'”
“He was no fool like other people (they who believed his promises when he knew better than to believe them himself); and knowing it, he yet craved the drink that would bring the whole ruin down upon him again.
“And what of the passing and lost, the uncounted and unrecoverable days used up in those depths? The time that went down the drain and never came back? What thing was there in all the world that could ever repay you for those days...?
“And wasn't that using up life frightfully fast, or—worse than fast—unaware? Time was all you had, all anyone had, and you weren't counting, you let it slip by as if the unused day or week might offer itself over again tomorrow. But it didn't and couldn't—it had been used even though you hadn't used it. Had you no better use for precious time than that? What are you if the chief good and market of your time be but to drink and sleep? Hadn't you in youth often cried out what a day to be alive? And how many days had there been, since, when you weren't even able to long for death? Why ask how many? You could never say, you had lost count too long ago. The lost lost days, so many that you were something a good deal less than your thirty-three years, many months less, whole gaps and periods of your life taken out in blank—most shameful and wanton waste of all, because nothing could ever give them back again. Compensation for your loss, recovery of time itself, lay only in re-entering that blank once more where time was uncounted and time didn't count, drinking yourself out of the middle of the week and into your timeless time-out.”
—The Lost Weekend
“How was Pam to reconcile her new identity when she'd lived so long with an old one? She was of her father. And now her father was someone else.”
—Libby Copeland, The Lost Family
“We are all, of course, children of whims, and we've always known this to be true. Long before the DNA age brought to light tales of one-night-stands and donor-sperm-swaps, and the mix-up of two babies in a hospital. We are whims of our mothers deciding to attend a certain dinner party and meeting our fathers. We are whims of the sperm cell that beat out millions of other sperm cells to reach our mother's egg.
“And, as we come into being, we are still whims—of childhood accidents, and the precise locations of the houses we grew up in, of a college admissions officer, of an email never opened, of a drunk driver we never saw coming. As destabilizing as it is to admit, life is just one grand unfolding of accidents.”
—Libby Copeland, The Lost Family
Required reading for adoptees and “non-paternity events” (NPEs).
This book is for plotters and non-fiction writers, authors of wilderness and science.
On any given page, the author writes about things like the daughter of his daughter Laura, the nuclei most prone to fission, and the Japanese name for explosive balloons that shut down the Hanford nuclear plant. His writing is drowning in facts.
If you are also one of these writers, you'll like this book.
“If they knock you down, you get up. If they knock you down again, get up. No matter how many times they knock you down, get up again.”
“Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.”
“Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness ... revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners....”
“There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.”