The contradictions of genius

• Theodore Dalrymple examines the life and work of Arthur Koestler in City Journal.

An excellent overview of Koestler's life and work, in all its contradictory glory:

Koestler’s reputation as a writer had declined well before Cesarani’s revelations. He had become an author of the kind one encounters during late adolescence or early adulthood, whom one catches like the literary equivalent of glandular fever, but to whom, once read, one develops a lifelong immunity. Once one of the world’s most famous authors, he became as dated as the youthful fashions of three decades ago.

There were several reasons for this. By 1980, if not before, the burning political issues of his early adulthood—Communism, the rise of fascism, and the establishment of a Zionist state—were of less concern to new generations of readers. Many regarded Koestler’s subsequent obsessions—Indian mysticism, Lamarckian biology, non-reductionist science, and parapsychology—as bizarre or even dotty, the symptoms of a mind that had lost its way. In his will, he endowed a chair in parapsychology at Edinburgh University. He regarded telepathy and precognition as established facts, largely because of the now-discredited experiments of J. B. Rhine at Duke University. He began to collect examples of startling coincidences, as if they could tell us something about noncausal relations between events. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before him, he seemed to the public to have traveled from serious authorship to spiritualist crankdom.

The penultimate nail in the coffin of his reputation, before Cesarani’s revelations, was his double suicide with his wife, who was 20 years younger, in 1983. While he had both severe Parkinson’s disease (causing a decline in his mental powers) and leukemia (from which he was soon to die, in any case), his wife, who swallowed a fatal dose of barbiturates with him, was in perfect health. Many believed—without adequate evidence—that Koestler had bullied his wife into ending her life with him.

More on Arthur Koestler here.

Koestler update

Over the weekend I noticed, to my surprise and delight, that Arthur Koestler's 1941 novel Darkness at Noon is back in print, via Scribner:

Read more about this fascinating author here.

Math and art, strange bedfellows

• Writer Gregory K. Pincus has turned mathematics into poetry.

This is pretty cool:

Blogs
spread
gossip
and rumor
But how about a
Rare, geeky form of poetry?

THAT'S exactly what happened after Gregory K. Pincus, a screenwriter and aspiring children's book author in Los Angeles, wrote a post on his GottaBook blog (gottabook.blogspot.com) two weeks ago inviting readers to write "Fibs," six-line poems that used a mathematical progression known as the Fibonacci sequence to dictate the number of syllables in each line.

Within a few days, Mr. Pincus, 41, had received about 30 responses, a large portion of them Fibonacci poems. Most of them were from friends or relatives or people who regularly read his blog, which focuses on children's literature.

There is often an intriguing overlap between mathematical and dramatic theories. My favorite example is the Golden Section; a colleague of mine named Doug Adams once wrote a fascinating article on film music which included an intriguing discourse on the theory:

There exists a theory known as the rule of the Golden Section. Roughly paraphrased, this theory states that just under two-thirds (0.618034... and so on) of the way through anything there is some significant occurrence. The idea is that those things which humans naturally find appealing or stereotypically beautiful are most likely to adhere to these guidelines. Much of nature adheres to this rule. Many flowers have their largest leaves about two-thirds of the way up their total height. Multiply a human's height by .618 and you'll often find the waist. The eyes are approximately two-thirds of the way up the human face, the heart two-thirds of the way up the torso. Human-made art often follows these rules as well. Debussy was a strong believer in the Golden Section and structured his works accordingly. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" has some elements of the GS in its construction. "Alien"'s climatic cat-and-mouse chase begins at roughly around this ratio, as does "Star Wars"' trench battle.

In practically every writing course I've ever taken, mention was made of something similar in terms of the structure of whatever piece of writing you were focused on. For example, the Joseph Campbell model of screenwriting (which has been nearly beaten to death in the years since Star Wars first opened... thanks a lot, George) posits nine steps in the hero's journey:

1. The ordinary world.
2. The call to action.
3. Refusal of the call.
4. Crossing the threshold.
5. Tests, allies and enemies.
6. Ordeal.
7. Reward.
8. The road back.
9. Return and resurrection.

You'll note that two-thirds of the way through this list is "ordeal," which typically takes the form of a plot twist that changes the hero's goal -- the token damsel getting kidnapped by the bad guy, for example, thus giving the hero a new emotional investment in achieving his objective. (This device is also commonly referred to as the "third-act ticking clock," and was satirized hilariously in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.) The rhythm of certain styles of poetry -- cinquains and sonnets, for example -- follow this idea. Basic rules of composition for art and photography emphasize a one-thirds/two-thirds standard for filling the frame. And the musicians amongst you are already aware that typical 32-bar (AABA) song structure usually places the bridge about two-thirds of the way through the song.

Anyway, the point of all this is that this rule, ingrained as it is in typical perceptions of art and aesthetics, can be of great help to you in terms of the construction of your work, be it written, visual or auditory. If anything, it's a good jumping-off point. Not all works of art adhere to this rule, of course, but a lot of fun can be had in the manipulation of the rules... once you learn them, that is.

As an extension of that, I’ve found, more often than not, that exploring the strictures of math and science can in fact reveal new elements in aesthetics. Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation has many such passages that illustrate how one could inform the other. Mathematics, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, is entirely theoretical, and like any other man-made system of thought it’s subject to the same fallibility, and flexibility, as art.

Now I want someone to come up with a way to turn Occam's Razor into, say, a cell phone ad.

It's a guy thing

• The Guardian explores "the books that move men."

And the winner is... Albert Camus' The Stranger. (Apparently, across the pond it's known as The Outsider... po-tay-to, po-tah-to.)

Yeah... check. That one's been an all-time favorite ever since I read it in English class in 11th grade. But the Big 3, the books that really reshaped my conception of writing, were Richard Adams' Watership Down, George Orwell's 1984 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Orwell, of course, gets the mention in the Guardian piece, but then again, he's a homegrown hero over there.

We found a strong sense of nostalgia among male readers as they looked back to their formative years; many had tended to lose interest in fiction in favour of non-fiction on entering into adulthood. One consequence of this was that several men admitted that they were reluctant to reread a book which had been almost painfully important to them at puberty. "I'm afraid I might find it mawkish now", "It might not live up to my memories", "It might read as dated now" became familiar responses.

Men also recalled a kind of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager - the same word was used by a surprising number of those we interviewed. Having found an author who "spoke" to them, a man would have trusted them as a literary guide, reading all of their works, and also works quoted from or cited by them. Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently as having guided our male reader in his choices of author. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in our survey of women's reading, though word-of-mouth recommendation by other readers regularly had (men mentioned word-of-mouth much less often).

I admit, I haven't reread any of the above books in many, many years, but not necessarily because I'm afraid of finding them to be lacking; it's just that there are too damn many other books I haven't read yet.

As for authors who've become mentors by proxy, well, I've read just about everything Stephen King has ever written, but I wouldn't necessarily consider him to be a guiding light. (Despite the fact that many of his books feature as a central character a screwed-up writer type.) I have, though, discovered authors and gone through phases where I read everything by them I could get my hands on; writers including (but not limited to) Richard Russo, Arthur Koestler, Don DeLillo, John Barth and T. C. Boyle have always left me hungry for more.

Ghostwriting and lost gems

• Tim Adams exposes the secrets of ghostwriters at Guardian Unlimited.

Most writers I know don't care for the notion of ghostwriting; that writerly integrity we hold onto so hard demands that the author write every single word him- or herself, dammit. The flipside is, it's usually good money, but the work itself can be draining. I've never really wanted to ghost anything -- I'll stick with my own byline, thanks -- but a case can certainly be made for it. Adams' article primarily discusses British personalities (with an emphasis on sports stars), which may render some of it incomprehensible to us Yanks, but there's illuminating material in it, just the same:

It seems to me that such books are rather a last resort of wish fulfilment. We invest so much of our culture in sport and celebrity that it feels necessary that the principal players have something to say for themselves. The soundbites you hear on Sky Sports News, or the quotes that are reheated in Heat will never be enough. The frustration of celebrities is they are in a world we desire but are unable to articulate how we imagine it feels. That's why the ghost - who exists in a hinterland between reality and surreality - is so engaging. He or she provides a voice that is halfway between his or her mundane life - and therefore ours - and that of the subject.

• Michael Jan details smaller presses' attempts to unearth out-of-print gems at the Columbia Spectator.

The New York Review of Books Classics series boasts some really great stuff; I've really enjoyed the works they've published by Georges Simenon, Alvaro Mutis and J. F. Powers. It's gotten to the point where whenever I see the NYRB logo on a book's spine I'll pick it up for immediate inspection, like I do with CDs put out by Tzadik or Varese Sarabande or Impulse. There are dozens of great authors who've written lots of books that have gone out of print; I'd love to see works by Laurens van der Post, Arthur Koestler and Pauline Kael, among others, get republished and rediscovered. And when, oh when is some enterprising company going to reissue Cameron Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (a nonfiction work which was the basis for the film)? The continued absence of that particular title has always been a mystery to me; I've always wanted to read it, but I've never been able to find it in any library anywhere, and I don't particularly feel like dropping $50 or more on some battered old paperback.

Groupthink, dormroom favorites and that pest Darwin

• Michael Young tackles the problem of public intellectuals at Reason.

Despite the needlessly highfalutin’ sound of the phrase “intellectual power cadre,” there’s still something enormously appealing about the idea of a bunch of brainy maniacs getting together, bouncing ideas around and goading each other into great things. A creative comfort zone that’s generated by your peers is incredibly rewarding; I’ve always found it fascinating to trace friendships and relationships between artists, if only to practice armchair psychology in tracing influences and trends.

Granted, groups like this inevitably burn themselves out, or turn against one another, or simply grow apart. But there’s nothing like watching a group of similarly-minded artists getting together and producing great things because of (or, perhaps, in spite of) their influence on one another.

Another excellent piece in this vein is Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece “Group Think”, which examines the clubhouse atmosphere of Saturday Night Live’s heyday in the context of similar group-driven movements throughout history, and comes up with some interesting points along the way:

We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it works, whether it's television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book "The Sociology of Philosophies," Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves: the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses.

• Famous people talk about books they loved in college at Slate.

So I’m not famous, but anyway, a book I really loved in college was Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s one of those books that’s next to impossible to summarize, because it covers so many different bases; Hofstadter is a lot like Arthur Koestler in his restless examination of practically anything that crosses his radar. Ostensibly it’s about the process of translating a poem by French writer Clement Marot into simple Yankspeak, but Hofstadter spins this narrative thread off into a thousand different directions; even when he’s totally lost you, you still marvel at the sheer wealth of ideas and the associative web that he weaves.

David Fincher once noted that language was invented so that people could lie to one another; Hofstadter’s ebullient examination of art, language and ideas (and, most movingly, love) strikes far deeper than you ever expect it to, and really gives you a reason to believe. Back in my dormroom days, Thoreau’s Walden provided me a few weeks worth of great head-in-the-clouds idealism, but Le Ton beau de Marot is the one I still find myself sneaking back to.

• D. T. Max places Austen and Darwin in the same sphere at the New York Times Magazine.

Science and art would seem to be strange bedfellows and yet the great artists -- the ones whose work endures -- set out to capture nature’s patterns in their work, most particularly our own. A comment from Christopher Hitchens in the aforementioned Slate piece, regarding George Eliot’s talent “in guessing at the real springs of human motive and in describing the mammalian underlay of social forces,” ties in nicely with this piece, which examines Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the context of evolutionary behavior.

Yeah, it’s probably because there’s a new movie of it out, but still, there are plenty of interesting bits along the way:

It is useful to know a bit about current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at a text as the product of particular social conditions or, less often, as a network of references to other texts. (Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, famously observed that there was "nothing outside the text.") It often focuses on how the writer's and the reader's identities - straight, gay, female, male, black, white, colonizer or colonized - shape a particular narrative or its interpretation. Theorists sometimes regard science as simply another form of language or suspect that when scientists claim to speak for nature, they are disguising their own assertion of power. Literary Darwinism breaks with these tendencies. First, its goal is to study literature through biology - not politics or semiotics. Second, it takes as a given not that literature possesses its own truth or many truths but that it derives its truth from laws of nature.

More on Arthur Koestler

• Christopher Hitchens champions Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon at Slate.

Koestler's political seesawing would make a great book in and of itself. Hitchens, of course, is more concerned with Koestler's political writings, in particular his essay in The God That Failed, in which Koestler struck out against Communism as practiced by the Stalinist regime. Towards the end of his life Koestler attempted to blur the line between "hard" science and metaphysics, which led some to believe that he'd simply gone off his rocker (not a surprise, since he was also experimenting with LSD, telepathy, levitation and parapsychology). The thing that's attractive about those later writings, though, is the Thoreau-esque sense that spirituality and science need not exist in strict separation; Koestler believed that the processes of each were reflective of the other, and he had the ability to walk you through his ideas without making you feel like you were being talked down to. That, or he bluffed awfully well. In either case, Hitchens makes an interesting case for Koestler's early writing career and how it was defined by his ever-evolving political beliefs. (See my profile of Koestler from August.)

Author profile: Arthur Koestler

A few years ago I read an interview in The New York Times with some members of the writing staff of The Simpsons. One of them -- I can’t remember who -- mentioned Arthur Koestler’s book The Act of Creation in passing, as part of a well-articulated point about the conflicting nature of comedy. I subsequently spent years looking for it -- fruitlessly, because it was, of course, out of print. I finally found a used copy online not long ago.

Koestler had a crazy, Cervantes-esque life. He was born into a German-speaking Hungarian Jewish family in 1905. During a stint as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War, he was captured and held prisoner for several months, an experience which formed the basis for his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon. He became a British subject during WWII and became well-known in the postwar period for his writing, which spanned from politics and science to philosophy and mysticism. He was an early advocate of euthanasia and committed suicide while terminally ill, along with his wife (who was apparently in good health), in 1983.

The Act of Creation is the second in a trilogy (the others being The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine) of examinations of life sciences and the human mind, and it’s really, really interesting -- written clearly and engagingly, without impenetrable jargon. Koestler’s basic idea is that there are “matrices” or patterns of thought that govern the human animal, and that the creative act is the “bisociation,” as he puts it, of two (or more) apparently incompatible frames of thought -- the creative act is the working-out of the new matrix. It's informative and enlightening across the board -- Koestler’s great gift is laying out the whys and hows of the creative process has evolved and how ideas can, and must, evolve along with it.

Selected quotes from The Act of Creation:

"The impersonator is two different people at one time. If the result is degrading, the spectator will laugh. If he is led to sympathize or identify himself with the impersonated hero, he will experience that state of split-mindedness known as dramatic illusion, or 'the magic of the stage.'"

"The humorist thrives on deformity; the artist deforms the world to recreate it in his own image."

"...to a sophisticated audience any joke sounds stale if it is entirely explicit."

"...discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit."

"...we may distinguish between the biological ripeness of a species to form a new adaptive habit or acquire a new skill, and the ripeness of a culture to make and exploit a new discovery."

Regarding Darwin: "Here is one of the cases where the process of elaboration, verification and confirmation -- the long donkey-work following the brief flash of insight -- is more decisive than the discovery itself."

"...static vision does not exist; there is no seeing without exploring."

"...distrust of words is a trait often found among those who create with their eyes."

"...the tragedian creates illusion, the comedian debunks illusion; the therapist does both."

"Imagination is at once the source of all hope and inspiration but also of frustration -- to forget this is to court despair."

"...the tragedies of science are the slayings of beautiful hypotheses by ugly facts."

"The consumer hopes that by being allowed to share the creator's vision he will gain a deeper and broader view of reality. The producer has an urge to share his own experience with others -- to win accomplices to his malice, partners in understanding, resonance for his emotions."

"Righteous indignation about injustices inflicted on others can generate behavior just as fanatical as the sting of a personal insult. Self-sacrificing devotion to a creed bred ruthless inquisitors -- 'the worst of madmen is a saint run mad.'"

Bibliography:
- Spanish Testament (1937)
- The Gladiators (1939)
- Darkness at Noon (1940)
- Arrival and Departure (1943)
- Twilight Bar (1945)
- The Yogi and The Commissar and Other Essays (1945)
- Thieves in the Night (1946)
- The Challenge of Our Time (1948)
- Promise & Fulfillment: Palestine 1917-1949 (1949)
- Insight & Outlook (1949)
- The Age of Longing (1951)
- The Trail of the Dinosaurs and Other Essays (1955)
- Reflections on Hanging (1956)
- The Sleepwalkers (1959) (abridged edition published in 1960 as The Watershed)
- The Lotus and The Robot (1960)
- Control of the Mind (1961)
- Hanged by the Neck (1961)
- Suicide of a Nation? (1963)
- The Act of Creation (1964)
- Studies in Psychology (1965)
- The Ghost in the Machine (1967)
- Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967 (1968)
- Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences (1969) (with J. R. Smythies)
- The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971)
- The Call Girls: A Tragicomedy with a Prologue and Epilogue (1972) (play)
- The Roots of Coincidence (1972)
- The Lion and The Ostrich (1973) (pamphlet)
- The Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968-1973 (1974)
- The Thirteenth Tribe (1976)
- Janus: A Summing Up (1978)
- Bricks to Babel: Collected Extracts (1980)

Autobiography:
- The Scum of the Earth (1941)
- Arrow in the Blue (1952)
- The Invisible Writing (1954)
- Stranger in the Square (1980) (with Cynthia Koestler)

Contributed to / featured in:
- The God That Failed (1949) (essay) (edited by Richard H. Crossman)
- The Challenge of Chance: A Mass Experiment in Telepathy and Its Unexpected Outcome (1973) (edited by Allister Hardy)
- Life After Death (1976) (co-editor)

Further resources:
Arthur Koestler entry at Wikipedia
Small collection of Koestler writings at the Arthur Koestler Project