Ad Nauseum

What is it that defines the line between humility and pretentiousness.

I have a few general rules I devised like: mechanical process is humble, spirituality is pretentious.

So it is little wonder that somebody who wrote a book called 'eat, pray, love' got up my nose.

I'm not going to link to the talk because I don't want to bouy the talks ratings up with the 2 hits I get per day:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html is where you can find it.

She starts out well by talking about how it is strange that the reality for anyone creative is to be asked by people 'aren't you afraid you won't succeed?' and points out her father a chemical engineer (and any run of the mill job) never get asked if they are afraid they won't succeed.

A valid point, one of those divergences of reason and reality. Like reasonably in Australia people should be questioned as to why they drink, there is so little advantage physically, economically and arguably subjectively to drinking beer that one should be reasonably curious as to why any particular individual chooses to do it. But in reality so many people drink in Australian society the interesting question is why someone chooses not to drink.

But elizabeth loses me moving away from 'why this could be' by talking about coping with the anxiety of being a creative person.

So I want to pick up her strong start and run with it, before switching to defence and beating her actual talk down.

The divergence of reason and reality, I think follows like this: firstly if we define success in terms of a 'creative' it would be that they manufacture infectious memes, memes so persuasive not only do people adopt them but actually spread them like herpes. This process could be called 'fame' and furthermore, the creative or artist actually manages to sign their meme, so that throughout the world people know where the meme came from. We could call this narrow definition of success - 'fame'. That at least suggests the efforts will be financially viable, and this is what most people are talking about when they posit the question 'aren't you afraid you won't succed/will fail?'

Reason tells me this, a 'creative' has some remote chance of success (then if they do succeed it compounds in a winner take all scenario) say less than one in 10,000. if talking about moderate success. eg. Melbourne has a population of 1.5 million (perhaps?) and it can support 10,000 artists financially, and it has 150,000 people trying to become writers, artists, actors, directors etc. But reason tells us that in all the world of chemical engineers perhaps once a century, one chemical engineer in the entire world will become famous, world renouned with a patented product that everybody loves. Like the guy who discovered nylon, I believe largely by accident.

Therefore, reason tells us that a chemical engineer has no chance of success, they are by the motivations of the artist 'already dead', so the creative who presumably is clutching at the only chance they have should reasonably be generally curious as to why a chemical engineer doesnt fear the almost certain prospect that they will never be recognised as doing anything of any real value for anyone ever?

But the reality is that people except something as impersonal as money as recognition, and artists may not even recieve that, hence the question only goes the other way.

Now elizabeth actually suggests that a creative is right to be anxious about the notion of stress and argues (in a nutshell) that we should disembody our creativity to be an external spirit. This way an artist won't be too full of themselves when they succeed, and too depressed when they fail.

Basically - don't take responsibility (or full credit) for your actions. And certainly somebody as prolific as Michelangelo earned a nickname 'Il Divino' as if to say god put the inspiration to be great in him. So even as late as the renaissance there was still the practice of not giving credit where credit is due.

Now Greg Capullo - pencil artist for most of the Spawn issues that anyone actually read, defined 'professionalism' as 'sitting down and drawing even when you don't "feel" like it.' And looking at his work it's hard to notice when Greg is in the zone and out of it. Greg will probably never make it onto TED to talk about his art because he is actually not that articulate (going off his written words in his solo project 'The Creech') which Elizabeth certainly is.

But Greg is just one of many artists that can produce abundant quality art through a process that needn't be so mysterious as to credit it to divine intervention. Or poems that run off into the sunset 'looking for another poet'.

In the comic world, you have people like Alan Moore, Jeph Loeb, Art Spiegal, R Crumb etc that have produced a body of work all of 'genius' quality. In painting you had the Renaissance masters that created timeless excellence with little technological mobility on very limited subject matter (bible stories), you have concept artists like Yoko Ono with such an extensive body of brilliant yet pretentious work, you have Salvador Dali, Magritte, Andy Warhol, Brett Whitely, Jeffrey Smart, Francis Bacon, Van Gogh, Matisse, Carevaggio, Frida Karlo, Diego Riviera and so on and so fourth that are able to continually produce pieces of excellence. Picasso even had different periods all of which he mastered such as his very real 'Blue' period where he exemplified his classical training to his more famous abstract work in 'cubism'. In literature you have author's like Malcolm Gladwell, J K Rowling, Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, William Gibson, Terry Pratchett, George R R Martin, Robert Jordan, Neal Stevenson, China Mieville, Douglas Adams, Tolkien, Chuck Phalaniuk, Murukami and Nick Horn(s?)by etc. All of which have managed to write more than one book that has succeeded. Infact it's probably mostly attributable to the compounding nature of success, the 'winner take all' aspect of scalable professions. In other words, it is the genius of the last book that sells the next book. You become a 'creative by demerit' after your initial success. You will have an audience for your next work no matter what, but the audience for the work after your next work is not guarunteed.

But in literature perhaps the best illustration is of what Elizabeth should have talked about is Joseph Heller. Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22. A book I in all serious think should replace the New Testemant, be compulsory reading for every single student in the world and is simply put - the book of the 20th century.

And he never backed up the success of Catch-22. His first work was his greatest, he wrote many other books for the rest of his life, including his next most notable work 'portrait of an artist as an old man' perhaps the most instructive self examination by a creative since Carevaggio's self portrait series that document his young humility to his prideful peak to his debt ridden depression of old age.

This is the distinction, one I actually probably owe to Tommy Hacker. Rather than divorcing the 'genius' as a disembodied spirit to the artist, that sneaks in and completes your work in the middle of the night, rather the disembodiment is one of assumption: People generalise, this is the assumption that allows success to compound. But it is a demerit system that some artists are good at and some aren't. Put simply - a fan is a fan of the work, not a fan of the artist.

Tommy put it in the context of music fans, who can kick up a stink because they don't like the direction their favorite band takes on the next album, say Tool with the direction they took between Lateralus - considered by a majority of Tool fans to be a masterpiece, and 10,000 days, considered by myself and others to be 'meh' by Tool 'standards'. Tommy points out that if a fan likes the last album better, they can still listen to the last album. The band should be unfettered to progress and do different stuff. And this is actually what happens, I will listen to Tool's Aenema and Lataralus in entirety, but rarely do I listen to the 1 or 2 tracks on 10,000 days I like.

And that's just it, a fan generalises, they say they are a fan of Quentin Tarantino because it's easier than saying 'I'm a fan of Reservior Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Part 1, Kill Bill Part 2' when they are not a fan of 'Jackie Brown & Death Proof' or someone who says 'I'm a fan of Johnny Depp' because they like 'Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Pirates of the Caribean, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Nightmare on Elm Street, 21 jump street' but not 'Dead Man, Pirates 2 & 3, Finding Neverland and Sweeney Todd' it's just simpler to call out the general common ground than listing all the iterations you do like, and all the iterations you don't.

If any thing needs to be disembodied, it is the artist from the work. Not the talent from the artist. Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22, nobody else did, perhaps nobody else could. But if there's one thing I am fucking certain of, it is that no fairy floated in passed down Joseph Heller's arm and tapped away at the typewriter.

Perhaps the best answers for where 'ideas come from' is just this 'thinking' or perhaps as Terry Pratchett put it when I saw him speak one time 'reading books, nonfiction. You can't just read fantasy, you need to read outside of the genre you are writing in.' which an be extrapolated out to 'a lifetime of experiences'

Ideas come from books read, art scene, nature observed, feelings felt, drawings practiced, sports played, news stories watched, radio interviews heard, arguments had, classes taken, jobs worked etc. Not from mysterious fucking ether outside of the body.

The poet cited by Elizabeth in her story, would be roaming the countryside and be hit by 'a poem' passing through her body, forcing her to run back to the house and get the poem out at the precise moment it hit her and if she was too slow she would lose it and sometimes she would catch it and write it backwards.

I'm going to hazard a guess that this lady wrote a fucking bunch of poems about the American landscape she happened to be looking at, thinking about when this mysterious poem hit her. I'm going to interpret under Occam's razor that her 'catching a poem by the tail' story is a poetic interpretation of 'reverse engineering' the very unpretentious process of thinking about where something ended up to draw conclusions about how you got there.

Most saddening of all was that this Ted clip, ends with a standing ovation, that most Ted Clips cut off, and some pretentious woman comes up to give this pretentious woman a kiss and call her a 'genius'.

Why the fuck do people stand up and appluad someone for saying 'hey artists, its not your fault if you are bad, and it isn't your achievement if you succeed. Creativity is mysterious and unknown.' arguably the most offensive thing ever said about the creative process ever. Like religious people who think they are being humble by believing that they know universal truths that condemn everyone else to damnation.

For that we need another departure from reality and reason, reason states that by default everyone is not a genius, and someone should earn the title of genius by doing something with ease that ordinarily would be very difficult (even if they have had to work incredibly hard to get to that comfort level). But it seems we live in a world where somene can be hailed as 'brilliant, a genius, inspirational' without anyone bothering to check. Elizabeth basically just espoused the most pretentious way to deal with writers block - she could have just said like Greg Capullo - 'sit down and draw, even when you don't "feel" like it' that's fucking professionalism. Don't sit and talk to your disembodied spirit. I mean who is going to be inspired by that? fucking seriously.

That is why I have had to come up with the term 'not-a-genius' for when someone is elevated to an acclaimed status through pure blind luck and herd mentality, not actually offering any new or useful ideas, or cherry picking others ideas and bringing them to market, or being worshipped before they have achieved anything. So far the list is as such:

Not-geniuses:

Elizabeth Gilbert
Christopher Nolan
Yao Ming

And just for comparisons sake...

Geniuses:

Andy Kaufman
John K
Mike Patton
Alan Moore
Stanley Kubrick
Bill Russell

and this guy