In A Perfect World

Expanding the Boundaries of Art

Here's the online version of "By Design," a just-published magazine story of mine about three of my favorite things: art, architecture, and writing about art and architecture. Working on the piece reminded me why I like architects so much. The best ones are imaginative thinkers, capable of transforming highly conceptual ideas into functional forms -- and typically they are amazingly articulate about their visions. The story focuses on the newly expanded Virigina Museum of Art in Richmond, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

What Would You Sacrifice for a Major Breakthrough?

 
What would you sacrifice to solve a problem that has stumped mathematicians for more than a century? What if, at the conclusion of your creative breakthrough, you would be deluged with generous offers from top American universities? What if you could expect a million-dollar prize for solving that problem?

Russian mathematician and genius Grigory Perelman solved the Poincare Conjecture, a complex topological problem involving how to characterize three-dimensional spheres. With an unbending focus on mathematics since childhood and a mind possessed with nearly superhuman computing power, Perelman did what no man or woman could do before. But to do it required sacrificing nearly every vestige of a normal life. Now 43, this internationally acclaimed mathematician lives with his mother. 

Masha Gessen, author of the recently published and powerfully told Perfect Rigor: A Genius + The Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century, believes that Perelman has Asperger's Syndrome, an autistic condition that has enabled his singular focus and rigorous commitment to rules. But it also has made him unable to cope with the messy reality of everyday life and the social pressures that swirled around him and his extraordinary achievement.

In fact, Gessen describes how offended and hurt Perelman was by the outpouring of offers from schools such as Princeton, Columbia and MIT that followed his celebrated triumph. Rather than enjoying the flattery, he saw this behavior as signs of the crass commercialization of math, a lack of ethics, vulgar attempts to buy him off for all his hard work.

So what did he do? He dropped out. He is said to have stated that he was quitting mathematics forever.

Whatever level of eccentricity or madness (Gessen's word) Perelman suffers, I have to say that I admire his fearless stand enormously. He's forsaken most everything for what he believes is right.

Yes, it may be a loss for mathematics and for the universities and students who could learn from him, but he's offered an enduring principle: What matters most is not the fame or the fortune. It's the work itself. 

Shedding Light on The Art of The Idea

Often the strongest ideas are the simplest ones. John Hunt, author of an insightful new book called The Art of The Idea, describes two categories of people: sunrisers and sunsetters. "A sunriser gives out energy, a sunsetter sucks it away," he writes. "A sunriser goes through life open to the idea that the best may still be coming. A sunset person is heavy in the knowledge that the best is past."

Guess which kind of person suffocates creativity and which is best in a brainstorm session determined to spur fresh ideas and creative breakthroughs.

Hunt, a South African and worldwide creative director of the advertising agency TBWA, says that age has nothing to do with which category anyone falls into. In fact, Hunt, who was intimately involved in Nelson Mandela's election campaign in 1993, describes South Africa's extraordinary leader as "the most sunrise person I've ever met...Often in meetings, he'd listen to people angry about the past. When they were finished, he's agree with them. They were right, he'd say. Then he'd ask that their anger at the past not contaminate the future...Mandela knew that if he based his ideas on the evils of the past, he'd soon have a sunset country."

Hunt's short book -- filled with pithy, well-written observations and charming artwork from South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa -- aims to give room  for ideas to breathe, be it in a jam-packed meeting or alone on an airplane. It's based on his experience that original thinking really can happen in a group and that the power of an idea is not based on who owns it but how it's shared.

That's a view worth exploring. You can see an interview with Hunt on an interesting blog -- mad-blog.com-- created by TBWA to "celebrate media arts and disruption."

The Last Station: Jay Parini wrote the book

  
Jay Parini is one of the lucky ones. A couple of years ago, I interviewed him for a piece I was writing about Russia and Leo Tolstoy's Moscow house, now a charming museum on the city's outskirts. Parini, who teaches literature at Middlebury College in Vermont, had written a good and substantial historical novel called The Last Station about the last year of Tolstoy's life and the battle for his soul. He already expected then that a movie based on his book was going to get made.

At the time, he thought Anthony Hopkins and Meryl Streep would be playing the roles of the great author and his wife Sofya -- roles ultimately taken by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren. Not so shabby. The cast also includes two of my other favorites, James McAvoy and Paul Giamatti.

The film, in limited release until January, has already landed two Golden Globe nominations (Plummer and Mirren) and five Independent Spirit awards, and it seems poised to garner some Oscar noms as well. As any filmmaker knows, getting any film made is a small miracle. Getting a good film made is a major one. The same theory surely applies to novelists imagining a film based on their novels.

Yet, nearly every time I read a review about the new movie, there's a part of me that feels badly for Parini. Why? More often than not, the talk is all about Michael Hoffman's The Last Station, the film that he directed and wrote. Well, they might mention that it's based on Parini's novel, but more typically the reader is led to believe that the film simply sprang forth from Hoffman.

Shed no tears for Parini. He's got a major motion picture based on his novel coming to a theater near you. More than that, a good director took his work seriously enough to create a sensual human drama, not merely a stiff Masterpiece Theater job. That's damned lucky.

But let's hope as the award season rolls on that more people remember that good movies usually originate from hard-working writers like Parini, compelled to create even if the movies don't come calling. 

Digital Facts of Life for Book Lovers

I almost fell out of my chair when I read Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' interview with Deborah Solomon in The New York Times Magazine about the Kindle and digital book sales. Think there's any going back to the glorious preeminence of the printed word? 

Forget it. Game over.

Here's what Bezos said: "For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition. It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books. It’s astonishing."

Yes, it is. No wonder there are a lot of frightened veterans in the book business.

But even as reluctant writers must embrace the pixelated world for connecting with readers -- and must be energetic and creative in how they do it -- they can take solace in one reality that will never change: Compelling stories, engagingly told, will always matter.

And one more thing: If not long ago scoring a deal with a top book publisher was the only road to victory, today there are many paths to success. That's good news.

Moby-Dick is on my iPhone

I am a writer. I believe in the printed word. But I've been trying to wrap my head around the idea that there's no intrinsic reason that words are better appreciated on paper. Call it my survival instinct. 

So in a nod to the earth shifting under our feet, I've been exploring various hand-held electronic devices for viewing books. And, to my surprise, I have come to praise the iPhone for reading a book. I'm not saying that I prefer it in every case -- because I don't -- but consider this:

I am having the best time reading Moby-Dick on my phone. 

On paper, it's more than 800 pages and weighs in at nearly two pounds. That's daunting. But in the bite-sized chunks on my phone, it feels less overwhelming ... and fun.

Stanza, the program that I used to get Herman Melville's classic, tells me exactly how much I've read. Page two of chapter 8? That's 6.4 percent. I can change the background, the color, the size of the font. 

And while standing in line waiting with my daughter to get her the H1N1 vaccine, I pulled out my phone and read Moby-Dick for an hour. Time well-spent that didn't require me to drag the massive tome with me, let alone plan to drag it.

One extra plus: The phone has back-lighting. So on a pleasant evening, I can sit outside and read a book in the dark or lay in bed and read with the lights out.

I won't stop buying "real" books, but I will no longer trash the idea of reading a book electronically. And as Nicholson Baker pointed out in a recent New Yorker piece, when the writing pulls you in, questions about format drift away. That's when the magic takes over and you enter the world of the story.