Tag: Karl Ove Knausgaard

Cutting to the core of creativity

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

I’m reading two books right now: “Kudos,” the mesmerizing new novel by Rachel Cusk, and the non-fiction treatise “The Creative Habit” by celebrated dancer-choreographer Twyla Tharp.

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The former is a whole-cloth original, narrative-defying, discursive and brainy, like the two previous books in Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, “Outline” and “Transit,” of which “Kudos” is the ravishing finale. Challenging and unorthodox, the seemingly autobiographical novels crack open your mind in a furiously fresh manner. They evoke Karl Ove Knausgaard’s rambling “My Struggle” series but are more rigorous, compressed, and chewier.

Catching my breath, I’m really here to dwell on Tharp’s self-described “practical guide,” whose full title is “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life.” I’m a sucker for eloquent lessons on creativity and the artist’s way, including, yes, “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, “The Sound on the Page” by Ben Yagoda, “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life” by Anne Lamott and “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. These books possess transformative powers, tweaking your creative habits just so, massaging your brain to look at the blank page or canvas with a kind of nervous optimism instead of paralyzing dread or clogging trepidation. They are weighted with wisdom.

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Tharp, a paragon of her art form, knows of what she speaks, and she speaks it plainly and persuasively, with little decorative dressing but plenty of panache. She’s a beneficent, caring lecturer, and the book, breezy and empathetic, bulges with sticky, pragmatic advice. Quick: “In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.” Or: “There are no ‘natural’ geniuses.” That’s in the first nine pages, and somehow I find these statements awfully encouraging. 

She digs much deeper, with infectious enthusiasm. Using hard-earned lessons from her own work methods and creative processes in ballet and presenting instructive anecdotes about artistic challenge and triumph among such underachievers as Mozart, Beethoven Richard Avedon, Balanchine and Maurice Sendak, Tharp casts a wide net showing how happy accidents, preparation and luck (those are Siamese twins), ritual, archiving and mineable memory are critical components of productive creativity. (She also includes some loopy exercises that I didn’t have much use for. One required a bunch of eggs.)

Flipping through this clean, handsome, none-too-big book I plucked a few quotables:

“The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty, I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple thumping away in my head: ‘You need an idea.'”

“Another trap is the belief that everything has to be perfect before you can take the next step. You won’t move on to that second chapter until the first is written, rewritten, honed, tweaked, examined under a microscope, and buffed to a bright mahogany sheen. You won’t dip a brush in the paint until you’ve assembled all the colors you can possibly imagine using in the course of the project. I know it’s important to be prepared, but at the start of the process this type of perfectionism is more like procrastination. You’ve got to get in there and do.”

“The best writers are well-read people. They have the richest appreciation of words, the biggest vocabularies, the keenest ear for language. They also know their grammar. Words and language are their tools, and they have learned how to use them.”

“There is no one ideal condition for creativity. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that’s habit-forming.”

“Jerome Robbins liked to say that you do your best work after your biggest disasters. For one thing, it’s so painful it almost guarantees that you won’t make those mistakes again. A fiasco compels you to change dramatically. The golfer Buddy Jones said, ‘I never learned anything from a match I won.’ He respected defeat and he profited from it.”

“These mistakes — relying too much on others, waiting for the perfect setup, overthinking structure, feeling obligated to finish what you’ve started, and working with the wrong materials — are deadly. Any one of them will undermine your best efforts.”

“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources … Limits are a secret blessing, and bounty can be a curse. I’ve been on enough big-budget film sets to appreciate the malignant influence of abundance and bloat.”

“You might not struggle for spine. You might be content to receive any random thought floating through the ether that happens to settle on you that day. You might think you don’t need a supporting mechanism for the art you’re constructing, a controlling image, a collateral idea to guide you. You might think getting lost is a big part of the adventure. You may think that, but you’d be wrong.”

I’ll read this next. Or maybe this. No wait. What about that?

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

A few posts ago I crowed about the next five books I plan on reading.

Scratch that. 

Things change. Switcheroos occur. Some books work, some don’t. I close and tuck away the latter and embrace and finish the former. There’s been some tucking away going on. 

I announced on the blog that after completing the superb Siamese twins biography “Inseparable” I would take on my Amsterdam holiday Kurt Vonnegut’s darkly comic wartime novel “Mother Night.” All of that happened. 

Except: I didn’t cotton to the Vonnegut book as I was certain I would. Quite early on I found it uninviting, atonal and dry. I shut it. And became desperate. I was still in the States and my sole vacation book was failing me. 

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Discouraged yet determined, I marched to an airport bookshop, poked and peeked at a dozen acclaimed books, until I hit the staff picks display, which spotlighted Ann Patchett’s heavily praised novel “Commonwealth.” I’m not used to paying full price for paperbacks, but I popped the almost $20, grimacing and banking on the best — even while recalling that I couldn’t get into Patchett’s previous blockbuster “Bel Canto” the two times I tried.

“Commonwealth” is strong. On the whole trip, though, I read only 47 pages of it — my laptop is a serious distraction. I enjoyed the book’s humor, descriptive muscle and palpable humanity, and I planned on gladly finishing it back home.

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Then this happened: Waiting for me at home was Rachel Kushner’s new, ecstatically reviewed “The Mars Room,” which was on my list of five books to read next. It was, of all things, a library book, with a two-week checkout limit. I pounced. “Commonwealth” would have to wait.  

I just wrapped “The Mars Room,” a very good if never truly great page-turner set largely in a sordid women’s prison, much like “Orange Is the New Black,” with grim and funny detours streaking the story, including a few to the San Francisco strip club of the title. Kushner is good with grit, limning harrowing and humorous situations with a kind of streamlined tough-gal strut. And the final pages seize you hard. 

Before the Amsterdam trip, I borrowed two other titles on my list of five, Zadie Smith’s “NW” and Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Homesick for Another World,” neither of which I got around to thanks to the pleasingly time-consuming “Inseparable.” They remain fast on my reading list. 

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And yet: Dropping off “The Mars Room,” instead of getting the Smith or Moshfegh books, I got distracted and picked up two more books on my extended wishlist, Curtis Sittenfeld’s comic coming-of-age novel “Prep” and Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winner “Salvage the Bones.” 

I get sidetracked in a snap when I’m around piles of books, my head on a pivot, eyes flashing, hands flipping pages, picking up and putting down volumes. So much to read, so many diversions, so many anxious postponements.

Of the two books I grabbed, I chose first to plunge into the poverty-stricken, pre-Katrina, Mississippi-set “Salvage the Bones.” So far, it is rapturously evocative, the prose raw and earthy and exquisite, the narrative quivering and propulsive.

Here is Ward’s description of a pit bull giving birth to puppies:

“Skeetah grabs the puppy’s rear, and his hand covers the entire torso. He pulls. (The mother) growls, and the puppy slides clear. He is pink. When Skeetah lays him on the mat and wipes him off, he is white with tiny black spots like watermelon seeds spit across his fur. His tongue protrudes through the tiny slit that is his mouth, and he looks like a flat cartoon dog. He is dead.”

If “Bones” eventually chokes — that’s far-fetched — I’ll do what I am wont to do: put it down and move on to the next title. But what will that be? “Prep” or …

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Even with two books before me, I said screw it and ordered Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Spring,” a slim new memoir arriving in the States bubble-wrapped in effusive plaudits. The book is “poignant and beautiful,” a critic says. “Even if you think you won’t like Knausgaard, try this one and you’ll get why some of us have gone crazy for him.” (I’ve read five of his books and have gone crazy for him.)

“Prep” or “Spring” — I’m betting on the latter. Or will yet another title crash my consciousness and hijack the show? Likely.

Book fiends I know are afflicted with this disease of ravenousness, of greedy insatiability, of jonesing for the next fix. Books as lifeblood. Beats baking. Beats sports.

The saga continues, so much pulped wood before me, no end in sight. It’s an embarrassment of riches — words, language, poetry, morality, mortality, love and loss. And, as that, it’s a crazy blessing.