#I still read a biography years later and that biographer sure did not have many kind feelings towards her it seemed

[museenkuss]

It’s so absurd to see Sisi on my dash. It’s like tumblr took a peek into 12 year old me’s mind and went “yeah, that unlikeable eating disordered horse woman with the bad teeth and the Heine obsession sounds like the perfect it girl”

Then again, tumblr WOULD think that.

[fuckyeahstephensondheim]

Rick Pender knows his Sondheim from A to Z

If the word “encyclopedia” conjures for you a 26-volume compendium of information ranging from history to science and beyond, you may find the notion of a Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia perplexing. But if you have ever looked at a bookshelf full of book after book about (and occasionally by) the premiere musical theatre composer-lyricist of our era and wished all that information could be synthesized and indexed in one place, maybe the idea of a Sondheim encyclopedia will start to make a little more sense to you. It did to Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, an independent publisher that’s made encyclopedias such as this one of their calling cards, offering tomes on everyone from Marie Curie to Akira Kurasowa. Several years ago, they approached Rick Pender, longtime managing editor of the gone but never forgotten Sondheim Review and now, after years of research, writing, and pandemic-related delays, the The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia is finally hitting shelves. I sat down with Rick (via Zoom) to chat about this unique, massive project.

FYSS: I want to really focus on the new book, but we should start with your history with Sondheim and The Sondheim Review. How did you become so enmeshed in this work?

RP: As a teenager, the first LP that I bought was the soundtrack from West Side Story, and I didn't have any clue about who much of anybody was, particularly not Stephen Sondheim. But I loved the lyrics for the songs, especially “Something’s Coming” and “Gee, Officer Krupke.” These are just fabulous lyrics.

Then, of course, in the ‘70s it was hard as time went by not to have some awareness of Sondheim. I saw a wonderful production of Night Music in northeast Ohio, and I again just thought these lyrics are incredible, and I love the music from that particular show. Fast forward a little further in the late ‘80s, I was laid up with some surgery and I knew I was going to be bedridden for a week or two anyway, so I went to the public library and grabbed up a handful of CDs, and in that batch was A Collector's Sondheim, the three-disc set of stuff up through about 1985, and I must have listened to that a hundred times, I swear, because it had material on it that I didn't know anything about like Evening Primrose or Stavisky. So that really opened my eyes.

Later, my son had moved to Chicago. He's a scenic carpenter and a union stagehand. He worked at the Goodman Theatre, and I went to see a production when they were still performing in a theater space at the Art Institute of Chicago, and they had a gift shop there. And lo and behold in the rack I saw a copy of a magazine called The Sondheim Review! I thought, oh my gosh, I've got to subscribe to this! This would have been about 1996, probably, so I subscribed and enjoyed it immediately. A quarterly magazine about just about Stephen Sondheim struck me as kind of amazing.

In 1997-98 the Cincinnati Playhouse did a production of Sweeney Todd in which Pamela Myers, all grown up, played Mrs. Lovett, and so I wrote to the editor of the magazine and said, “Would you like me to review this?” That started me down a path for a couple of years of making fairly regular contributions to the magazine. Then in 2004 that editor retired, and I was asked to become the managing editor, which I did from 2004 to 2016. It went off the rails for some business reasons, but it lasted for 22 years which I think is pretty remarkable.

I tried to sustain it in an alternative form with a website called Everything Sondheim. We put stuff up online for about 18 months, and we published three print issues that look very much like The Sondheim Review, but we were not able to sustain it beyond that.

FYSS: How did the Encyclopedia project originate?

RP: The publisher asked me to write an encyclopedia about Stephen Sondheim! I envisioned that I would be sort of the general editor who coordinated a bunch of writers to put this together, but they said no, we're thinking of you as being the sole author. They had done a couple of other encyclopedias particularly of film directors, and those were all done by one person, so they sent me a contract asking me to generate 300,000 words for this book, and after I regained consciousness, I said all right, I'll give it a try.

It took me about two years – most of 2018 and ‘19 – to generate that content. I sent it off in the fall of ‘19, and then, well, the world stopped because of the pandemic. It was supposed to come out April a year ago, and they had just furloughed a bunch of their editors and everything stalled. But now it's coming out mid-April 2021.

FYSS: What was the research and writing process like?

RP: This project came about in part because the publisher initially approached another writer, Mark Horowitz, who's at the Library of Congress and who had done a Sondheim book of Sondheim on Music. Mark and I had become quite close because he wrote a number of wonderful features about different Sondheim songs for The Sondheim Review. When I heard that that he had put my name out there, I went back to him after I had agreed to do this and said, Mark, could we use some of that material that you wrote for the magazine about those songs? And he said, sure do with them whatever you wish. And I was glad he said that, because they were really long pieces, and I've reduced each of them to about 1500-2000 words, which I thought was probably about the maximum length that people would really want to read in a reference volume.

But other than that, I generated everything else myself. I relied upon plenty of material within the 22 years of back issues of The Sondheim Review. Another great resource was Sondheim's own lyric studies, the two-volume set which provides so much information about the production of shows and that sort of thing.

Of the 131 entries I wrote for this, 18 of them are lengthy pieces about each of the original productions, so again Sondheim's books were certainly useful for that, and other books like Ted Chapin's book about Follies.

I also spent some time in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress, and Mark loaned me a quite a bit of material that he had collected – not archival material but scrapbooks of clippings that he put into ring binders of stuff about Sondheim's shows.

I came back to Cincinnati with about four or five cartons of materials, and I could really dig through that stuff as I was working on these. And then I have, as I'm sure you and lots of other Sondheim fans have, a bookcase with a shelf or two of Sondheim books, and those were all things that I relied upon, too.

I actually generated a list with lots and lots of topics, probably over 200, and I knew that was going to be more than I could do. Eventually, some things were consolidated, like an actor who perhaps performed in just one Sondheim show wasn't going to get a biographical entry, but I would talk about them in the particular show that they were involved in. So, I was able to collapse some of those kinds of things. But as I said, I did end up with 131 entries in the publication, and it turned out to be 636 pages, so that's a big fat reference book.

FYSS: Who is the intended audience for a work like this? RP: The book is really intended to be a reference volume more than a coffee-table book. It does have photography in it, but it's black and white and more meant to be illustrative than to wallow in the glories of Sondheim. There is an extensive bibliography in it, and all the material is really thoroughly sourced so people can find ways to dig into more.

FYSS: Sometimes memories diverge or change over time. Did you come across any contradictions in your research, and how did you resolve them?

RP: I can't say that I can recall anything like that. I relied very heavily on Sondheim's recollections in Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat because he's got a memory like a steel trap. Once in a while I would email him with a question and get very quick response on things. I really used him as my touchstone for making sure of that kind of thing.

I also found that Secrest’s biography was very thoroughly researched, and I could rely on that. But I can't say that I found a lot of discrepancy, and some of those kinds of things were a little too much inside baseball for me to be including in the encyclopedia.

FYSS: For figures with long and broad histories, how did you decide what to include? George Abbott, for example, is the first entry in the book and he worked for nine decades! How important was writing about an individual as they relate to Sondheim vs. who they were more generally?

RP: To use George Abbott as an example, I would say that the first things that I did was to go back to the lyric studies and to the Secrest biography and just look up references to Abbott. I mean, it was George Abbott who said that he wanted more hummable songs from Sondheim, so you know that was certainly an anecdote that was worth including because, of course you know, it becomes a little bit of the lyric in Merrily We Roll Along. 

So you know, I would look for those kinds of things, but I also wanted to put Sondheim in context because Abbott was well into his career when he finally directed Forum which, since it was Sondheim's first show as a composer and a lyricist, is significant. That was very much the focus of that entry, but I wanted to lay a foundation in talking about Abbott, about all the things that he had done before that. I mean, he was sort of the Hal Prince of his era in in terms of his engagement in so many different kinds of things – writing plays, directing musicals, doctoring shows, all of that.

FYSS: Did any entries stick out to you as being the hardest to write?

I think the most complicated one to write about probably was Bounce/Road Show because it's got a complicated history, and Sondheim has so much to say about it. And because it's not a show that people know so much about, I wanted to treat it appropriately, but not as expansively as all of that background material might have suggested. So I kind of had to weave my way through that one. It also was a little tough to write about, because how do you write a synopsis of a show that has had several incarnations quite different from one another, and musical material that has changed from one to the other? With shows like that, I particularly tried to resort to the licensed versions of the shows. 

FYSS: I haven't had a chance to read the book cover-to-cover yet, but I did read the Follies and the Into the Woods entries to try to get a sense of how you covered individual shows, and both of those are shows that had significant revisions at different times. And I thought you made it very clear what they were and also where to go for a reader who wants to learn more.

RP: Let me say one other thing this is not directly on this topic, but it sort of relates, and that is that in writing an encyclopedia, I didn't want to overlay a lot of my very individual opinions about things, but with each of the show entries I tried to review the critical comments that were made about the show in its original form, perhaps with significant revivals and that sort of thing, and then to source those remarks from critics at those various points in time. And of course, my own objectivity (or lack thereof) had something to do with what I was selecting, but I thought that was a good way to represent the range of opinion without having to make it all my own opinion.

FYSS: Did you feel any responsibility with regards to canonization when you made choices about what to include or exclude? What made the First National Tour of Into the Woods more significant than the Fiasco production, for example? Why do Side by Side by Sondheim & Sondheim on Sondheim get individual entries, but Putting It Together is relegated to the omnibus entry on revues?

RP: I guess that now you are lifting the curtain on some of my own subjectivity with that question. I tried to identify things that were particularly significant. I mean with the revues for instance, several of those shows – you know, particularly Side by Side by Sondheim, the very early ones – they were the ones I think that elevated him in people’s awareness. So, I think that to me was part of what drove that. And then shows that that were early touring productions struck me as being things that maybe needed a little bit more coverage. I think the Fiasco production was a really interesting one, but with the more recent productions of shows I just felt like there's no end to it if I begin to include a lot of that sort of thing.

FYSS: I mean it's so subjective. I'm not the kind of person who clutches my pearls and screams oh my goodness, how could you not talk about this or that. But I was surprised to see in your Follies entry that the Paper Mill Playhouse album was not listed among the recordings, for example. I imagine that once this book hits shelves you're going to be bombarded with people asking about their pet favorites.

RP: Oh, I'm sure, and maybe that will be a reason to do a second edition, which I’m totally ready to do.

The Sondheim Encyclopedia hits bookstore shelves April 15. It’s available wherever you buy books, but Rick has provided a special discount code for readers of Fuck Yeah Stephen Sondheim to receive 30% off when you order directly from the publisher. To order, visit www.rowman.com, call 800-462-6420, and use code RLFANDF30.

Celebrate the launch of The Sondheim Encyclopedia with a free, live online event featuring Rick Pender in conversation with Broadway Nation’s David Armstrong Friday, April 16 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Eastern. More information and register here.

[senadimell]

2, 7, 30?

Ooh, my first request!

2. Favorite underrated historical figure?

Princess Taiping/ 太平公主！ I wrote a paper on her and it was really hard to find sources discussing her in her own right. She’s a Zhou and Tang-dynasty figure, the daughter of the famous Wu Zetian, known as the only female emperor in China (Zhou being the single-generation dynasty established by Wu Zetian) She’s not someone I’d emulate, but man, she lived a wild life. 

She instigated two successful coups and played politics like nobody’s business. All the while, she amassed landholdings and wealth. She was her mother’s right-hand woman: Emperor Wu* used one of the Taiping Princess’ plans to get rid of a confidante who’d gone too far by setting fire to a temple. Princess Taiping’s first husband was implicated in a failed rebellion against her mother and executed, but she was able to remarry and stay on the scene. In fact, we’re pretty sure her mother had the wife of her second husband assassinated so she could remarry him. I think it’s fascinating that she was able to stay on top during her mother’s rule, as two of her brothers were executed by her mother and two were ousted from power after being named successors. Later in her mother’s life, Taiping outmaneuvered both her mother and her mother’s head of secret police to coerce her mother into agreeing to oust him. 

Eventually, she knew winds were changing in the court and her mother was falling out of favor, so she helped convince her to abdicate the throne in favor of one of her brothers, who I will refer to as Emperor Zhongzong.

It’s kinda complicated to talk about the crazy intrigue that followed her mother’s death, because practically all of her brothers and nephew all have multiple names: birth names, ruling names, and post-humous reign titles, so it can get a little confusing. So Emperor Zhongzong (sounds like jhong-tsong) came into power and his wife, Empress Wei, was also a strong political actor. She did not want Princess Taiping wielding that much political power, and Princess Taiping had lost her most powerful backer when Wu Zetian stepped down. Empress Wei wanted her daughter, the Anle princess, to hold power in the court, and even tried to have her named crown princess and heir, something unprecedented. That didn’t work and her son Li Chongmao/later Emperor Shao was named successor instead. It’s strongly suspected that Empress Wei and the Anle princess (sounds like ahn-leh) conspired to and successfully poisoned Emperor Zhongzong. The Taiping Princess lost no time in launching a coup, and in two weeks time both Empress Wei and the Anle princess were dead. 

Li Chongmao didn't stand a chance. He was around 10-12 when this happened, and when people were still talking about who would be the new leader, she said “Everybody turns to the prime minister [princess Taiping’s brother, Li Dan, later Emperor Ruizong], little boy; this is not your seat.”** Emperor Ruizong treated Princess Taiping as a political equal and relied heavily on her advice.

Meanwhile, his son Li Longji grew in political power and prowess. She felt threatened by him, and participated in a smear campaign to limit his power. He tried to placate her appointing her supporters to  government, so the government was filled with people loyal to her. Unfortunately for her, Emperor Ruizong’s advisors still managed to convinced him to exile her. Through her connections, she was still able to maintain power in the court. 

In 712 ACE, Emperor Ruizong took a comet as a sign he was to step down (rather than eventually getting killed in the struggle between his son and sister) and announced his future abdication to his son Li Longji, temple name Emperor Xuanzong (shu-en tsong) which is how I will refer to him from now on). Aware of what this would mean for her, the Taiping Princess planned her third coup, an armed struggle to upend the soon-to-be Emperor Xuanzong, but was betrayed and discovered. She fled to a monastery, but was found three days later and permitted to commit suicide (seen as more honorable than execution). In the aftermath of the coup, all of the political leaders associated her were implicated by association and were executed or forced to commit suicide. Get this: that was all but one of the chief ministers! It took years for the state to completely appropriate her amassed landholdings and wealth.

*So Empress usually denotes a designated wife of an emperor (皇帝）. Wu Zetian went from a consort to empress regent to empress regnant, essentially. When Wu Zetian ascended the throne, she did some masterful religious and linguistic subversion to establish her legitimacy and came up with a lot of new terms and names to justify what she was doing, since it was unprecedented.  Essentially, she was the female version of Emperor, but translating the linguistic titles is complicated. 

**Sue Wiles and Lily Xiao Hong Lee “Li, Princess Taiping” Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, Volume II: Tang Through Ming 618 - 1644. Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women.

7. Which time period would you like to live in?

Now. The current one. Go back too far even in the past century and I lose rights and privileges that I value, like the ability to dress as weirdly as I please, the ability to discuss issues of mental health and the #me too movement with women’s rights in general, the ability to work where I want, and the ability to openly practice religion. I would also miss conversations and changes within my own faith community about treating people of all races and backgrounds equally, church culture vs. doctrine, and attitudes towards church history.

 But if I were a time traveller and could stop in a place for a vacation, I’d love to live in the early 1900s (1900-1920) and visit major urban centers for art, music, and to witness labor conditions and activism. Alternatively, if I were a time traveller I would simply attend live showings of my favorite shows and concerts (lots of musical theatre)

30. Favorite kids/teens history books:

Most of the historical fiction I’ve read takes place in the past 100 years, and a lot of it takes place in the 30s and 40s. I do have a rule for myself that I don’t seek fiction about the Holocaust--the things here are exceptions. I tend to read survivor’s accounts instead, though I couldn’t think of many novels in for this rec. 

 Between Shades of Grey, by Ruta Sepetys--gorgeous, heart-wrenching book about a girl in Lithuania sent to a Soviet prison camp in Siberia. 

Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein--both take place during WWII. Rather brutal and play around with alternative narration styles.

The Devil’s Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen. I don’t know how to describe it. During a Passover Seder, Hannah Stern is transported back in time to 1942 Poland, during World War II. 

Anything by Gillian Bradshaw (she’s more of a ‘dump you into the history hard and let you figure things out’ kind of author, which I love--I’m trying to get my hands on A Beacon at Alexandria. She also writes historical fiction set in antiquity, which I don’t see as often.)

Flygirl, by Sherri Smith about the WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots). Tackles the racism of the era as well.

The Red Umbrella, by Christina Diaz Gonzalez, about the Cuban exile after the revolution of 1959

Esperanza Rising, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, about a girl who leaves her estate in Mexico and has to live as a migrant worker in California. 

Uprising, by Margaret Peterson Haddix. This is about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911 and is a good introduction to labor issues and unions in US history. This book is almost solely responsible for why I don’t think Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them looks anything like New York at the early 20th century (yes, I know this takes place 10 years earlier, but conditions hadn’t changed all that much). 

The Lightning Tree, by Sarah Dunster (not the book of the same name by Patrick Rothfuss). This one’s a bit personal--it’s a coming-of-age story following the story of a girl of Waldensian heritage set in Utah right after the Utah War (1858) and a year after the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It’s character-driven, lyrical and subverted my expectations of what would happen. 

The Vanishing Point, by Louise Hawes. A fictionalized biography of Lavinia Fontana, a famous female artist in the Italian Renaissance. Considering how the art world is dominated by male artists, this was really neat to read, and also takes place further in the past than a lot of things I read. 

Distant Waves, by Suzanne Weyn: Probably the weirdest book here, but just fabulous. It combines spiritualism, Nikola Tesla, Houdini and Doyle, H.G. Wells and the wealthy crème de la crème of the era with the Titanic.

Non-fiction

Yankee Doodle Gals, by Amy Nathan is about the WASP and is fabulous.

Teens at War, by Allan Zullo. Ten stories of teenagers at war throughout history.

Witch-Hunt: Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials by Marc Aronson. One of the things I realized was just how much of an anomaly the trials were, as previously courts had been denying spectral evidence as a valid source of evidence.

Night, by Elie Wiesel. A personal history of surviving the Holocaust. Here’s the thing--if you can, read both the edition before his wife translated it and compare it to her translation. Her translations soften the hard edges of the book, which isn’t something I usually want if I’m reading about the Holocaust, but have been called more true to his words.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. A moving and disturbing story about race, medical exploitation, the invention of vaccines, and poverty in the U.S. I don’t know if this counts as a teen novel, but I read it as a freshman in high school on my librarian’s recommendation.

Savage Girls and Wild Boys Does this count as children or history? It’s a history about feral children (raised by animals, etc) and other children raised in extraordinary circumstances. 

Sort of history? It’s more modern. Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick. It’s kind of a memoir of Arn Chorn-Pond, someone who survived the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 and was a child soldier. It’s brutal, but I recommend it to everyone. 

This isn’t a children’s history book, but I can’t miss an opportunity to recommend it. The Rape Of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II by Iris Chang is utterly heartbreaking. The Rape of Nanjing has hugely significant to cultural memory, and yet most people I’ve talked to in the states have never hear about it

As for children’s books, I read my copy of The Secret Soldier by Ann McGovern to death. If not for its length, it would probably be falling out of its binding by now. 

I also read my mother’s childhood copy of The Story of Helen Keller by Lorena A. Hickok over and over again (first published 1958). 

Survivor, by Allan Zullo. Compilation of stories from children who survived the Holocaust. 

The Hidden Girl, the story of Lola Rein Kaufman written between her and Lois Metzger. After her mother is killed by the Gestapo, she has to hide in a barn to survive.

OH! ETA:

Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics  and Tough Mothers: Amazing Stories of History's Mightiest Matriarchs by Jason Porath are a fun way to get familiar with historical and legendary female historical figures. There is some swearing and description of all the sorts of things you can imagine have happened to historical women, but it’s organized by rating and type. 

@brightbeautifulthings I don’t know if asking automatically tags you?

[marryat92]

Captain Marryat: 'Among the first in Dickens’s liking'

Marryat in 1841, the year he met Charles Dickens

Inevitably, when some lesser-known person is associated with Charles Dickens, that connection will be advertised as loudly as possible, since Dickens is one of the few 19th century writers and public figures who still enjoys widespread recognition in the English-speaking world. Such is the case with Frederick Marryat. A biographical blurb about Marryat will often bring up his friendship with Dickens before any of Marryat's own accomplishments are mentioned.

Despite their age difference —Marryat was 20 years older than Dickens— the two men were certainly friends. I have tried to puzzle out exactly how close they were with sometimes sketchy evidence (not helped by the fact that both men tried to burn or destroy large amounts of their correspondence.) I don’t know if the young Charles Dickens was keenly interested in meeting Captain Marryat; but Marryat was clearly aware of him. Dickens and Marryat didn’t meet each other in person until 1841, but Marryat recorded the wild popularity of Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, as he traveled to America in 1837: “Dinner over; every body pulls out a number of ‘Pickwick’; every body talks and reads Pickwick; weather getting up squally; passengers not quite sure they won’t be seasick. [...] for many days afterwards, there were Pickwicks in plenty strewed all over the cabin, but passengers were very scarce.” (Diary in America)

As for who was influencing whom, that question is easy to answer. Marryat was first on the scene, writing in a Dickensian vein with picaresque heroes and colorful characters sketched from life before Dickens was a household name. Marryat published his nonfiction travelogue Diary in America years before Dickens’ equivalent American Notes (which was clearly inspired by Marryat.) According to the English professor Louis Parascandola, Marryat “was the first nineteenth century writer to publish his novels serially in his own magazine, the Metropolitan, an important precedent for later authors like Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray.”

The first meeting between Marryat and Dickens was arranged by their mutual friend, the artist Clarkson Stanfield. Stanfield wrote to Dickens at the beginning of 1841, “I have before told you that my friend Captain Marryat is very anxious to have ‘what all covet’, the pleasure of your acquaintance and, if therefore you have no objection to meet him, will you come and take a beef steak with me on Wednesday 27.” Dickens replied, “I shall be delighted to join you and know Marryat.”

Dickens and Marryat seem to have immediately hit it off, enjoying each other’s wit and theatrical personalities. As Marryat’s biographer Tom Pocock describes it:

The two men took to each other at once. They shared a recognition of the absurd and could present it entertainingly, sometimes mixed with pathos and even tragedy. But while Marryat re-created the world that he himself had experienced in his books, Dickens’s imagination erupted with cavalcades of characters and panoramas of widely varied scenery. Dickens did not see Marryat as a rival but recognised his skill in presenting the world of the sea and seamen, which he himself could only try to imagine. Thanking Marryat for sending him his latest novel, Dickens wrote, ‘I have been chuckling, and grinning, and clenching my fists and becoming warlike for three whole days past.’

It seems clear that Dickens and Marryat would be close friends, and Marryat himself might be a less obscure writer in the present day, except that his association with Dickens was so brief. By 1843 Marryat had sequestered himself at his country estate in Langham, Norfolk, far from the literati of London with the transportation methods of the day. Marryat’s biographies and Florence Marryat’s Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat are full of entreaties from his friends begging Marryat to return to London to socialize with them and attend various events. He rarely agreed to travel, and by 1848 he was dead.

John Forster, Dickens’ friend and biographer, writes in The Life of Charles Dickens: “There is no one who approached [Dickens] on these occasions [dancing at parties with the Dickens children] excepting only our attached friend Captain Marryat, who had a frantic delight in dancing, especially with children, of whom and whose enjoyments he was as fond as it became so thoroughly good hearted a man to be. His name would have stood first among those I have been recalling, as he was among the first in Dickens’s liking; but in the autumn of 1848 he had unexpectedly passed away.”

For all the brevity of Dickens’ relationship with Marryat, they were close enough for Dickens to share some juicy gossip. In a letter to Forster, Dickens shines a rare light on Marryat’s rocky marriage. There is an anecdote about Marryat, “as if possessed by the devil,” teaching “every kind of forbidden topic and every species of forbidden word” to the overly sheltered sons of a baronet, and the “martyrdom” he suffered with his wife. Catherine (Kate) Marryat, as described by Dickens, is a violent, temperamental woman who beats her maid and has “no interest whatever in her children.” 

Although Victorian propriety omitted names, as Marryat’s biographer Oliver Warner notes, “The reference might be considered vague enough— except to those who knew Marryat. To them, it must have been so clear that in later editions Forster left out all references by which Kate might identify herself.” Dickens’ 20th century biographer Walter Dexter also names the troubled couple as the Marryats.

Charles Dickens is the only person whose documented, surviving correspondence mentions the fact that Marryat spoke with a lisp. Marryat’s daughter Florence mentions no such thing, and Marryat never gave a speech impediment to his leading characters, but Dickens quips about an old fresco, “I can make out a Virgin with a mildewed Glory round her head and … what Marryat would call the arthe of a cherub.” (A few online articles about Marryat make a lot of hay over this sole mention of a lisp, and they can all thank Charles Dickens for spilling the tea.) Poor Marryat, who reminisced in a laudanum haze about all of his old friends in his final months, including “Charlie Dickens”, did he anticipate this reveal? He really should have known that Dickens had a wit that could be as mocking and caustic as his own.

Principal References (not including Marryat’s own books):

Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat, Florence Marryat (1872)

Life of Charles Dickens, John Forster (1872-1874)

Captain Marryat: A Rediscovery, Oliver Warner (1953)

Puzzled Which to Choose: Conflicting Socio-Political Views in the Works of Captain Frederick Marryat, Louis J. Parascandola (1997)

Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer, and Adventurer, Tom Pocock (2000)

[the-demelza-robins]

A Hogwarts Reunion 1/2

Request: None

Words: 2k 

Pairings: Hermione/Draco, Harry/Ginny

PART 2

To Whom It May Concern,

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is holding a reunion for those who graduated twenty years ago. Every wizard/witch invited will have one plus-one. Children are welcome. We expect your owl by no later than July 17th. 

Sincerely, Aberforth Dumbledore

Headmaster, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Hermione Granger bit her lip and stared at the letter in her hand, letting the morning light from the kitchen window shine onto it. A dark brown tawny owl sat on her kitchen counter a few feet away, waiting for her response. After she gave none, it squawked at her three times until her head snapped away from the piece of parchment. "Oh! Don't worry, we'll send an owl to the school ourselves." 

Ruffling its feathers, the owl flew out of the window and into the horizon. The woman watched it fly until it disappeared before letting her gaze return to the letter, her mind racing with the possibility of seeing her schoolmates again. She, Harry, and Ron had all fallen out of touch after she went to Australia to restore her parents' memories. 

She'd never come back to them. 

There was a rumbling upstairs, and Hermione knew instinctively that her kids had woken up. Soon enough, they stumbled down the stairs into the kitchen, bleary eyed. At the age of sixteen, Rose was the oldest. Scorpius was only five years younger than her at eleven. Both had dirty blonde hair and brown eyes. They were sleeping in; it was a Saturday morning and even though it was summer, Hermione sent them to a tutor to get them caught up on muggle subjects such as English and Math during the weekdays.

"Where's dad?" Scorpius asked, looking around the kitchen suspiciously for his father, almost as if he expected him to jump out from behind the counter.

Hermione ruffled his hair and silently asked herself the same question. "He had to stay late at the Ministry. He'll be back soon." No need, she thought to herself, to add that the only reason she was standing in the kitchen when they woke up was that she was watching for his arrival. The dark circles under her eyes surely proved that. 

"You should go to bed," Rose said quietly, following her mother's gaze out the window. 

"I'm fine," Hermione said. The lie came easily and often; it was the cure-all solution to questions she didn't want to answer. 

Scorpius, innocently oblivious, had started to make some scrambled eggs "the muggle way". Hermione busied herself with helping him, and soon, they were all having breakfast. After Scorpius went upstairs, Rose cornered her mother. 

"He's been coming home this late for awhile now, hasn't he?" Yes, Rose was the most like her mother, caring and all. Clever, too, but Scorpius was as well - just in a different way. Hermione shifted uncomfortably, remembering all the nights when her husband had come back just in time to get in bed and pretend to have been sleeping before the children woke them up. "Maybe." 

Rose’s eyes narrowed, a mannerism she’d inherited from her father. "You've been waiting up for him every night?"

The witch nodded. Rose sighed and tucked a strand of her blond hair behind her ear. "I don't understand why you love him as much as you do. He can be such a prat sometimes." 

"Language, Rose," Hermione said, her tone defensive. "That's your own father you're talking about. And haven't I told you not to make assumptions? There are some things you'll never understand. Now get a head start on your homework for school. The sixth year is always one of the hardest, you don't want to enter it unprepared." 

Rose sighed again and left the kitchen, casting one more anxious look at her mother over her shoulder. Hermione resumed her position by the window, looking out of it once more. He never flew from the ministry and never used floo powder. He always Apparated right in front of their doorstep... 

Shifting her glance momentarily from the window to the Daily Prophet, she saw her own (considerably younger) face beaming back at her, along with news of her last whereabouts. The ad had been running every week for the last eighteen years, though the space it had been afforded in the newspaper had slowly shrank over the years. Hermione looked over the article again - the headline had not changed in eighteen years (“Missing: The Brightest Witch of Our Age”) nor had the picture of her (taken during a Ministry-organized ceremony commemorating those who’d fought against Voldemort). Even the small, italicized writing at the bottom of the ad remained the same: Last confirmed sighting October 17th, 1998 while the subject was leaving for Australia. Current whereabouts unknown. Any sightings should be reported to The Office of Misplaced Persons at the earliest convenience. 

Hermione’s husband claimed that the ad was only still running because of the pull Harry Potter had in the ministry. She figured he was probably right, but it still boosted her ego quite a bit to see it in there. 

Then, suddenly, a loud pop - not loud in anyone else's ears, but loud as a gong in Hermione's - sounded from the street below. 

Excitedly, the brightest witch of her generation dropped the Prophet and hurried down the hall to the living room, where the entrance to the house was located.

Draco Malfoy stepped through the door, dark circles under his eyes, hands stained with ink. He was restlessly alert, and his eyes scanned the room before making contact with those of his wife's. He wrapped his arms around her, and only when he had done so did his form relax a little bit. 

"I was so worried," Hermione whispered. 

A smile tugged at the edge of her husband's lips. "Of course you were. Please tell me you slept at least a little?"

"I was waiting for you."

"All night? Hermione, I know you love me, but -" He was cut off as she kissed him. "Go to bed."

Her smile turned into a frown. "Not before I get some answers first. What held you up this time? The children noticed." 

He sighed and looked into the kitchen as if to make sure that his kids weren't listening in. "Potter's gone mad," he whispered. "He's had us looking for you every night under threat of losing our jobs."

"It's been twenty years!" Hermione exclaimed, both annoyed and touched at the same time. 

"Yeah, well, his efforts have been restarted by the so-called 'Granger sighting' a few days ago," the man said. "You should watch when you go to Diagon Alley next time."

"I don't like living under house arrest, Draco," Hermione said irritably, her tiredness wearing away at the aura of pleasantness and agreeability that her husband claimed didn't exist. 

He sighed. "I know you don't, but imagine what will happen if they found us," he paused for dramatic effect, "Owls swooping in, Aurors at our front door -"

"- hexes and jinxes flying all over the place," Hermione finished wryly. She'd heard this speech many times, but it still didn't sit right with her. "They'll - they'll kidnap you, and they'll take the kids, just because - because of this!" Draco ripped up his left sleeve, revealing the Dark Mark still etched there. In all his hysteria, his voice had gotten louder. 

"Quiet, the kids'll hear," Hermione shushed. Draco snorted and collapsed on the couch, all fight leaving him in one smooth motion. "They're smart, Hermione. You honestly think they haven't figured it out yet?" 

She joined him, taking his hand. "I like to believe they haven't." 

He studied the lines in her palm for awhile. Finally, he spoke, "We'll figure it out. We'll figure out a way for you to do things among English wizards again without having to wait a month for the Polyjuice potion to brew. We just need time." "Time heals all wounds," the witch muttered. 

"It's true. After all, you married me." 

"I suppose I did," she said thoughtfully. "Still, Ron and Harry were always much more close-minded..." 

He couldn't help himself when he whispered, "Idiots." 

Hermione chuckled. "They weren't that bad, you know. Ron was thick as a brick but he was funny. Harry -" 

"Enough about the Boy Who Didn't Die, I'm sick of hearing about it," Draco said crossly.

"- just saying that if circumstances were different, you would've been great friends -" 

"If he was a Slytherin, maybe..." 

" - you're both smart, you know, and you both love Defense Against the Dark Arts." 

"Same interests do not a friendship make!" 

"Besides, who are you to judge my friends when your friends are some of the worst, tasteless and, frankly, rude people I've ever met -" 

"Hermione." 

"Draco." 

"Stop saying such silly things before I make you stop."

"And how will you do that?" Hermione asked, subconsciously moving closer to her husband. 

As usual, Scorpius had impeccable timing. "Mum! Rose has charmed my quills into attacking me again!" 

Hermione rolled her eyes at her husband and stood up, following an indignant Scoripus out of the Watching her go, Draco was about to nod off before noticing a crumpled piece of parchment on the floor. Frowning, he picked it up and straightened it out before reading it. As he did, his frown deepened considerably. 

"Hogwarts?" he muttered, looking at the seal on the front. "Hogwarts again?"

"You need to stop worrying Mom so much."

Draco looked down at his daughter before clearing his throat. "I try not to." "She waits up for you." 

"I tell her not to." 

"Dad?" 

“Yes, Rose?”

“I mean this in the best way, but -”

“Get on with it.”

“I’m so lucky to have you as a father, you’re amazing and all, but -”

Draco sighed, closed his eyes, and then opened them again. “You’re asking why she married me.”

“I’ve just been wondering - there’s biographies on her, you know, I checked one out from the library back when school was in session - she punched you.”

“That’s a very determined biographer, that is.”

“I know. Rita Skeeter, I think her name is? She doesn’t portray Mum very well, but -”

“I don’t know why she married me. But I’m lucky that she did.”

"Hermione?" Draco said, holding the letter from Hogwarts in his palm. 

"Yes, Draco?" his wife said airily. It was a day later, Sunday, and everyone was having a restful afternoon except Hermione, who had spent the morning completing paperwork for her position at the Magical Congress of the United States of America. It was a tribute to the bad relations between the two Wizarding governments that Hermione's whereabouts were secure within the MCUSA - though she held a high-ranking position and was well known within the magical American community, only her surname was used in press releases and interviews. 

"When were you going to tell me about the Hogwarts letter?" 

"I don't know." 

He faced her. "Why are you so scared of what might happen?" 

Hermione looked up from her book. "Because you know what a prat you were to them - and me - all through our Hogwarts years." 

Draco looked hurt, and Hermione knew he was going to start saying what he always did when she broached the subject of their less-than-amicable Hogwarts years. "I didn't start it. I asked Potter to hang out with me on the first day of school and he -" 

"Draco, we both know you weren't as complimentary of Ron as Harry would've liked. Your utter disdain for most things was not charming." She paused and looked at him. He looked stricken. More gently, she continued, "Now, obviously, against all my better judgment, I've gotten past that -"

"And thank Merlin you did," he muttered. 

"- but they haven't. If they hear that Hermione married Draco, it would kill them. They would probably disown me. And no telling what Ron would do." Her voice rose a little with every word. She was on the verge of a full-scale anxiety attack. 

Draco took her hand. "You're fine. It'll be fine. We don't even have to go." 

She pursed her lips. “My gut is telling me to go, though.”

“Whatever you decide.”

"We'll go," Hermione said, cracking a smile at him. 

"How will you tell them?"

She sighed, her forehead creased in thought. "I just will. Don't worry about it." 

The children were told the next day. Rose, who knew her parents' history, had initially argued with the arrangement, voicing all of Hermione's silent concerns. But when she saw the look of determination on her mother's face, she backed off. Draco sent an owl back with their confirmation. And so things were ready. 

[christymtidwell]

I don’t often read biographies. I only have 12 books on my Goodreads shelf labelled “biography” that I’ve actually read, and a couple of those might be stretching the definition a bit (e.g., Kate Bolick’s Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, which includes biographical sketches as part of a more autobiographical project). Looking over the short list of biographies I’ve actually completed, it appears I’m primarily drawn to biographies of women, including the following: Rachel Carson, Judith Merril, George Eliot, James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), Rosa Luxemburg, Octavia E. Butler, and Shirley Jackson. The list also includes Rachel Ignotofsky’s Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World, which is a collection of short, illustrated biographical sketches of female scientists throughout history. There are only three books on the list that are about men (and here I want to mention Philippe Girard’s Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life, which I listened to on a long car ride and would highly recommend).

I’m not sure what it is that has me reading mostly biographies of women. It’s not a conscious choice to focus on women. Some of this focus certainly grows out of my scholarly interests; my dissertation was about feminist science fiction and feminist science, after all. Rachel Carson, Judith Merril, James Tiptree, Jr., and Octavia E. Butler are all relevant to that work. But my dissertation didn’t focus on any of these women and didn’t require biographical research anyway.

Certainly there’s also an element of admiration in my choices. All of these are biographies of women whose work I value: Rachel Carson’s scientific work as well as her writing about science; James Tiptree, Jr.’s brilliant and disturbing fiction, much of it reflecting on gender and sex; Judith Merril’s writing and editorial work and the way she helped shape science fiction as a genre; Octavia Butler’s revelations of power in her fiction (I especially love Dawn); Rosa Luxemburg’s fight for freedom and justice. And so on.

Another unfortunate pattern, however, seems to be that the biographies I have enjoyed most (is enjoyed the right word? perhaps not) are those of women who have led somewhat painful, constrained lives: Rachel Carson, James Tiptree, Jr., Octavia Butler, Shirley Jackson.

This pattern seems especially to be highlighted by Ruth Franklin’s recent biography of Shirley Jackson (Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, 2016), which I just finished reading. Franklin emphasizes Jackson’s always strained relationship with her mother, her feeling of never fitting in anyplace, the hurtful ways her husband (scholar Stanley Hyman) treated her, frequently lukewarm responses to her fiction with a couple of significant exceptions, the tension she felt between her life as wife and mother and her life as writer, her late-in-life agoraphobia and serious anxiety, and her early death. Despite some real success as a writer and what seem like largely positive relationships with her children, Jackson’s life is marked by pain, anxiety, and a sense of her lack of freedom.

Reading her fiction with this in mind is illuminating. For instance, her work frequently circles around the supernatural. She typically stops short of relying on the supernatural as an explanation, but it is always a possibility, and it was something she studied for years.

Witchcraft, whether she practiced it or simply studied it, was important to Jackson for what it symbolized: female strength and potency. The witchcraft chronicles she treasured–written by male historians, often men of the church, who sought to demonstrate that witches presented a serious threat to Christian morality–are stories of powerful women: women who defy social norms, women who get what they desire, women who can channel the power of the devil himself. (261)

Shirley Jackson didn’t identify herself as a feminist, but she certainly fits into a feminist tradition. And Franklin points out how her observations about her own life, as well as her fiction, presage Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Like many women of the time, Jackson felt she had little to no control over her own life, little to no say in what was possible. Witchcraft, even as a thought experiment, allowed a window out of that world of control.

Later, Franklin’s discussion of The Haunting of Hill House includes a significant, telling detail about Jackson’s sense of the book and, potentially, about her sense of herself. At one point, Franklin observes that, in her notes, Jackson referred to a particular line as the “key line” of the novel. This line comes after Eleanor has been clutching Theodora’s hand in fear as she hears a child crying for help in the next room. When the lights go on, however, Theodora is not in bed with her but in the bed across the room: “Good God,” Eleanor says, “whose hand was I holding?” This line always gives me chills but I hadn’t considered it as central to the book in the way Jackson apparently did.

Franklin’s interpretation builds upon Jackson’s biography:

The people we hold by the hand are our intimates–parents, children, spouses. To discover oneself clinging to an unidentifiable hand and to ask “Whose hand was I holding?” is to recognize that we can never truly know those with whom we believe ourselves most familiar. One can sleep beside another person for twenty years, as Shirley had with Stanley [Hyman] by this point, and still feel that person to be at times a stranger–and not the “beautiful stranger” of her early story. The hand on the other side of the bed may well seem to belong to a demon. (414)

This is an intriguing reading that I will have to consider when I re-read the novel. Whether I find it convincing as a reading of this line or not, however, it is a compelling take on Shirley’s mindset and the feelings about her marriage she struggled with for many years.

Franklin’s biography – as in these two examples – provides potentially useful ways of reading Shirley Jackson’s work through her biography. The next instance raises questions about the limits of such readings, however.

Late in her life, when she became (temporarily) unable to leave her house, she found herself also unable to write. Franklin writes, tying Jackson’s anxiety to her relationship with Stanley, “It was an issue of control, she thought. How could she wrest control of her life, her mind, back from Stanley? And if she could, would her writing change?” (477). Jackson wrote in her diary at this time, “insecure, uncontrolled, i wrote of neuroses and fear and i think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety.” Her books do all seem to wrestle with anxiety and fear, and this is the source of much of their power. Would she write such books if she were a happier woman? If the world made room for her to be who she needed to be? Likely not. But what other books might she have written instead? Her books gather force from her anxiety and fear, but to leave it there is to discount her talent and skill as a writer. I suspect that a less unhappy version of Shirley Jackson could still have been a brilliant writer, but she might have spoken to different concerns. Or perhaps she would still have reflected these fears, for they are not unique to her or to her situation as a woman in an unhappy marriage in the mid-20th century.

Some of Jackson’s commentary on her own writing from earlier in her life indicates the broader reach of her ideas:

In a publicity memo written for Farrar, Straus around the time The Road Through the Wall appeared–only a month before “The Lottery” was written, if the March date on the draft is accurate–Jackson mentioned her enduring fondness for eighteenth-century English novels because of their “preservation of and insistence on a pattern superimposed precariously on the chaos of human development.” She continued: “I think it is the combination of these two that forms the background of everything I write–the sense which I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction, which may be the devil and may be intellectual enlightenment.” In all her writing, the recurrent theme was “an insistence on the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behavior.” (224)

I take this as a reminder that although her personal demons may have shaped her writing, these feelings and themes are not unique to her or to people with similar problems. In fact, this quote seems to sum up horror fiction in a nutshell: rationality attempts (and fails) to control that which is beyond rational, humanity attempts (and fails) to control itself or its “wickedness.”

Shirley Jackson & Biography I don't often read biographies. I only have 12 books on my Goodreads shelf labelled "biography" that I've actually read, and a couple of those might be stretching the definition a bit (e.g., …

[topicprinter]

I see a lot of people on this thread asking Should I start this? How does XYZ be able to do it? How do I find the motivation to do it? etc. This is part II of a two-part summary of the book Deep Work by Cal Newport that I wrote for my friend to urge him to read it during the quarantine. I categorize the essence of an entrepreneur into certain core skills. I then read up on books that teach those skills and summarize them for the benefit of my friend and mine. I plan to post the summaries here for yours as well. You can find the first part hereMy friend, the 4DX framework is not a how-to guide for deep work alone. You can apply it to anything you do. Most successful people apply this (Planning, Measuring, Execution & Feedback) in their lives to some extent but some do not realize they were doing it. (unconscious competence)As you will see, deep work is a common skill from Bill Gates, Carl Jung, J K Rowling, Walter Isaacson and every other successful person who has ever achieved something worthwhile. (Walter Isaacson is the biographer of many great 21st century personalities. As an Apple fanboy, You will particularly appreciate that Steve Jobs personally requested him to do his biography)Coming back to our deep work example, You are in IT sales. You want to earn that commission. It means financial freedom to you. If I asked you to measure it, you would probably start measuring sales deals closed/month or revenue earned/month. But as we just learned, these are lag measures. You cannot directly measure them. What should you measure? The Number of leads approached/day. The Number of clients spoken to/day. These are things that you can directly influence daily. If you work on them and do it right, your lag measures (sales deals closed/month) will increase, right? Right. And then you can get the commission you wanted.​Tip #1: Plan these things in advanceWhere you'll work and for how longHow you will work once you start to workHow will you support your workAt this point, you might think, isn't this excessive? Do I need to plan out that far? Well, the answer is yes, my friend. Remember our school friend Dan? He makes it a point to start work at 7 am every day. He has a ritual. He reaches his office by 7 am, makes calls to his clients for an hour, and then schedules other work for the day and takes small breaks in between. This ritualistic habit is key to making it work. (Co-incidentally building habits is key - whether it is going to the gym, learning a new language, learning to code, etc - more on this later). Deciding where you will work and then getting there and doing it, will automatically put you in the mood for deep work.How long you will work for is also equally important. This is something you must decide after trying it. Initially, your focus muscle will be weak. So you will find yourself distracted. ( I will teach how to deal with distractions later) So it is important to set timers for yourself (say 25 minutes. I started with 25 minutes a year ago and now I can work for 90 minutes without my mind starting to wander).How will you work once you start to work? - Set rules and processes to keep your effort structured. For example, I will make 5 sales calls per hour. I will not use the internet or my phone until it is over, etcHow will you support your work - Your brain needs all the support it can get for doing deep work. It could be a cup of coffee, a light morning walk or exercise. Our friend, Dan always said that the 30-minute early morning walk kept his mind brisk and his day energetic. What worked for him may not work for you. So from now on, take stock of how clear your thinking is when you do certain activities. I start the day with guided meditation ( I use the headspace app - the free version should do just fine) and it allows me to concentrate. More importantly, it lets me realize when my thoughts have gone on a different track, even when I am not meditating!​Tip #2: Make Grand GesturesIn 2007, J K Rowling was struggling to finish her final book - The Deathly Hallows. She recalled in an interview that there was a day when the window cleaner came or the dogs were barking or the kids were at home. She decided to do something extreme to finish her book. She booked a suite at the Balmoral Hotel, located in Edinburgh. And she completed her book there!Back when Bill Gates was still Microsoft CEO, he was famous for taking a 'Think Weeks' holiday. He would leave behind his work and family to stay at a cabin with research papers to think for weeks at a time. He could have done this at his office, but he chose to do it there. He arrived at his famous conclusion that the Internet was going to be the next big thing in the industry there! (seems obvious now).Walter Isaacson and Carl Jung retreat to hard-to-reach places to complete their books or to improve their thinking.You might remember that I go to Starbucks to work on the e-commerce store idea. You scoffed at me for spending so much to do my work there. I was simply using this. I didn't want to say why at the time, because I wasn't sure back then if it would work. I did my feedback sessions (from the 4DX framework) there and plan out the week ahead. It helped me stay on top of my work while leaving enough time to learn new skills. This commitment to deep work is paying off for me with the current pandemic situation, as I can stay on top of my work while learning a new language and learn content marketing as well.​Tip #3: Schedule every minute of your dayPeople lack the motivation to do things because they do not know what to do (and when to do it). If you come up with a schedule full of activities focusing on lead measures, you will be very productive. Quite often, disturbances or emergencies pop-up that will ruin your plan for the day. It is important that you do not get frustrated. What you need to do instead is take some time off (after your distraction) to revise your plan for the day. I will share with you my schedule (which I revise weekly, earlier at Starbucks and now at my deep work desk at my home)​Tip #4: Be Lazy - Schedule breaks tooReason 1 - Breaks help you get insights on 'stuck' problem: There is a 2008 study by Ap Dijksterhuis called Unconscious Thought Theory. In it, Ap argues that 'contrary to popular belief, decisions about simple issues can be better tackled by conscious thought, whereas decisions about complex matters can be better approached with unconscious thought'. It means that, if you are stuck with a complex problem, it's best to take your mind off of it. You might have seen it in the movies - the trope where the lead character is unable to solve his big problem. He gives in to distraction and does something else. An unrelated remark by the bumbling friend makes him sit up and think. He says - X, You are a genius! and proceeds to work out the solution.Reason 2 - Breaks help you recharge: Stephen and Rachel Kaplan proposed that walking or even looking at pictures of nature aids concentration. They called it Attention Restoration Theory (ART). They validated it through a study done by Berman, Marc & Jonides, John & Kaplan, Stephen and published it in 2009. They let a bunch of people walk through traffic and another bunch of people walk through a park. They were asked to solve problems after some time. The one that went through nature did it faster. They repeated the experiment sometime later. The same people who went on the city walk were now on the nature walk and vice-versa. Again, the people who went on the nature walk were the ones who did the tasks assigned faster.You might argue that walking through a nature park is a pleasant experience, so they repeated the conditions in freezing weather. The people who went through the park still did better than the ones who went through traffic.Reason 3 - Without recharging, you will deplete your concentration muscle: This is simply the negative statement of Reason #2. People think that concentration is simply a question of will-power. Similarly think they will be a rich man one day but it is simply a question of setting their mind to the task. They could not be more wrong! Achieving something requires deliberate practice. And just like how elite athletes schedule breaks after a training session, you must schedule breaks in between your deep work sessions.​Tip #5: Embrace Boredom:Boredom is also a way to recharge your concentration. But a lot of people can only last a minute in waiting before picking up their phone. You see this in restaurant queues, grocery lines, etc. but lately, people do this even after they get seated at the table or in family dinners! People constantly crave something to look at. You might remember our mutual friend who was unable to make use of his talents. If you asked him to sit still for a minute, I bet he would crack in 10 seconds before reaching for the phone. Why is this behavior damaging? Because they deplete your concentration muscle!​Tip #6: Don't take breaks from distraction, instead take breaks from deep work. Once you are rewired this way, you'll soon crave deep work activities instead of craving breaks.​Tip #7: Memorize a Deck of Cards - It doesn't have to be cards, it could be anything - numbers, a new language, etc. It helps your memory and concentration.​Strategies for the office worker to include deep-work in their day:​Select the right network tools - People use a lot of network tools indiscriminately - Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, Reddit, etc. The list goes on. They justify it using the any-benefit approach:You justify using a tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might miss out on if you don't use it.Cal advises you to use the craftsman approach instead: Identify the core factor that determines success in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if it positively impacts these factors substantially outweigh the negative impacts.Take my case. I deleted Facebook as I decided that having both Facebook and Instagram would be redundant. De-clutter your life from tools that don't help you and eat away your time. And make sure to mute those notifications when you are busy with deep work as those pesky notifications will distract you.​Turn off the internet when you work - When you check the internet, even for official things, you will come across an e-mail or an article and soon you will start to respond to the shallow work instead of continuing your deep work. You might have instances where you checked the internet for sending an e-mail and ended up on BuzzFeed's 33 ways this cat made your day article! In our 30-minute scheduling example, you'd work for 25 minutes and take 5 minutes to check the internet and resume work again.​Leave the office at by a fixed time - Just as your cellphone leaves you distracted, taking a sneak peek at the e-mail after office hours, continues to work your concentration muscle. So schedule what time you will leave your office and stick to it. have a shutdown ritual - plan for whatever work is pending and move on to your home and stop thinking about work. Revise your schedule if you are unable to stick to it.​Become hard-to-reach during your deep work - Due to instant messaging tools, people expect you to reply immediately. It is gratifying for them; damaging for you. Sometimes they may be offended if they can't reach you. It is easier if you tell them an important reason Eg: I was working on something that the boss (or the CEO) asked for urgently.​Make people who send you e-mail do more work -Strategy 1 - Check out this contact form.Strategy 2 - If you receive an e-mail that says ' I read the article. What are your thoughts on it?' here is an example response"I will get a draft to you by XYZ date, I'll do my part and add comments for where I need your help. No need to follow up with me in the meantime or reply to the draft I send, unless of course there are issues with it.Strategy 3 - Don't respond. If it was important, they will follow back anyway. Unless of course, it is an e-mail from your boss or CEO.

[lhight1-mtsac-eng1a-645to50]

HOMEWORK (DUE 9/27):

Please read “Notes to My Biographer” by Adam Haslett (posted below), and answer the questions on the study guide (also posted below).

NOTES TO MY BIOGRAPHER

A short story by Adam Haslett

          Two things to get straight from the beginning: I hate doctors and have never joined a support group in my life. At seventy-three, I’m not about to change. The mental-health establishment can go screw itself on a barren hilltop in the rain before I touch their snake oil or listen to the visionless chatter of men half my age. I have shot Germans in the fields of Normandy, filed twenty-six patents, married three women, survived them all, and am currently the subject of an investigation by the IRS, which has about as much chance of collecting from me as Shylock did of getting his pound of flesh. Bureaucracies have trouble thinking clearly. I, on the other hand, am perfectly lucid.

            Note, for instance, the way I obtained the Saab I am presently driving into the Los Angeles basin: a niece in Scottsdale lent it to me. Do you think she’ll ever see it again? Unlikely. Of course, when I borrowed it from her I had every intention of returning it, and in a few days or weeks I may feel that way again, but for now forget her and her husband and three children who looked at me over the kitchen table like I was a museum piece sent to bore them. I could run circles around those kids. They’re spoon-fed Ritalin and private schools and have eyes that say, Give me things I don’t have. I wanted to read them a book on the history of the world, its immigrations, plagues, and wars, but the shelves of their outsized condominium were full of ceramics and biographies of the stars. The whole thing depressed the hell out of me and I’m glad to be gone.

            A week ago I left Baltimore with the idea of seeing my son Graham. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently, days we spent together in the barn at the old house, how with him as my audience ideas came quickly, and I don’t know when I’ll get to see him again. I thought I might as well catch up with some of the other relatives along the way. I planned to start at my daughter Linda’s in Atlanta, but when I arrived it turned out she’d moved. I called Graham, and when he got over the shock of hearing my voice, he said Linda didn’t want to see me. By the time my younger brother Ernie refused to do anything more than have lunch with me after I had taken a bus all the way to Houston, I began to get the idea that this episodic reunion thing might be more trouble than it was worth. Scottsdale did nothing to alter my opinion. These people seem to think they’ll have another chance, that I’ll be coming around again. The fact is I’ve completed my will, made bequests of my patent rights, and am now just composing a few notes to my biographer, who, in a few decades, when the true influence of my work becomes apparent, may need them to clarify certain issues.

Franklin Caldwell Singer, b. 1924, Baltimore, Maryland.

Child of a German machinist and a banker’s daughter.

My psych discharge following “desertion” in Paris was trumped up by an army intern resentful of my superior knowledge of the diagnostic manual. The nude-dancing incident at the Louvre in a room full of Rubenses had occurred weeks earlier and was of a piece with other celebrations at the time.

B.A., Ph.D., Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University.

1952. First and last electroshock treatment, for which I will never, never, never forgive my parents.

Researcher, Eastman Kodak Laboratories. As with so many institutions in this country, talent was resented. I was fired as soon as I began to point out flaws in the management structure. Two years later I filed a patent on a shutter mechanism that Kodak eventually broke down and purchased (then?Vice President for Product Development Arch Vendellini was having an affair with his daughter’s best friend, contrary to what he will tell you. Notice the way his left shoulder twitches when he is lying).

All subsequent diagnoses—and let me tell you, there have been a number—are the result of two forces, both in their way pernicious. 1) The attempt by the psychiatric establishment over the last century to redefine eccentricity as illness, and 2) the desire of members of my various families to render me docile and if possible immobile.

The electric-bread-slicer concept was stolen from me by a man in a diner in Chevy Chase dressed as a reindeer whom I could not possibly have known was an employee of Westinghouse.

That I have no memories of the years 1988?90 and believed until very recently that Ed Meese was still the attorney general is not owing to my purported paranoid blackout but, on the contrary, the fact that my third wife took it upon herself to lace my coffee with tranquilizers. Believe nothing you hear about the divorce settlement.

          When I ring the buzzer at Graham’s place in Venice, a Jew in his late twenties with some fancy-looking musculature answers the door. He appears nervous and says, “We weren’t expecting you till tomorrow,” and I ask him who they are and he says, “Me and Graham,” adding hurriedly, “We’re friends, you know, only friends. I don’t live here, I’m just over to use the computer.”

          All I can think is I hope this guy isn’t out here trying to get acting jobs, because it’s obvious to me right away that my son is gay and is screwing this character with the expensive-looking glasses. There was a lot of that in the military and I learned early on that it comes in all shapes and sizes, not just the fairy types everyone expects. Nonetheless, I am briefly shocked by the idea that my twenty-nine-year-old boy has never seen fit to share with me the fact that he is a fruitcake—no malice intended—and I resolve right away to talk to him about it when I see him. Marlon Brando overcomes his stupor and lifting my suitcase from the car he leads me through the back garden past a lemon tree in bloom to a one-room cottage with a sink and plenty of light to which I take an instant liking.

            “This will do nicely,” I say, and then I ask him, “How long have you been sleeping with my son?” It’s obvious he thinks I’m some brand of geriatric homophobe getting ready to come on in a religiously heavy manner, and seeing that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look in his eye I take pity and disabuse him. I’ve seen women run down by tanks. I’m not about to get worked up about the prospect of fewer grandchildren. When I start explaining to him that social prejudice of all stripes runs counter to my Enlightenment ideals—ideals tainted by centuries of partial application—it becomes clear to me that Graham has given him the family line. His face grows patient and his smile begins to leak the sympathy of the ignorant: poor old guy suffering from mental troubles his whole life, up one month, down the next, spewing grandiose notions that slip like sand through his fingers to which I always say, you just look up Frank Singer at the U.S. Patent Office. In any case, this turkey probably thinks the Enlightenment is a marketing scheme for General Electric; I spare him the seminar I could easily conduct and say, “Look, if the two of you share a bed, it’s fine with me.”

            “That drive must have worn you out,” he says hopefully. “Do you want to lie down for a bit?”

            I tell him I could hook a chain to my niece’s Saab and drag it through a marathon. This leaves him nonplussed. We walk back across the yard together into the kitchen of the bungalow. I ask him for pen, paper, and calculator and begin sketching an idea that came to me just a moment ago—I can feel the presence of Graham already—for a bicycle capable of storing the energy generated on the downward slope in a small battery and releasing it through a handlebar control when needed on the uphill, a potential gold mine when you consider the aging population and the increase in leisure time created by early retirement. I have four pages of specs and the estimated cost of a prototype done by the time Graham arrives two hours later. He walks into the kitchen wearing a blue linen suit with a briefcase held to his chest and seeing me at the table goes stiff as a board. I haven’t seen him in five years and the first thing I notice is that he’s got bags under his eyes and he looks exhausted. When I open my arms to embrace him he takes a step backward.

            “What’s the matter?” I ask. Here is my child wary of me in a strange kitchen in California, his mother’s ashes spread long ago over the Potomac, the objects of our lives together stored in boxes or sold.

          “You actually came,” he says.

            “I’ve invented a new bicycle,” I say, but this seems to reach him like news of some fresh death. Ben hugs Graham there in front of me. I watch my son rest his head against this fellow’s shoulder like a tired soldier on a train. “It’s going to have a self-charging battery,” I say, sitting again at the table to review my sketches.

~

With Graham here my idea is picking up speed, and while he’s in the shower I unpack my bags, rearrange the furniture in the cottage, and tack my specs to the wall. Returning to the house, I ask Ben if I can use the phone and he says that’s fine, and then he tells me, “Graham hasn’t been sleeping so great lately, but I know he really does want to see you.”

            “Sure, no hard feelings, fine.”

           "He’s been dealing with a lot recently . . . maybe some things you could talk to him about … and I think you might—"

            “Sure, sure, no hard feelings,” and then I call my lawyer, my engineer, my model builder, three advertising firms whose numbers I find in the yellow pages, the American Association of Retired Persons—that market will be key—an old college friend who I remember once told me he’d competed in the Tour de France, figuring he’ll know the bicycle-industry angle, my bank manager to discuss financing, the Patent Office, the Cal Tech physics lab, the woman I took to dinner the week before I left Baltimore, and three local liquor stores before I find one that will deliver a case of Dom Pérignon.

            “That’ll be for me!” I call out to Graham as he emerges from the bedroom to answer the door what seems only minutes later. He moves slowly and seems sapped of life.

            “What’s this?”

            “We’re celebrating! There’s a new project in the pipeline!”

            Graham stares at the bill as though he’s having trouble reading it. Finally, he says, “This is twelve hundred dollars. We’re not buying it.”

            I tell him Schwinn will drop that on donuts for the sales reps when I’m done with this bike, that Oprah Winfrey’s going to ride it through the halftime show at the Super Bowl.

            “My dad made a mistake,” he says to the delivery guy.

            I end up having to go outside and pay for it through the window of the truck with a credit card the man is naïve enough to accept and I carry it back to the house myself.

            “What am I going to do?” I hear Graham whisper.

            I round the corner into the kitchen and they fall silent. The two of them make a handsome couple standing there in the gauzy, expiring light of evening. When I was born you could have arrested them for kissing. There ensues an argument that I only half bother to participate in concerning the champagne and my enthusiasm, a recording he learned from his mother; he presses play and the fraction of his ancestry that suffered from conventionalism speaks through his mouth like a ventriloquist: your-idea-is-fantasy-calm-down-it-will- be-the-ruin-of-you-medication-medication-medication. He has a good mind, my son, always has, and somewhere the temerity to use it, to spear mediocrity in the eye, but in a world that encourages nothing of the sort the curious boy becomes the anxious man. He must suffer his people’s regard for appearances. Sad. I begin to articulate this with Socratic lucidity, which seems only to exacerbate the situation.

            “Why don’t we just have some champagne,” Ben interjects. “You two can talk this over at dinner.”

            An admirable suggestion. I take three glasses from the cupboard, remove a bottle from the case, pop the cork, fill the glasses, and propose a toast to their health.

          My niece’s Saab does eighty-five without a shudder on the way to dinner. With the roof down, smog blowing through my hair, I barely hear Graham, who’s shouting something from the passenger’s seat. He’s probably worried about a ticket, which for the high of this ride I’d pay twice over and tip the officer to boot. Sailing down the freeway I envision a lane of bicycles quietly recycling power once lost to the simple act of pedaling. We’ll have to get the environmentalists involved, which could mean government money for research and a lobbying arm to navigate any legislative interference. Test marketing in L.A. will increase the chance of celebrity endorsements, and I’ll probably need to do a book on the germination of the idea for release with the first wave of product. I’m thinking early 2001. The advertising tag line hits me as we glide beneath an overpass: Making Every Revolution Count.

          There’s a line at the restaurant and when I try to slip the maître d’ a twenty, Graham holds me back.

          “Dad,” he says, “you can’t do that.”

            “Remember the time I took you to the Ritz in that Rolls-Royce with the right-hand drive and you told me the chicken in your sandwich was tough and I spoke to the manager and we got the meal for free? And you drew a diagram of the tree fort you wanted and it gave me an idea for storage containers.”

            He nods his head.

          “Come on, where’s your smile?”

          I walk up to the maître d’, but when I hand him the twenty he gives me a funny look and I tell him he’s a lousy shit for pretending he’s above that sort of thing. “You want a hundred?” I ask, and am about to give him an even larger piece of my mind when Graham turns me around and says, “Please don’t.”

          “What kind of work are you doing?” I ask him.

          “Dad,” he says, “just settle down.” His voice is so quiet, so meek.

          “I asked you what kind of work you do.”

            “I work at a brokerage.”

            A brokerage! What didn’t I teach this kid? “What do you do for them?”

            “Stocks. Listen, Dad, we need—”

            “Stocks!” I say. “Christ! Your mother would turn in her grave if she had one.”

             "Thanks,“ he says under his breath.

            "What was that?” I ask.

            “Forget it.”

            At this point, I notice everyone in the foyer is staring at us. They all look like they were in television fifteen years ago, the men wearing Robert Wagner turtlenecks and blazers. A woman in mauve hot pants with a shoulder bag the size of her torso appears particularly disapproving and self-satisfied, and I feel like asking her what it is she does to better the lot of humanity. “You’ll be riding my bicycle in three years,” I tell her. She draws back as though I had thrown a rat on the carpet.

            Once we’re seated it takes ten minutes to get bread and water on the table, and sensing a bout of poor service, I begin to jot on a napkin the time of each of our requests and the hour of its arrival. Also, as it occurs to me:

Hollow-core chrome frame with battery mounted over rear tire wired to rear-wheel engine housing wired to handlebar control/thumb-activated accelerator; warning to cyclist concerning increased speed of crankshaft during application of stored revolutions. Power break?

Biographer file: Graham as my muse, mystery thereof, see storage container, pancake press, flying teddy bear, renovations of barn for him to play in, power bike.

           Graham disagrees with me when I try to send back a second bottle of wine, apparently under the impression that one ought to accept spoiled goods in order not to hurt anybody’s feelings. This strikes me as maudlin, but I let it go for the sake of harmony. Something has changed in him. Appetizers take a startling nineteen minutes to appear.

            “You should start thinking about quitting your job,” I say. “I’ve decided I’m not going to stay on the sidelines with this one. The power bike’s a flagship product, the kind of thing that could support a whole company. We stand to make a fortune, Graham, and I can do it with you.” One of the Robert Wagners cranes his neck to look at me from a neighboring booth.

            “Yeah, I bet you want a piece of the action, buddy,” I say, which sends him back to his endive salad in a hurry. Graham listens as I elaborate the business plan: there’s start-up financing for which we’ll easily attract venture capital, the choice of location for the manufacturing plant—you have to be careful about state regulations—executives to hire, designers to work under me, a sales team, accountants, benefits, desks, telephones, workshops, paychecks, taxes, computers, copiers, decor, water coolers, doormats, parking spaces, electric bills. Maybe a humidifier. A lot to consider. As I speak, I notice that others in the restaurant are turning to listen as well. It’s usually out of the corner of my eye that I see it and the people disguise it well, returning to their conversations in what they probably think is convincing pantomime. The Westinghouse reindeer pops to mind. How ingenious they were to plant him there in the diner I ate at each Friday morning, knowing my affection for the Christmas myth, determined to steal my intellectual property.

Re: Chevy Chase incident, look also into whether or not I might have invented auto-reverse tape decks and also therefore did Sony or GE own property adjacent to my Baltimore residence—noise, distraction tactics, phony road construction, etc.—and also Schwinn, Raleigh, etc., presence during Los Angeles visit.

          “Could we talk about something else?” Graham asks.

             "Whatever you like,“ I say, and I inform the waiter our entrées were twenty-six minutes in transit. Turns out my fish is tougher than leather, and the waiter’s barely left when I have to begin snapping my fingers for his return.

             "Stop that!” Graham says. I’ve reached the end of my tether with his passivity and freely ignore him. He’s leaning over the table about to swat my arm down when the fellow returns.

            “Is there a problem?”

            “My halibut’s dry as sand.”

          The goateed young man eyes my dish suspiciously, as though I might have replaced the original plate with some duplicate entrée pulled from a bag beneath the table.

          “I’ll need a new one.”

            “No he won’t,” Graham says at once.

            The waiter pauses, considering on whose authority to proceed.

          “Do you have anything to do with bicycles?” I ask him.

            “What do you mean?” he asks.

            “Professionally.”

          The young man looks across the room to the maître d’, who offers a coded nod.

          “That’s it. We’re getting out of here,” I say, grabbing bread rolls.

            “Sit down,” Graham insists.

          But it’s too late; I know the restaurant’s lousy with mountain-bike executives. “You think I’m going to let a bunch of industry hustlers steal an idea that’s going to change the way every American and one day every person on the globe conceives of a bicycle? Do you realize what bicycles mean to people? They’re like ice cream or children’s books, they’re primal objects woven into the fabric of our earliest memories, not to mention our most intimate connection with the wheel itself, an invention that marks the commencement of the great ascent of human knowledge that brought us through printing presses, religious transformations, undreamt-of speed, the moon. When you ride a bicycle you participate in an unbroken chain of human endeavor stretching back to stone-carting Egyptian peasants, and I’m on the verge of revolutionizing that invention, making its almost mythical power a storable quantity. You have the chance to be there with me, ‘like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific—and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise—silent, upon a peak in Darien.’ The things we’ll see!”

            Because I’m standing as I say this a quorum of the restaurant seems to think I’m addressing them as well, and though I’ve slipped in giving them a research lead I can see in their awed expressions that they know as I do, not everyone can scale the high white peaks of real invention. Some—such as these—must sojourn in the lowlands where the air is thick with half measures and dreams die of inertia. Yes! It is true.

            “You’ll never catch up with me,” I say to the gawking industrial spies.

            This seems to convince Graham we indeed need to leave. He throws some cash on the table and steers me by the arm out of the restaurant. We walk slowly along the boulevard. There’s something sluggish about Graham, his rounded shoulders and bowed head.

           "Look, there’s a Japanese place right over there, we can get maki rolls and teriyaki, maybe some blowfish, I can hear all about the brokerage, we might even think about whether your company wants to do the initial public offering on the bike venture, there could be an advantage—"

            He shakes his head and keeps walking up the street, one of whose features is a truly remarkable plenitude of shapely women, and I am reminded of the pleasures of being single, glances and smiles being enjoyed without guilt and for that matter why not consummation? Maybe it’s unseemly for a seventy-three-year-old to talk about erections, but oh, do I get 'em! I’m thinking along these lines when we pass what appears to be the lobby of a luxury hotel convention-center kind of place, and of course I’m also thinking trade shows and how far ahead you have to book those things so I turn in and, after a small protest, Graham follows (I tell him I need to use the bathroom).

            “I’d like to talk to the special-events manager,” I say to the girl behind the desk.

            “I’m afraid he’s only here during the day, sir,” she replies with a blistering customer-service smile, as though she were telling me exactly what I wanted to hear.

            “Well, isn’t that just wonderful,” I say, and she seems to agree that yes, it is wonderful, wonderful that the special-events manager of the Royal Sonesta keeps such regular hours, as though it were the confirmation of some beneficent natural order.

          “I guess I’ll just have to take a suite anyway and see him in the morning. My son and I will have a little room-service dinner in privacy, where the sharks don’t circle!”

          Concern clouds the girl’s face as she taps her keyboard.

            “The Hoover Suite is available on nineteen. That’s $680 a night. Will that be all right?”

          “Perfect.”

          When I’ve secured the keys I cross to where Graham’s sitting on the couch. “Dinner is served,” I say with a bow.

          “What are you talking about?”

            “I got us a suite,” I say, rattling the keys.

          Graham rolls his eyes and clenches his fists.

            “Dad!”

          There’s something desperate in his voice.

            “What!”

            “Stop! Just stop! You’re out of control,” he says. He looks positively frantic. “Why do you think Linda and Ernie don’t want to see you, Dad, why do you think that is? Is it so surprising to you? They can’t handle this! Mom couldn’t handle this! Can’t you see that? It’s selfish of you not to see a doctor!” he shouts, pounding his fists on his thighs. “It’s selfish of you not to take the drugs! Selfish!”

            The lobby’s glare has drained his face of color and about his unblinking eyes I can see the outlines of what will one day be the marks of age, and then all of a sudden the corpse of my son lies prostrate in front of me, the years since we last saw one another tunneling out before me for some infinite distance, and I hear the whisper of a killing loneliness travel along its passage as though the sum total of every minute of his pain in every spare hour of every year was drawn in a single breath and held in this expiring moment. Tears well in my eyes. I am overcome.

          Graham stands up from the couch, shaken by the force of his own words.

          I rattle the keys. “We’re going to enjoy ourselves.”

            “You have to give those back to the desk.”

          By the shoulders I grab him, my greatest invention. “We can do so much better,” I say. I take him by the wrist and lead him to the elevator, hearing his mother’s voice behind us reminding me to keep him out of the rain. “I will,” I mutter. “I will.”

          Robert Wagner is on the elevator with Natalie Wood but they’ve aged badly and one doesn’t take to them anymore. She chews gum and appears uncomfortable in tight clothing. His turtlenecks have become worn. But I figure they know things, they’ve been here a long time. So I say to him, “Excuse me, you wouldn’t know where I might call for a girl or two, would you? Actually what we need is a girl and a young man, my son here’s gay.”

          “Dad!” Graham shouts. “I’m sorry,” he says to the couple, now backed against the wall as though I were a gangster in one of their lousy B movies. “He’s just had a lot to drink.”

          “The hell I have. You got a problem with my son being gay?” The elevator door opens and they scurry onto the carpet like bugs.

          For a man who watched thousands starve and did jack shit about it, the Hoover Suite is aptly named. There are baskets of fruit, a stocked refrigerator, a full bar, faux rococo paintings over the beds, overstuffed chairs, and rugs that demand bare feet for the sheer pleasure of the touch.

          “We can’t stay here,” Graham says, as I flip my shoes across the room.

          His voice is disconsolate; he seems to have lost his animation of a moment ago, something I don’t think I can afford to do right now: the eviction notices in Baltimore, the collection agencies, the smell of the apartment … “We’re just getting started,” I say quickly.

            Graham’s sitting in an armchair across the room, and when he bows his head, I imagine he’s praying that when he raises it again, things will be different. As a child he used to bring me presents in my study on the days I left for trips and he’d ask me not to go; they were books he’d found on the shelf and wrapped in Christmas paper.

           I pick up the phone on the bedside table and get the front desk. “This is the Hoover Suite calling. I want the number of an agency that will provide us with a young man, someone intelligent and attractive—”

          Graham rips the phone from my hand.

          “What is it?” I say. His mother was always encouraging me to ask him questions. “What’s it like to be gay, Graham? Why have you never told me?”

            He stares at me dumbfounded.

            “What? What?” I say.

             "How can you ask me that after all this time?“

            "I want to understand. Are you in love with this Ben fellow?”

            “I thought you were dead! Do you even begin to realize? I thought my own father was dead. You didn’t call for four years. But I couldn’t bear to find out, I couldn’t bear to go and find you dead. It was like I was a child again. I just hoped there was an excuse. Four years, Dad. Now you just appear and you want to know what it’s like to be gay?”

            I run to the refrigerator, where among other things there is a decent chardonnay, and with the help of a corkscrew I find by the sink I pour us two glasses. Graham doesn’t seem to want his, but I set it down beside him anyway.

            “Oh, Graham. The phone company in Baltimore’s awful.”

            He starts to cry. He looks so young as he weeps, as he did in the driveway of the old house on the afternoon I taught him to ride a bicycle, the dust from the drive settling on his wetted cheek and damp eyelashes, later to be rinsed in the warm water of the bath as dusk settled over the field and we listened together to the sound of his mother in the kitchen running water, the murmur of the radio, and the stillness of evening in the country, how he seemed to understand it as well as I.

            “You know, Graham, they’re constantly overcharging me and then once they take a line out it’s like getting the Red Sea to part to have it reinstalled but in a couple of weeks when the bicycle patent comes through that’ll be behind us, you and Linda and Ernie and I, we’ll all go to London and stay at the Connaught and I’ll show you Regent’s Park where your mother and I rowed a boat on our honeymoon circling the little island there where the ducks all congregate and which was actually a little dirty, come to think of it, though you don’t really think of ducks as dirty, they look so graceful on the water but in fact—” And all of a sudden I don’t believe it myself and I can hear my own voice in the room, hear its dry pitch, and I’ve lost my train of thought and I can’t stop picturing the yard where Graham used to play with his friends by the purple lilac and the apple tree whose knotted branches held the planks of the fort that I was so happy for him to enjoy never having had one myself. He knew me then even in my bravest moments when his mother and siblings were afraid of what they didn’t understand, he would sit on the stool in the crumbling barn watching me cover the chalkboard propped on the fender of the broken Studebaker, diagramming a world of possible objects, the solar vehicles and collapsible homes, our era distilled into its necessary devices, and in the evenings sprawled on the floor of his room he’d trace with delicate hands what he remembered of my design.

             I see those same hands now spread on his thighs, nails bitten down, cuticles torn.

            I don’t know how to say goodbye.

             In the village of St. Sever an old woman nursed my dying friend through the night. At dawn I kissed his cold forehead and kept marching.

          In the yard of the old house the apple tree still rustles in the evening breeze.

          “Graham.”

          “You want to know what it’s like?” he says. “I’ll tell you. It’s worrying all the time that one day he’s going to leave me. And you want to know why that is? It’s got nothing to do with being gay. It’s because I know Mom left you. I tell you it’s selfish not to take the pills because I know. Because I take them. You understand, Dad? It’s in me too. I don’t want Ben to find me in a parking lot in the middle of the night in my pajamas talking to a stranger like Mom found you. I don’t want him to find me hanged. I used to cast fire from the tips of my fingers some weeks and burn everything in my path and it was all progress and it was all incredibly, incredibly beautiful. And some weeks I couldn’t brush my hair. But I take the pills now, and I haven’t bankrupted us yet, and I don’t want to kill myself just now. I take them and I think of Ben. That’s what it’s like.”

            “But the fire Graham? What about the fire?”

            In his eyes, there is sadness enough to kill us both.

            “Do you remember how you used to watch me do my sketches in the barn?”

            Tears run down his cheeks and he nods his head.

            “Let me show you something,” I say. Across the room in the drawer of the desk I find a marker. It makes sense to me now, he can see what I see, he’s always been able to. Maybe it doesn’t have to end. I unhook a painting from the wall and set it on the floor. On the yellow wallpaper I draw the outline of a door, full-size, seven by three and a half.

          “You see, Graham, there’ll be four knobs. The lines between them will form a cross. And each knob will be connected to a set of wheels inside the door itself, and there will be four sets of hinges, one along each side but fixed only to the door, not to the frame.” I shade these in. Graham cries. “A person will use the knob that will allow them to open the door in the direction they want—left or right, at their feet or above their heads. When a knob is turned it’ll push the screws from the door into the frame. People can open doors near windows without blocking morning or evening light, they’ll carry furniture in and out with the door over their heads, never scraping its paint, and when they want to see the sky they can open it just a fraction at the top.” On the wall I draw smaller diagrams of the door’s different positions until the felt nib of the pen tatters. “It’s a present to you, this door. I’m sorry it’s not actual. You can imagine it, though, how people might enjoy deciding how to walk through it. Patterns would form, families would have their habits.”

          “I wanted a father.”

          “Don’t say that, Graham.” He’s crying still and I can’t bear it.

          “It’s true.”

          I turn back to the desk and, kneeling there, scrawl a note. The pen is nearly ruined and it’s hard to shape the letters. The writing takes time.

Though some may accuse me of neglect, I have been consistent with the advice I always gave my children: never finish anything that bores you. Unfortunately, some of my children bored me. Graham never did. Please confirm this with him. He is the only one that meant anything to me.

           "Graham,“ I say, crossing the room to show him the piece of paper, to show him the truth.

          He’s lying on the bed, and as I stand over him I see that he’s asleep. His tears have exhausted him. The skin about his closed eyes is puffy and red and from the corner of his mouth comes a rivulet of drool. I wipe it away with my thumb. I cup his gentle face in my hands and kiss him on the forehead.

          From the other bed I take a blanket and cover him, pulling it up over his shoulders, tucking it beneath his chin. His breath is calm now, even. I leave the note folded by his hands. I pat down his hair and turn off the lamp. It’s time for me to go.

          I take my glass and the wine out into the hall. I can feel the weight of every step, my body beginning to tire. I lean against the wall, waiting for the elevator to take me down. The doors slide open and I enter.

          From here in the descending glass cage I can see globes of orange light stretching along the boulevards of Santa Monica toward the beach where the shaded palms sway. I’ve always found the profusion of lights in American cities a cause for optimism, a sign of undiminished credulity, something to bear us along. In the distance the shimmering pier juts into the vast darkness of the ocean like a burning ship launched into the night

Work Cited

Haslett, Adam. “Notes to My Biographer.” Zoetrope All-Story, Fall 1999, https://www.all-story.com/issues/9

ENG 1A

Hight

STUDY GUIDE FOR “NOTES TO MY BIOGRAPHER”

          Please answer the questions as thoroughly as possible (on a separate piece of paper), and please keep in mind: I am really dumb, so I don’t understand short and vague answers.

1. The narrator of the story, Franklin Caldwell Singer, insists that there is nothing wrong with him, and that the “mental-health can go screw itself on a barren hilltop in the rain”.  Do you believe him? Why or why not?

2. Does Franklin have an interesting voice?  Is he witty, sarcastic, or annoying? Why?  How would you describe his personality?

3. Will Franklin ever make any money off of his bicycle idea?  Why or why not?

4. Why does Franklin want to re-connect with his estranged son, Graham?  Is it because cares about his son, or does Franklin have some ulterior motive?  What do you think and why?

5. What happens at the end?  Why does Franklin leave Graham?  Is this a noble gesture?  Why or why not?

6. Who do you sympathize with more: Graham or Franklin?  Whose side are you on: Graham or Franklin?  Why?

[newssplashy]

Opinion: The author who won't be booked: Conan O'Brien's unrequited fanboy love for Robert Caro

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Conan O’Brien, the longest tenured late-night TV host, has had them all in his 25 years on the air. Oscar winners. Hall of Famers. Bowie, Springsteen, McCartney.

But there’s one person who keeps saying no — someone whose work has been a near-obsession for the host for some time.

“At a certain point, I have the power to book a lot of people,” O’Brien said over dinner at Lucques, a Mediterranean-inspired restaurant here. “I’ve been around long enough. There’s a point where you feel like you’ve met everyone. Everyone. And then there’s Robert Caro.”

For years, O’Brien has tried to book the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Power Broker” and the multivolume epic “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” And for years, Caro has said no.

O’Brien, 55, started to realize his love for the biographer-historian was perhaps unrequited some eight years ago.

At the time, he had recently made the move to TBS after 17 years as a late-night host at NBC — a run that had come to an end with his brief stint behind the desk of “The Tonight Show.” Newly ensconced at “Conan” in the lower-stakes environs of basic cable, he had the freedom to give serious airtime to guests who would have gotten five-minute segments during his network days.

“We’re talking about authors and I’m thinking, ‘Let’s get Robert Caro on — I’ll do two segments with him,'” O’Brien said. “The request went out. It was the equivalent of putting a penny in a well and never hearing the splash.”

Later invitations also resulted in polite refusals.

“The Path to Power,” the first installment of Caro’s biography of Johnson, was published in 1982 when O’Brien was a student at Harvard. He received the book as a Christmas present from his father and soon fell under its spell, as did his roommate, Eric Reiff. They shared their new enthusiasm during a trip away from campus.

“Think of two guys in college going on a road trip,” O’Brien said. “You think about how we get a bunch of beer, we go to Fort Lauderdale, we get hammered. No. We go to a quiet beach in Rhode Island and we’re lying there and yelling at each other back and forth about Lyndon Johnson. ‘It was his father! His father had been disappointed!’ ‘But what about Pappy O’Daniel?'”

The later works in the epic series, which have been published at a rate of roughly once a decade, have more than lived up to the promise of the first in O’Brien’s view. Caro, 82, has said he is closing in on completing the fifth and final volume and the pompadoured comic is among those eagerly awaiting its publication.

“The Lyndon Johnson books by Caro, it’s our Harry Potter,” O’Brien said. “If there were over-large ears and fake gallbladder scars that we could wear instead of wizard hats while waiting in line to get the book, we would do it.”

After having been rejected numerous times, O’Brien came up with a plan to land his prey: a relatively sober streaming interview program called “Serious Jibber Jabber.” Guests have included best-selling nonfiction author Michael Lewis, historian Evan Thomas and data journalist Nate Silver.

“I pretty much made this thing as a bear trap to catch Robert Caro,” O’Brien said. “I keep getting other people who are great. But no Robert Caro.”

The host sent word that he would be willing to interview the author in his hometown, New York City. No dice, Caro replied through an intermediary. O’Brien then asked him to dinner, without cameras. Maybe next time.

A onetime writer for “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” O’Brien is one of the brainiest people in late night, even if he favors a loose, absurdist brand of comedy that has little in common with the topical style of Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers and Samantha Bee.

O’Brien arrived at the restaurant for our interview carrying a sheaf of notes filled with dates and facts tracing his obsession. It included the time he attended a Caro reading at the Barnes & Noble in New York City around the release of “Master of the Senate,” Volume 3 in the LBJ series.

“I’m just checking,” O’Brien said, flipping through his notes, when asked what year he saw Caro. “I want to make sure I have as many answers as I can for you.”

It was 2002. O’Brien did not introduce himself.

“I don’t want to bother Caro and go up to him and say, ‘Of course, you must know me from the Masturbating Bear and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who will poop on you,'” he said, referring to comedy bits that were staples of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” the NBC show he hosted from 1993 to 2009.

Caro’s penchant for leaving nothing out — the still-growing LBJ series runs to more than 3,000 pages — is a quality that has wearied his detractors while inspiring special devotion among fans like O’Brien.

“One of the things that makes him one of the greatest biographers of all time is he’ll write about Lyndon Johnson, but when he encounters another character who’s interesting — Coke Stevenson — he will drop everything and go down deep, incredibly deep, into, ‘Who is this man really?'” he said. “He’ll find all this deep rich ore, which, once you know it, it’ll make the whole story that much more powerful. Whereas other people would dispense with those characters in a paragraph or two.”

O’Brien was insistent that Caro’s team has been nothing but polite in sending its regrets. In fact, a few years ago, O’Brien received a signed copy of “The Path to Power” with the inscription: “To Conan O’Brien. From A Fan — Robert A. Caro.”

The gift only confused matters.

“It just cracks me up,” O’Brien said. “It’s like the White Whale writing Ahab a note, saying, ‘Hey, man. We’ve got to get together. I’m a fan!'”

Caro has appeared on other programs over the years, including “The Colbert Report,” “CBS This Morning” and “The Daily Show” in its Jon Stewart iteration. When asked for this article why he had yet to appear on “Conan,” the author said in a statement: “'Conan’ — You mean it was O’Brien? I thought it was The Barbarian.”

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman at Knopf, Caro’s publisher, said of O’Brien’s many entreaties, “Suffice to say, his people have been in touch a few times (email, phone, Conan standing outside the building), and we remain cautiously optimistic about Caro making an appearance on the show before the decade is out.”

The refusals have done nothing to lessen the host’s affection for the author. “The biggest thing I want to stress is that my inability to get him to sit with me only makes me respect him more,” O’Brien said.

In his morbid fantasies, he imagines Caro appearing on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where the guests often play games with the host.

“I know that someday I’m going to turn on Fallon and see Caro playing Pictionary,” he said. “And I’m just going to be enraged. He’s going to get everyone cheering, and Cardi B’s there, high-fiving him. And I’m just going to be enraged.”

As he continues his quest, O’Brien said he will draw on what he has learned from Caro’s epic series. “Like Johnson, I have an incredible drive and a complicated relationship with my father,” he said. “I’ll stop at nothing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

John Koblin © 2018 The New York Times

source http://www.newssplashy.com/2018/08/opinion-author-who-wont-be-booked-conan.html

[thejoydaily-blog]

Holy Faith, Worthy Gospel, World Vision

Andrew Fuller’s Broadsides Against Sandemanianism, Hyper-Calvinism, and Global Unbelief

Holy Faith, Worthy Gospel, World Vision

Andrew Fuller’s Broadsides Against Sandemanianism, Hyper-Calvinism, and Global Unbelief

Desiring God 2007 Conference for Pastors

Resource by John Piper

Topic: Biography

A revised and expanded version of this biographical message now appears inAndrew Fuller: Holy Faith, Worthy Gospel, World Mission.

It is totally possible that Andrew Fuller’s impact on history, by the time Jesus returns, will be far greater and different than it is now. My assessment at this point, 192 years after his death, is that his primary impact on history has been the impetus that his life and thought gave to the modern missionary movement, specifically through the sending and supporting of William Carey to India in 1793. That historical moment — the sending of William Carey and his team — marked the opening of the modern missionary movement.

The Unleashing of Modern Missions

Carey was the morning star of modern missions. Between 1793 and 1865, a missionary movement never before seen in the history of the world reached virtually all the coastlands on earth. Then in 1865, Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission, and from 1865 until 1934, another wave of missionary activity was released so that by 1974 virtually all the inlands — all the geographic countries of the world — were reached with the gospel. In 1934, Cameron Townsend founded Wycliffe Bible Translators which focused not on geographic areas or political states but on people groups with distinct languages and dialects and cultures — and gradually the church awakened, especially at the Lausanne Congress in 1974, to the biblical reality of “every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9; 7:9) — and the missionary focus of the church shifted from unreached geography and to the unreached peoples of the world.

We are in the midst of this third era of modern missions. Today the great reality, as documented in Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom, is that the center of gravity in missions is moving away from Europe and the United States to the South and East. Places we once considered mission fields are now centers of Christian influence and are major missionary sending forces in the world (Andrew Walls would say it a little differently than Jenkins: “While some scholars such as Philip Jenkins emphasize a shift of power from Western churches to those south of the equator, Walls sees instead a new polycentrism: the riches of a hundred places learning from each other.” “Historian Ahead of His Time,” Christianity Today, Vol. 51, No. 2, February 2007, p. 89.).

Andrew Fuller’s Impact

You won’t read it in the secular history books or hear it on the nightly news, but judged by almost any standard, this modern missionary movement — the spread of the Christian faith to every country and almost all the peoples of the world — is the most important historical development in the last two hundred years. Stephen Neill, in the conclusion to his History of Christian Missions, wrote, “The cool and rational eighteenth century [which ended with William Carey’s departure for India] was hardly a promising seed-bed for Christian growth; but out of it came a greater outburst of Christian missionary enterprise than had been seen in all the centuries before” (571).

So how did it come about that the “cool and rational” eighteenth century gave birth to the greatest missionary movement in world history — a movement that continues to this day, which, if you’re willing, you can be a part of? God’s ways are higher than our ways and his judgments are unfathomable and inscrutable (Romans 11:33). More factors led to this great movement than any human can know. All I want to do is document one of them — just one of ten thousand things God did to unleash this great Christ-exalting, gospel-advancing, Church-expanding, evil-confronting, Satan-conquering, culture-transforming soul-saving, hell-robbing, Christian-refreshing, truth-intensifying missionary movement.

I mention the terms Christian-refreshing and truth-intensifying because in Andrew Fuller’s life, there is a reciprocal relationship between spiritual life and biblical truth, on the one hand, and missions, on the other hand. In one direction, spiritual life and biblical truth give rise to missions. And in the other direction, engagement in the missionary enterprise awakens and sustains new levels of spiritual life and sharpens and deepens and intensifies our grasp of biblical truth. We will focus on the first in this message, but here are some glimpses into the effect missions had on Fuller’s life. On July 18, 1794, he wrote the following in his diary:

Within the last year or two, we have formed a missionary society; and have been enabled to send out two of our brethren to the East Indies. My heart has been greatly interested in this work. Surely I never felt more genuine love to God and to his cause in my life. I bless God that this work has been a means of reviving my soul. If nothing else comes of it, I and many others have obtained a spiritual advantage. (Peter Morden, Offering Christ to the World [Waynesboro, Georgia: Paternoster, 2003], p. 167)

Six months earlier he had written to John Ryland, “I have found the more I do for Christ, the better it is with me. I never enjoyed so much the pleasures of religion, as I have within the last two years, since we have engaged in the Mission business. Mr. Whitfield used to say, ‘the more men does for God, the more he may’” (Ibid.).

In one direction, when your love for Christ is enflamed and your grasp of the gospel is clear, a passion for world missions follows. In the other direction, when you are involved in missions—when you are laying down your life to rescue people from perishing—it tends to authenticate your faith, and deepen your assurance, and sweeten your fellowship with Jesus, and heighten your love for people, and sharpen your doctrines of Christ and heaven and hell. In other words, spiritual life and right doctrine are good for missions, and missions is good for spiritual life and right doctrine.

The reason I said at the beginning that it is totally possible that Andrew Fuller’s impact on history, by the time Jesus returns, will be far greater and different than it is now, is that there are three volumes of his writings still in print, and he was an unusually brilliant theologian. So quite apart from his influence on the rise of modern missions, his biblical insights may have an impact for good on future generations all out of proportion to his obscure place in the small town of Kettering, England. We will see some of his theological genius as we work our way backward from effect to cause — from his engagement with the new missionary movement to the spiritual life and theology that set it in motion.

Great Gain and Great Loss

Andrew Fuller died on May 7, 1815, at the age of sixty-one. He had been the pastor of the Baptist Church in Kettering (population, about three thousand) for thirty-two years. Before that, he was the pastor at Soham, and before that, he was a boy growing up on his parents’ farm and getting a simple education. He had no formal theological training but became the leading theological spokesman for the Particular Baptists5 in his day. He began to do occasional preaching in his home church of Soham at age seventeen, and when he was twenty-one, they called him to be the pastor.

The year after he became the pastor at Soham, he married Sarah Gardiner. (The year was 1776 — the year America declared independence from Britain). In the sixteen years before she died, the couple had eleven children, of whom eight died in infancy or early childhood. Sarah died two months before the Baptist Missionary Society was formed in Fuller’s home in October of 1792.

It is often this way in the ministry: the greatest gain and the greatest loss within two months. “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). He did marry again. In 1794, he married Ann Coles who outlived him by ten years.

An Overwhelmed Life

During these forty years of pastoral ministry in Soham and Kettering, Fuller tried to do more than one man can do well. He tried to raise a family, pastor a church, engage the destructive doctrinal errors of his day with endless writing, and function as the leader of the Baptist Missionary Society which he and a band of brothers had founded in 1792. He regularly felt overwhelmed. In 1801, he wrote in a letter,

[Samuel] Pierce’s memoirs are now loudly called for [that is, people were calling for him to write the memoirs of his friend, which he did]. I sit down almost in despair. . . . My wife looks at me with a tear ready to drop, and says, “My dear, you have hardly time to speak to me.” My friends at home are kind, but they also say, “You have no time to see us or know us and you will soon be worn out.” Amidst all this there is “Come again to Scotland — come to Portsmouth — come to Plymouth — come to Bristol” (Morden, Offering Christ, pp. 153-154).

A little band of Baptist pastors including William Carey had formed the Baptist Missionary Society on October 2, 1792. Fuller, more than anyone else, felt the burden of what it meant that William Carey and John Thomas (and later others) left everything for India in dependence, under God, on this band of brothers. One of them, John Ryland, recorded the story where the famous “rope holder” image came from. He wrote that Carey said,

Our undertaking to India really appeared to me, on its commencement, to be somewhat like a few men, who were deliberating about the importance of penetrating into a deep mine, which had never before been explored, we had no one to guide us; and while we were thus deliberating, Carey, as it were, said “Well, I will go down, if you will hold the rope.” But before he went down . . . he, as it seemed to me, took an oath from each of us, at the mouth of the pit, to this effect — that “while we lived, we should never let go of the rope.” (Ibid., p. 136.)

Fuller served as the main promoter, thinker, fundraiser, and letter-writer of the Society for over twenty-one years. He held that rope more firmly and with greater conscientiousness than anyone else. When he said above that in all his pastoral labors he hears, “Come again to Scotland — come to Portsmouth — come to Plymouth — come to Bristol,” he meant: Churches were calling him to come and represent the mission. So he traveled continuously speaking to raise support for the mission. He wrote the regular Periodical Accounts. He supplied news to the Baptist Annual Register, the Evangelical Magazine, and the Baptist Magazine. He took the lead role in selecting new missionaries. He wrote regularly to the missionaries on the field and to people at home (See Ibid., pp. 136-137, for a fuller account of his engagements.)

Tireless Pastoral Labors

All this while knowing his pastoral work was suffering. He did not have an assistant at Kettering until 1811 (John Hall), four years before he died. In October of 1794, he lamented in a letter to John Ryland how the mission work was compromising the church work: “I long to visit my congregation that I may know of their spiritual concerns and preach to their cases” (Ibid., p. 111). The love he felt for his people is expressed in a letter he wrote to a wayward member that he was pursuing: “When a parent loses . . . a child nothing but the recovery of that child can heal the wound. If he could have many other children, that would not do it. . . . Thus it is with me towards you. Nothing but your return to God and the Church can heal the wound.”

He pressed on faithfully feeding his flock with faithful expository preaching. “Beginning April 1790, he expounded successively Psalms, Isaiah, Joel, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Genesis, Matthew, Luke, John, Revelation, Acts, Romans, and First Corinthians as far as 4:5” (Tom Nettles in his “Preface to the New Edition: Why Andrew Fuller?” The Complete Works of Reverend Andrew Fuller, Vol. 1, Joseph Belcher, (Harrisonburg, Virginia: Sprinkle Publications, 1988).).

The people did not seem to begrudge their pastor’s wider ministry for the Missionary Society. One young deacon entered in his diary two weeks before Fuller’s death,

What a loss as individuals and as a church we are going to sustain. Him that has so long fed us with the bread of life, that has so affectionately, so faithfully, and so fervently counseled, exhorted, reproved, and animated; by doctrine, by precept, and by example the people of his charge; him who has liv’d so much for others! Shall we know more hear his voice? (Morden, Offering Christ, p. 112.)

And when he was home from his travels, his life was one form of work for another. His second wife Ann once told him that “he allowed himself no time for recreation.” Fuller answered, “O no: all my recreation is a change of work.”13 His son, Gunton Fuller, recorded that even in 1815, just a few months before his death, he was still working at his desk “upwards of twelve hours a day” (Morden, Offering Christ, p. 183.).

Extraordinary Suffering

Woven into all this work, making his perseverance all the more astonishing, is the extraordinary suffering, especially his losses. He lost eight children and his first wife. On July 10, 1792, he wrote, “My family afflictions have almost overwhelmed me, and what is yet before me I know not! For about a month past the affliction of my dear companion has been extremely heavy.” Then on July 25, “Oh my God, my soul is cast down within me! The afflictions of my family seemed too heavy for me. Oh, Lord, I am oppressed, undertake for me!” (The Complete Works of Reverend Andrew Fuller, Vol. I, pp. 58–59.) When his wife died one month later (August 23, 1792), having lost eight of her children, Fuller wrote these lines:

The tender parent wails no more her loss, Nor labors more beneath life’s heavy load; The anxious soul, released from fears and woes, Has found her home, her children, and her God. (Works, Vol. I, pp. 59-61.)

Andrew Fuller, the Thinker

That is the personal, pastoral, missionary context of Fuller’s engagement with the spiritual and doctrinal errors of his day. And for all his activism, it is his controversial and doctrinal writing that served the cause of world missions most. Virtually all the students of Andrew Fuller agree that he was the most influential theologian of the Particular Baptists. “Fuller,” one writes, “was pre-eminently the thinker, and no movement can go far without a thinker” (Morden, Offering Christ, p. 137, citing E. F. Clipsham, who was quoting B. Grey Griffith.)

What I will try to do is show how his engagement with Sandemanianism recovered and preserved a kind of vital faith that is essential for missions, and his engagement with Hyper-Calvinism (or what he more often called High Calvinism) recovered and preserved a kind of preaching that is essential for missions. And in both cases, the battle was distinctly exegetical and doctrinal even though the all-important outcomes were deeply experiential and globally practical.

Enlightenment Contemporaries and Particular Baptists

Of course, Andrew Fuller, the thinker, the theologian, did not arise in a vacuum. Besides the secular rationalism of David Hume (1711–1776) in Britain and Rousseau (1712–1778) in France and Thomas Paine (1737–1809) in America — all contemporaries of Andrew Fuller — there was the Great Awakening in America and the Evangelical Awakening in Britain. Both George Whitefield (1714–1770) and John Wesley (1703–1791) were in their prime when Andrew Fuller was born in 1754.

The Particular Baptists did not like either of these evangelical leaders. Wesley was not a Calvinist, and Whitefield’s Calvinism was suspect, to say the least, because of the kind of evangelistic preaching he did. The Particular Baptists spoke derisively of Whitefield’s “Arminian dialect” (Ibid., p. 20). Fuller grew up in what he called a High Calvinistic — or Hyper-Calvinistic — church. He said later that the minister at the church in Soham (John Eve) had “little or nothing to say to the unconverted” (Ibid., p. 27). Fuller’s greatest theological achievement was to see and defend and spread the truth that historic biblical Calvinism fully embraced the offer of the gospel to all people without exception.

Fuller immersed himself in the Scriptures and in the historic tradition flowing from Augustine through Calvin through the Puritans down to Jonathan Edwards. The Bible was always paramount: “Lord, thou hast given me a determination to take up no principle at second-hand; but to search for everything at the pure fountain of thy word” (Works, Vol. I, p. 20). That is one of the main reasons why it is so profitable to read Fuller to this very day: He is so freshly biblical.

His Great Mentors

But he is wide open about who his great mentors were. And we should know them. He searched both the Scriptures and the history of doctrine to see if he could find this High Calvinism that had so infected and controlled his denomination — the view that opposed offering the gospel to all men and said it could not be the duty of the unregenerate men to believe on Jesus, and therefore, one should not tell them they should do what they have no duty to do. That was the reasoning of Hyper-Calvinism.

The two most influential authors representing High Calvinism — at least the ones who influenced Particular Baptists most — were John Brine (1703–1765) and John Gill (1697–1771). Morden comments that Timothy George and others have made attempts to rehabilitate Gill and to rebut the charge that he was a Hyper-Calvinist, “but attempts to defend him from the charge of high Calvinism are ultimately unconvincing” (Offering Christ, p. 15) A quotation illustrating John Gill’s attitude towards a free offer of the gospel: “That there are universal offers of grace and salvation made to all men, I utterly deny; nay I deny that they are made to any; no not to God’s elect; grace and salvation are provided for them in the everlasting covenant, procured for them by Christ, published and revealed in the gospel and applied by the spirit.” John Gill, Sermons and Tracts, Three Volumes (London: 1778), III, p. 269-270, quoted in Morden, Offering Christ, p. 14. Fuller himself certainly saw Gill as a High Calvinist responsible for much of the evangelistic deadness among his fellow Particular Baptists: “I perceived . . . that the system of Bunyan was not the same as [John Gill’s]; for while he maintained the doctrines of election and predestination, he nevertheless held with the free offer of salvation to sinners without distinction” (Morden, Offering Christ, p. 31).

Fuller came to this conclusion:

Neither Augustine nor Calvin, who each in his today defended predestination, and the other doctrines connected with it, ever appear to have thought of denying it to be the duty of every sinner who has heard the gospel to repent and believe in Jesus Christ. Neither did the other Reformers, nor the Puritans of the 16th century, nor the divines at the Synod of Dort, (who opposed Arminius) nor any of the nonconformists of the 17th century, so far as I have any acquaintance with their writings, ever so much as hesitate upon this subject. (Works, Vol. II, p. 367)

John Calvin played a relatively minor role in shaping Fuller’s thinking directly. He was immersed in the Puritans and quoted more from Charnock, Goodwin, Bunyan, and Owen than from Calvin. He only quotes from Calvin once in the first edition of his most influential book, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. Morden concludes, “There is no direct link between Calvin’s writings and The Gospel Worthy” (Morden, Offering Christ, p. 35). In fact, by his own testimony, John Owen ranks first in his esteem of all the writers that influenced him. “I never met with anything of importance in his writings on which I saw any reason to animadvert; so far from it, that I know of no writer for whom I have so great an esteem” (Works, Vol. I, p. 39. Emphasis added).

The Influence of Jonathan Edwards

But even if he esteems Owen above all others, almost everyone who studies Fuller’s works agree that Jonathan Edwards was the most decisively influential in helping him break free from his Hyper-Calvinistic roots (Edwards, most agree, was “probably the most powerful and important extra biblical influence” on Fuller. Morden, Offering Christ, p. 49). Fuller admits that, after the Bible itself, it was Edwards who provided the keys that unlocked the door out of Hyper-Calvinist reasoning. We will see that this was true both for the Sandemanian and the Hyper-Calvinist controversies.

David Bebbington says that Jonathan Edwards “stands at the headwaters” of eighteenth-century evangelicalism (David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 6). That is certainly true for Andrew Fuller. To give you a flavor of the way he felt about Edwards — ten days before Fuller died on May 7, 1815, he dictated a letter to John Ryland, one of the band of brothers who founded the mission together with him. The point of the letter was to defend Jonathan Edwards:

We have heard some, who have been giving out of late that “if Sutcliff and some others had preached more of Christ and less of Jonathan Edwards, they would have been more useful.” If those who talk thus, preached Christ half as much as Jonathan Edwards did, and were half as useful as he was, their usefulness would be double what it is (Works, Vol. I, p. 101.).

Edwards’ Freedom of the Will

Fuller was born in 1754, four years before Jonathan Edwards died, and the year that Edwards published his hugely influential book, The Freedom of the Will. I mention Edwards’ book on the will because in it Fuller found one of the keys that unlocked the unbiblical prison of Hyper-Calvinism.

The Hyper-Calvinist reasoning went like this, in the words of Andrew Fuller:

It is absurd and cruel to require of any man what is beyond his power to perform; and as the Scriptures declare that “No man can come to Christ, except the Father draw him,” and that “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned,” it is concluded that these are things to which the sinner, while unregenerate, is under no obligation. (Ibid., p. 376.)

“It is a kind of maxim with such persons,” Fuller said, “that ‘none can be obliged to act spiritually, but spiritual men’” (Works, Vol. II, p. 360). The practical conclusion that they drew was that faith in Christ is not a duty for the non-elect. It is not a duty for the unregenerate. Therefore, you never call for faith indiscriminately. You never stand before a group of people — whether in Britain or in India — and say, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ!” You never exhort, plead, call, command, urge.

Fuller Against the Hyper-Calvinists

One of Fuller’s critics, John Martin, Pastor at Grafton Street, Westminster wrote,

Sinners in my opinion, are more frequently converted, and believers more commonly edified, by a narrative of facts concerning Jesus Christ, and by a clear, connected statement of the doctrines of grace, and blessings of the gospel, and then by all the expectations and expostulations that were ever invented. (Quoted in Morden, Offering Christ, p. 57.) But in fact, the Hyper-Calvinists were not passionately telling the narrative of the gospel story to the lost and were opposed to the new mission to India. Peter Morden points out that “The prevalence of high Calvinism had led not only to a refusal to ‘offer Christ’ but also to a general suspicion of all human ‘means’, such as ministerial training and associating” (Morden, Offering Christ, p. 45). The effect of this rationalistic distortion of the biblical Calvinism was that the churches were lifeless and the denomination of the Particular Baptists was dying.

One example of the emotional fallout of High Calvinism is seen, first, in the fact that Whitefield and Wesley were accused of “enthusiasm” which was defined vaguely and abusively as any kind of religious excitement, and, second, in the fact that John Gill, in his A Complete Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, said that spiritual joy “is not to be expressed by those who experience it; it is better experienced than expressed” (Ibid., p. 20).

Fuller, who only knew High Calvinism in his early ministry, said in 1774, “I . . . durst not, for some years, address an invitation to the unconverted to come to Jesus” (Quoted from John Ryland’s biography in Ibid., p. 103.). He went on to say, “I conceive there is scarcely a minister amongst us whose preaching has not been more or less influenced by the lethargic systems of the age” (Works, Vol., II, p. 387.). The price had been huge: in the forty years after 1718; the Particular Baptists declined from 220 congregations to 150 (Morden Offering Christ, p. 8.).

A “Warrant of Faith”?

If you ask: How then did anyone get saved under this system? The answer was that here and there God would give what they called a “warrant of faith.” That is, there would be some token granted by the Holy Spirit to signify that the persons were regenerate and elect and therefore had a “warrant” to believe. For example, one way God did this, they believed, was by forcibly suggesting a Scripture to one’s mind. This happened to Fuller at age thirteen (with Romans 6:14), and he thought for a while that he had been saved. But the experience proved to be abortive (Ibid., p. 28).

What Fuller came to see was that High Calvinism had shifted the meaning of faith from focusing on the objective person and promises of Christ onto the subjective state of our own hearts. In other words, saving faith became faith that I am experiencing the regenerating work of God — faith that I am elect. Or, as Fuller put it, the High Calvinists said that faith is to “believe the goodness of their state.” To this he responded:

If this be saving faith, it must inevitably follow that it is not the duty of unconverted sinners; for they are not interested in Christ [that is, they are not yet united to him], and it cannot possibly be their duty to believe a lie. But if it can be proved that the proper object of saving faith is not our being interested in Christ [that is, our being already united to him], but the glorious gospel of the ever blessed God, (which is true, whether we believe it or not,) a contrary inference must be drawn; for it is admitted, all in all hands, that it is the duty of every man to believe what God reveals (Works, Vol., II, p. 333.).

In fact, Fuller goes on to show that

Nothing can be an object of faith, except what God has revealed in his word; but the interest that any individual has in Christ . . . is not revealed. . . . The Scriptures always represent faith as terminating on something [outside of] us; namely, on Christ, and the truths concerning him. . . . The person, blood, and righteousness of Christ revealed in the Scriptures as the way of a sinner’s acceptance with God, are, properly speaking, the objects of our faith; for without such a revelation it were impossible to believe in them. . . . That for which he ought to have trusted in him was the obtaining of mercy, in case he applied for it. For this there was a complete warrant in the gospel declarations (Ibid., pp. 334, 340, 342.).

In other words, we should not say to unbelievers: Wait until you feel some warrant of faith so that you can trust in that. Rather, we should say, “Christ is the glorious divine Son of God. His death and resurrection are sufficient to cover all your sins.39 He promises to receive everyone who comes to him and he promises to forgive all who trust in him. Therefore, come to him and trust him and you will be saved. If you wonder if you are elect or if you are regenerate, cease wondering and do what Christ has commanded you to do. Receive him, trust in him, cast yourself on him for his promised mercy. And you will prove to be elect and to be regenerate.”

On the extent of the atonement, Fuller found himself again defending the Scripture against High Calvinists and Arminians who both thought that “particular redemption” made the free offer of the gospel to all illogical. His position is that the death of Christ is not to be conceived of “commercially” in the sense that it purchased effectually a limited number such that if more believed they could not be atoned for.

On the other hand, if the atonement of Christ proceed not on the principle of commercial, but of moral justice, or justice as it relates to crime — if its grand object were to express the divine displeasure against sin (Romans 8:3) and so to render the exercise of mercy, in all the ways wherein sovereign wisdom should determine to apply it, consistent with righteousness (Romans 3:25) — if it be in itself equal to the salvation of the whole world, were the whole world to embrace it—and if the peculiarity which attends it consists not in its insufficiency to save more than are saved, but in the sovereignty of its application—no such inconsistency can justly be ascribed to it (Works, Vol., II, pp. 373–374 Emphasis added).

Fuller, the Calvinist

Fuller is a Calvinist. He says, “The Scriptures clearly ascribe both repentance and faith wherever they exist to divine influence [e.g., 2 Timothy 2:25-26; Ephesians 2:8].” He believes in irresistible grace. But what he is arguing against is that one has to know before he believes that he is being irresistibly called or regenerated:

Whatever necessity there may be for a change of heart in order [for one to believe], it is neither necessary nor possible that the party should be conscious of it till he has believed. It is necessary that the eyes of a blind man should be opened before he can see; but it is neither necessary nor possible for him to know that his eyes are open till he does see.

In other words, the limitation of the atonement lies not in the sufficiency of its worth to save all the sinners in the world, but in the design of God to apply that infinite sufficiency to those whom he chooses. As the application of redemption is solely directed by sovereign wisdom, so, like every other event, it is the result of previous design. That which is actually done was intended to be done. Hence the salvation of those that are saved is described as the endwhich the Savior had in view: “He gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.” Herein, it is apprehended, consists the peculiarity of redemption. There is no contradiction between this peculiarity of design in the death of Christ, and the universal obligation of those who hear the gospel to believe in him, or universal invitation being addressed to them (Ibid., p. 374).

In this position, as in so many, he was in line with his decisive mentor, Jonathan Edwards, who wrote in The Freedom of the Will,

Christ in some sense might be said to die for all, and to redeem all visible Christians, yea, the whole world by his death; yet there must be something particular in the design of his death with respect to such as be saved thereby. God has the actual salvation of redemption of a certain number in his proper and absolute design, and of a certain number only; and, therefore, such a design can only be prosecuted in anything God does in order to the salvation of men (“The Freedom of the Will,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. I, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale university Press, 1985), p. 435).

Fuller steadfastly refuses to let ostensible Calvinistic or Arminian logic override what he sees in Scripture. And ironically, High Calvinism and Arminianism are here standing on the same pretended logic against Scripture. Both argue that it is absurd and cruel to require of any man what is beyond his power to perform. Or to put it the way Fuller does,

They are agreed in making the grace of God necessary to the accountableness of sinners with regard to spiritual obedience. The one [High Calvinism] pleads for graceless sinners being free from obligation, the other [Arminianism] admits of obligation but founds it on the notion of universal grace. Both are agreed that where there is no grace there is no duty. But if grace be the ground of obligation, it is no more grace, but debt (Ibid., p.379).

“The whole weight of this objection,” he says, “rests upon the supposition that we do not stand in need of the Holy Spirit to enable us to comply with our duty” (Ibid., p. 379). In other words, both High Calvinists and Arminians rejected the prayer of St. Augustine, “Command what you wish, but give what you command”(Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), p. 40). But Fuller says, “To me it appears that the necessity of Divine influence, and even of a change of heart, prior to believing, is perfectly consistent with its being the immediate duty of the unregenerate” (Works, Vol., II, p. 381.).Why? Because the Scripture shows it to be the case, and Jonathan Edwards provides categories that help make sense out of it. Concerning the biblical witness, he writes,

The same things are required in one place which are promised in another: ‘Only fear the Lord, and serve him in truth with all your heart.’ — ‘I will put my fear in their hearts that they shall not depart from me.’ When the sacred writers speak of the divine precepts, they neither disown them nor infer from them a self-sufficiency to conform to them, but turn them into prayer: ‘Thou hast commanded us to keep thy precepts diligently. Oh that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes!’ In fine, the Scriptures uniformly teach us that all our sufficiency to do good or to abstain from evil is from above; repentance and faith, therefore may be duties, notwithstanding their being the gifts of God (Ibid., p. 380. “If an upright heart toward God and man be not itself required of us, nothing is or can be required; for all duty is comprehended in the acting-out of the heart.” Ibid., p. 382).

Natural Inability and Moral Inability

In his most famous work, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, Fuller piles text upon text in which unbelievers are addressed with the duty to believe (See Works, Vol., II, pp. 343–366 where most of these texts are explained. See, for example, Psalm 2:11n12; Isaiah 55:1–7; Jeremiah 6:16; John 12:36; John 6:29; 5:23. He aligns himself with John Owen at this point who wrote, “When the apostle beseecheth us to be ‘reconciled’ to God, I would know whether it be not a part of our duty to yield obedience? If not, the expectation is frivolous and vain.” Works, Vol., II, p. 353). These are his final court of appeal against the High Calvinists who use their professed logic to move from biblical premises to unbiblical conclusions. But he finds Edwards very helpful in answering the High Calvinist objection on another level. Remember, the objection is: “It is absurd and cruel to require of any man what is beyond his power to perform.” In other words, a man’s inability to believe removes his responsibility to believe (and our duty to command them to believe). In response to this objection, Fuller brings forward the distinction between moral inability and natural inability. This was the key insight which he learned from Jonathan Edwards, and he gives him credit for it on the third page of The Gospel Worthy.

Referring to himself in the third person as the author, he writes, “He had read and considered, as well as he was able, President Edwards’s Inquiry into the Freedom the Will . . . on the difference between natural and moral inability. He found much satisfaction in the distinction as it appeared to him to carry with it its own evidence—to be clearly and fully contained in the Scriptures. . . . The more he examined the Scriptures, the more he was convinced that all inability ascribed to man, with respect to believing, arises from the perversion of his hear” (Works, Vol., II, p. 330).

The distinction is this: Natural inability is owing to the lack of “rational faculties, bodily powers, or external advantages”; but moral inability is owing to the lack of inclination because of an averse will. Natural inability does in fact remove obligation. He cites Romans 2:12 as a pointer to this truth: “For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.” In other words, there is a correlation between what you will be held accountable for and what you had natural access to.

But moral inability does not excuse. It does not remove obligation. And this is the kind of inability the Bible is speaking about when it says, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Corinthians 2:14; cf. Romans 8:8).

There is an essential difference [Fuller writes] between an ability which is independent of the inclination, and one that is owing to nothing else. It is just as impossible, no doubt, for any person to do that which he has no mind to do, as to perform that which surpasses his natural powers; and hence it is that the same terms are used in one case as in the other (Ibid., p. 377).

In other words, it is just as impossible for you to choose to do what you have no inclination to do as it is to do what you have no physical ability to do. But the inability owing to physical hindrances excuses, while the inability owing to a rebellious will does not.

“He that, from the Constitution of his nature, is absolutely unable to understand, or believe, or love a certain kind of truth, must of necessity, be alike unable to shut his eyes against it, to disbelieve, to reject, or to hate it. But it is manifest that all men are capable of the latter; it must therefore follow that nothing but the depravity of their heart renders them incapable of the former” (Works, Vol., II, p. 378).

This kind of reasoning was not Fuller’s main reason for rejecting High Calvinism and Arminianism. Scripture was. But Edwards’ categories helped him make more sense of what he saw there.

The Practical Effect for Missions

The all important conclusion from all this exegetical, doctrinal, theological labor and controversy was the enormously practical implication for evangelism and world missions:

I believe it is the duty of every minister of Christ plainly and faithfully to preach the gospel to all who will hear it; and, as I believe the inability of men to [do] spiritual things to be wholly of the moral, and therefore of the criminal kind — and that it is their duty to love the Lord Jesus Christ, and trust in him for salvation, though they do not; I therefore believe free and solemn addresses, invitations, calls, and warnings to them, to be not only consistent, but directly adapted as means, in the hand of the Spirit of God, to bring them to Christ. I consider it as part of my duty that I could not omit without being guilty of the blood of souls (Morden, Offering Christ, p. 106.).

Fuller’s engagement at this level of intellectual rigor, as a pastor and a family man, may seem misplaced. The price was high in his church and in his family. But the fruit for the world was incalculably great. No one else was on the horizon to strike a blow against the church-destroying, evangelism-hindering, missions-killing doctrine of High Calvinism. Fuller did it, and the theological platform was laid for the launching of the greatest missionary movement in the world.

Fuller Against Sandemanianism

Before we draw out some lessons for ourselves, I want to deal briefly with Fuller’s engagement with Sandemanianism. Fuller’s response to this deadening movement of his day was part of the platform for the missionary movement, and it is amazingly relevant for our day because of its bearing on the debates about the nature of justifying faith. I just tuned into the debate between R. Scott Clark and Doug Wilson over at Scott’s blog, Heidelblog, and there were elements of it that relate directly to Fuller’s response to Sandemanianism (though no one there would be in the category of a Sandemanian). And again Fuller gets one of his decisive insights in this debate from Jonathan Edwards.

What is Sandemanianism?

Robert Sandeman (1718–1771) spread the teaching that justifying faith is the mind’s passive persuasion that the gospel statements are true. Here is the way Andrew Fuller expressed this Sandemanianism. The distinguishing marks of the system, he says, relate

to the nature of justifying faith. This Mr. S. [Sandeman] constantly represents as the bare belief of the bare truth; by which definition he intends, as it would seem, to exclude from it everything pertaining to the will and the affections, except as effects produced by it. . . . ‘Everyone,’ says he, ‘who obtains a just notion of the person and work of Christ, or whose notion corresponds to what is testified of him, is justified, and finds peace with God simply by that notion.’

This notion he considers as the effect of truth being impressed upon the mind, and denies that the mind is active in it. ‘He who maintains,’ says he, ‘that we are justified only by faith, and at the same time affirms . . . that faith is a work exerted by the human mind, undoubtedly maintains, if he had any meaning to his words, that we are justified by a work exerted by the human mind’ (Works, Vol., I, pp. 566-567. Sandeman took his view so seriously that he saw the main stream Puritan writers (including men like Flavel, Boston, Guthrie, and the Erskines) as furnishing “a devout path to hell.” Works, Vol. II, p. 566.).

Sandeman’s aim is to protect the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He believes that if faith has any movement of mind or will or affections toward God, it is an act and therefore a work and would therefore compromise the doctrine. To protect the doctrine, he denies that faith has any activity in it at all. Implicit is that faith is not a virtue. It does not partake of any goodness or newness in the soul. He therefore does not see regeneration as preceding and enabling faith, for that would make faith an acting of the renewed heart and therefore we would be justified by the goodness of what we do. So faith must be defined as perfectly consistent with a soul that is in actual enmity with God, before there is any renewal at all.

Sandeman’s main support for this view is the meaning of the term ungodly in Romans 4:5, “To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.” He argues that this term must mean that there is no godly or virtuous or renewed or active quality about our faith, for if there were, we would not be called ungodly. So he defines faith as a passive persuasion of the truth in which the mind is not active. So faith can coexist with ungodliness understood as the total absence of any renewal or godly act of the soul (See how Fuller explains this argument of Sandeman in Works, Vol., I, p. 568.).

For the Sake of the Church and the Nations

Fuller found this both unbiblical and deadening to the churches. To sever the roots of faith in regeneration, and to strip faith of its holiness, and to deny its active impulse to produce the fruit of love (Galatians 5:6) was to turn the church into an intellectualistic gathering of passive people who are afraid of their emotions and who lack any passion for worship or missions (“Their intellectualized view of faith probably accounted for what Fuller and Sutcliff saw as the arid nature of many of their churches. . . . Most centrally, they were not sufficiently committed to the spread of the gospel” (Morden, Offering Christ, p. 150). Therefore, Fuller, the lover of God and missions, waged another battle against Sandemanianism for the sake of the church and the nations.

Fuller compiles a hundred pages of small print argument in twelve letters complied under the title Strictures on Sandemanianism (Works, Vol. II, pp. 561–646).

Here are two sample arguments for not taking ungodly in Romans 4:5 to mean that faith in the justified believer has no character of holiness:

Argument #1: “Neither Abraham nor David, whose cases the apostle selects for the illustration is argument, was, at the time referred to, the enemy of God. . . . But the truth is, [Abraham] had been a believer in God and a true worshiper of him for many years, at the time when he is said to have believed in God, and it was counted to him for righteousness, Genesis 12:1-3; 15:6; Hebrews 11:8. Here then is an account of one who had walked with God for a series of years ‘working not, but believing on him that justifieth the ungodly;’ a clear proof that by ‘working not’ the apostle did not mean a wicked inaction, but a renunciation of works as the ground of acceptance with God” (Works, Vol. III, p. 717).

Argument #2. “It and has been said that the term ungodly is never used but to describe the party as being under actual enmity of God at the time. I apprehend this is a mistake. Christ is said to have died for the ‘ungodly.’ Did he then lay down his life only for those who, at the time, were actually his enemies? If so, he did not die for any of the Old Testament saints, nor for any of the godly who were then alive, nor even for his own apostles. All that can in truth be said is, that, what ever were the characters at the time, he died for them as ungodly; and thus it is that he ‘justifieth the ungodly’” (Ibid., p. 404).

He points out, for example, that faith is a kind of “work” or act of the soul because Jesus says so in John 6:28–29, “Then they said to him, ‘What must we do, to be doing the works of God?’ Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent’” (Works, Vol. III, p. 718. But he adds immediately, as we will see below, “But that we are justified by it as a work, or is a part of moral obedience . . . I utterly deny.”)

He also observes that it is the uniform witness of Scripture that “without repentance there is no forgiveness” (Ibid., p. 716). He also shows that the meaning of faith in the New Testament is revealed with many parallel expressions that imply the good action of the heart (for example, to receive Christ, John 1:12; or to come to Christ, John 6:35).

So Fuller denies that faith is a mere passive persuasion of the mind, but asserts that it is the holy fruit of regeneration which has in it the good impulse to “work through love” (Galatians 5:6).

“Unbelief [is not] the same thing as unholiness, enmity, or disobedience; but it is not so distinct from either as not to partake of the same general nature. It is not only the root of all other sin, but is itself a sin. In like manner, faith is not only the root of all other obedience, but is itself an exercise of obedience. It is called ‘obeying the truth,’ and ‘obeying the gospel’” (Works, Vol. II, p. 575).

To see this is vital for the life of the church and the power of world missions. How then does he reconcile this with Romans 4:5 which says that God “justifies the ungodly”? Here is his answer:

This term [ungodly in Romans 4:5], I apprehend, is not designed, in the passage under consideration, to express the actual state of mind which the party at the time possesses, but the character under which God considers him in bestowing the blessing of justification upon him. Whatever be the present state of the sinner’s mind — whether he be a haughty Pharisee or a humble publican — if he possess nothing which can in any degree balance the curse which stands against him, or at all operate as a ground of acceptance with God, he must be justified, if at all, as unworthy, ungodly, and wholly out of regard to the righteousness of the mediator” (Works, Vol. III, p. 715. Emphasis added.). He uses the analogy of a magnet to help us see that faith can have qualities about it and yet it not be these qualities that God has reference to when he counts faith as justifying.

Whatever holiness there is in [faith], it is not this, but the obedience of Christ, that constitutes our justifying righteousness. Whatever other properties the magnet may possess, it is as pointing invariably to the north that it guides the mariner; and whatever other properties faith may possess, it is as receiving Christ, and bringing us into union with him, that it justifies (Works, Vol. I, p. 281).

“By believing in Jesus Christ the sinner becomes vitally united to him, or, as the Scriptures express it, ‘joined to the Lord,’ and is of ‘one spirit with him;’ and this union, according to the divine constitution, as revealed in the gospel, is the ground of an interest in his righteousness. Agreeable to this is the following language: “There is now, therefore no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.’—‘Of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us righteousness,’ etc.—‘That I may be found in him not having mine own righteousness which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ’” (Works, Vol. II, p. 384).

The Uniqueness of Faith

He points out that faith is unique among all the other graces that grow in the renewed heart. It is a “peculiarly receiving grace.”

Thus it is that justification is ascribed to faith, because it is by faith that we receive Christ; and thus it is by faith only, and not by any other grace. Faith is peculiarly a receiving grace which none other is. Were we said to be justified by repentance, by love, or by any other grace, it would convey to us the idea of something good in us being the consideration on which the blessing was bestowed; but justification by faith conveys no such idea. On the contrary, it leads the mind directly to Christ, in the same manner as saying of a person that he lives by begging leads to the idea of his living on what he freely receives” (Works, Vol. I, p. 281. “By faith we receive the benefit; but the benefit arises not from faith, but from Christ. Hence the same thing which is described in some places to faith, is in others ascribed to the obedience, death, and resurrection of Christ.” p. 282).

What matters, Fuller says, concerning the meaning of the justification of the ungodly is not that we possess no holy affections in the moment of justification by faith, “but that, whatever we possess we make nothing of it as a ground of acceptance, ‘counting all things but loss and dung that we may win and be found in him’” (Works, Vol. II, p. 406.). Faith is a duty. It is an act of the soul. It is a good effect of regeneration. “Yet,” Fuller says, “it is not as such, but as uniting us to Christ and deriving righteousness from him, that it justifies?” (Ibid., p. 572. At this point, he refers to Jonathan Edwards and gives him credit for this insight.)

Faith: A Holy Act That Justifies the Ungodly

Fuller concludes his book, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, with reference back to the New Testament preachers:

The ground on which they took their stand was “Cursed is everyone who continueth not in all things written in the book of the law to do them” [Galatians 3:10]. Hence they inferred the impossibility of the sinner being justified in any other way than for the sake of him who was “made a curse for us;” and hence it clearly follows, that whatever holiness any sinner may possess before, in, or after believing, it is of no account whatever as a ground of acceptance with God. (Ibid., pp. 392–393.)

Which means that God justifies us under the consideration of our unworthiness, our ungodliness, because of Christ, not under the consideration of any holiness in us. In this way, Fuller is able to retain the crucial biblical meaning of faith as a holy acting of the will flowing from regeneration, and yet say with Paul, “To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:5).

One Great Enemy: Global Unbelief

The sum of the matter is that Fuller had one great enemy he wanted to defeat — global unbelief in Jesus Christ. He believed that the kingdom of Christ would triumph, and he meant to be an instrument in the conquering of unbelief in India and to the ends of the earth. Standing in the way of that triumph in his generation were false views of justifying faith and false views of gospel preaching. Sandemanianism had ripped the life and power out of faith so that it was powerless in worship and missions. Hyper-Calvinism had muzzled the gospel cry of the Bride (“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price,” Revelation 22:17). For the sake of the life of the church and the salvation of the nations, Fuller took up the battle for truth.

The Vital Link Between Doctrine and World Missions

What shall we learn from this? We should learn the vital link between the doctrinal faithfulness of the church and the cause of world missions. The main impulse of our day is in the other direction. Everywhere you turn there is pressure to believe that missions depends on not disputing about doctrine. As soon as you engage another professing Christian in controversy over some biblical issue, the cry will go up: “Stop wasting your time and be about missions.” What we learn from Fuller is that those cries are at best historically naïve and at worst a smoke screen for the uninhibited spread of error.

One crucial lesson from Andrew Fuller’s life is that the exegetical and doctrinal defense of true justifying faith and true gospel preaching in the end did not hinder but advanced the greatest missionary movement in world history. Getting Christian experience biblically right and getting the gospel biblically right are essential for the power and perseverance and fruitfulness of world missions.

Wrong Inferences Produce Deadly Mistakes

Learn from Fuller’s conflicts that deadly mistakes come from drawing wrong inferences from texts based on superficial claims of logic: If God justifies the ungodly, then faith must be ungodly because God justifies by faith. If the natural man cannot receive the message of the cross, then don’t urge him to receive it; it’s pointless and cruel. Real logic is not the enemy of exegesis. But more errors than we know flow from the claim to logic that contradicts the Bible.

If God is love, there cannot be predestination.

If Stephen says Israel has resisted God, then God cannot overcome our rebellion irresistibly.

If men are accountable for their choices, they must be ultimately self-determining.

If God is good, innocent people cannot suffer so much.

If God rules all things including sin, he must be a sinner.

If God rules all things, there is not point in praying.

If God threatens a person with not entering the kingdom, he cannot have eternal security.

If Christ died for all, he cannot have purchased anything particular for the elect.

Fuller shows us that the best antidote against the wrong use of logic is not first better logic, but better knowledge of the Bible, which is the best warning system for when logic is being misused.

Global Impact for the Glory of Christ

There is a kind of inner logic to Fuller’s life and battles and global fruitfulness. His engagement with Sandemanianism highlights the importance of vital, authentic spiritual experience over against sterile, intellectualistic faith. His engagement with Hyper-Calvinism highlights the importance of objective gospel truth. These two things set the stage for assaulting global unbelief. Authentic subjective experience of God plus authentic objective truth of God leads to authentic practical mission for God. Holy faith plus worthy gospel yields world vision.

Therefore, devote yourself to experiencing Christ in the gospel biblically and authentically. And devote yourself to understanding Christ in the gospel biblically and authentically. And may God ignite that experience and that understanding in such a way that your life will count like Andrew Fuller’s for the cause of world evangelization to the glory of Christ.

[thoughtsforleaders]

Insanely Wonderful Interview On Kindness In Leadership, Innovation, Curiosity Reflecting On The Lives Of Da Vinci, Steve Jobs And Others

Walter Isaacson is the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, and has been the chairman and CEO of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine. He is the #1 bestselling author of biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and most recently, Leonardo da Vinci. Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, the top-rated professor at Wharton, and the #1 bestselling author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. The two recently sat down to discuss what made da Vinci and Steve Jobs so brilliant, and what we can do to follow in their footsteps.

By Heleo Editors

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Adam: You’ve been the biographer of some of the greatest innovators in human history. Your new book is on da Vinci; why da Vinci?

Walter: I started with Ben Franklin, and then Einstein, and then Steve Jobs—[they were all] innovative and creative. And I said, “Well, what pattern [leads to] that?” The pattern wasn’t that they were smart, because you’ve met lots of smart people, and they don’t usually amount to much. The pattern tends to be curiosity across disciplines.

Ben Franklin went up and down the coast looking at how swirls of air resembled the swirls of the northeastern storms, and then he discovered the Gulf Stream. Same with Leonardo—he sees patterns across nature. Steve Jobs would always end his product presentations with the intersection of the arts and technology. He said at that intersection is where creativity happens. And he said that Leonardo is the ultimate of that! That ability not just to connect art and science, but in Leonardo’s case, to make no distinction between the beauty of art and science. That’s why he was the final mountain to climb in this series of books.

Adam: I think there’s a ton we can learn from da Vinci. I also think, though, that it seems unfair. I want to live in da Vinci’s era, because no one knew anything! So you could be an architect and a scientist and a great painter, and get to excellence much quicker in each of those fields than you can today. Is it too late for a Renaissance man or woman today?

Walter: Well, Leonardo was a misfit. He and Steve Jobs spent years as the misfits and rebels and round pegs in the square holes. He was illegitimate, which was lucky for him. Born out of wedlock, he didn’t have to be a notary like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather. He was gay. He was left-handed. He was vegetarian. He was a radical, and he was beloved in the town of Florence. They accepted that. And they assumed, like Leonardo, that you could learn everything you wanted about anything you wanted.

We can still be a little bit more like that, to answer your question. We silo ourselves too much, we specialize too much. The biggest takeaway from this book is to stay curious about everything, things you and I asked about when we were ten, but not in our later years.15

Why is the sky blue? Why do fish swim faster in water than birds fly in the air? Leonardo woke up one morning and said, “I’ve got to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like.” It’s not because he needs it to study the flight of birds. He doesn’t need it to paint a painting—he needs it because he’s a learner. He just wants to know everything you could possibly know, about everything that could be known.

I mean he decided, “Alright, I want to do flying machines,” then he does studies on the flights of birds. Then he’s like, “I’m gonna do military machines,” then, “I’m going to do the design of churches.” But then he starts with anatomical drawing because he wants to paint St. Jerome, and he can’t quite get the neck muscles right. But after a while, he’s not just dissecting neck muscles—he’s dissecting the heart, the liver. He just drills down [deeper into each field of study].

Bill Gates once said that [da Vinci] was the last person in history who could aspire to know everything there was to know about everything that was knowable. I’m not sure that’s totally true. Ben Franklin aspired to do that, and you know what, you and I can aspire to do that, with Wikipedia and the internet. Just staying curious is the main lesson.

Adam: It’s weird because [Leonardo] was accomplishing all of these things, and yet he was frustrated. What was it like to be da Vinci?

Walter: Well, we can see first of all that he’s human. He makes math mistakes, he leaves things unfinished, he comes up with crossbows that can never fire, tanks that could never roll.

And he despairs. Over and over in the notebooks, he writes this line: “Tell me, tell me, did I ever accomplish anything? Tell me, tell me, did I ever get anything done?”

Adam: I was shocked when I first read he was a serious procrastinator.

Walter: When Leonardo was painting the Last Supper, by this time he’s famous, so he has an audience. He’d go in through the front door of the dining hall at the monastery, and he’d just stand there, and finally he’d do just one stroke. And he’d leave! And the duke said, “Hey, what about my painting?” And Leonardo explained to him, “Sometimes when you’re creative, you accomplish the most when you seem to be working the least, because you’re bringing things together, and you’re letting them gel. You’re intuiting what you’re going to do.”

Adam: Isn’t that just an excuse for not working?

Walter: Yes it is, and he doesn’t finish some paintings. He does finish a lot of paintings, and “The Last Supper” is pretty good. But he procrastinated so much, it started flaking off the wall, because when you do a fresco, you’re supposed to do it when the plaster is wet.

Adam: I think it worked out okay for his career, all things considered. What else did you find that’s relevant to us today?

Walter: Well I like the fact that imagination and fantasy played such a big role [in his life]. Because what we do is we take a ten-year-old, who’s inordinately curious about all sorts of things, [and we shut him down]. I was walking in the Philadelphia airport and some kid was asking his father, “Why is that [designed] this way?” and “What’s this?” Finally, the father, like every father does at a certain point, says, “Quit asking so many stupid questions.” And this kid eventually, by age fifteen, will shut up and quit asking questions.

Also, [the message we get is,] “Quit daydreaming.” Leonardo always daydreamed. When he’s in his twenties, his main job is [making] costumes for the big pageants and plays. People say, “Didn’t he invent the helicopter?” [because they’ve] seen that famous drawing. Well, that was originally done to bring the angels down from the rafters in a particular play. He always allows his imagination to blur into a challenge in reality, and so he goes on and tries to design flying machines.

So sometimes, let your imagination push you a little bit. Don’t be afraid of daydreaming, and then trying the impossible.6

Adam: You’ve mentioned Steve Jobs a few times. In the case [of the book you wrote about him], you spent many, many hours with him, and also many people who knew him well. What was it like getting to know the person who many people view as the greatest innovator of our time?

Walter: Well, he was a deeply spiritual, very intense person who had rough edges and was nasty as times. But also, having driven people crazy, they’d walk through walls for him. He’d drive them to do things that they didn’t know they could do.

Working with him, I was subject to watching him have that very “mercurial” personality, as he put it. And it was difficult, especially when it was clear he wasn’t going to beat the cancer. He was angry at times, on painkillers at times, and saying [cruel] things about people who were his friends, people very close to him. And that presented a journalistic dilemma, because all my life I was always trying to get people to say things that would be explosive and exciting.

[But] there’s a lot of mean things he said that I ended up leaving out of the book. I had to balance how enlightening that would be for the reader versus how hurtful that would be for the people he was talking about. And also, I’m not sure he really meant it. There was an anger at the end of his life, and a painfulness near the end of his life. And so, it was a hell of a lot more intense than doing Ben Franklin or Leonardo.

Adam: I think we both know a fair number of entrepreneurs who hold Jobs up as their role model and say, “Look, he wasn’t the nicest guy in the world. And that’s proof that this is sometimes how you have to be.” Did he succeed in spite of, or because of, his cruelty?

Walter: When I started working on Steve Jobs, [Steve] Wozniak said to me, “The main question you’ll have to answer is, ‘Did he have to be so mean?’” And at the end of the book, I called Woz and said, “Tell me what you think.” He said, “Well if I had run Apple, I would’ve been much nicer. I would’ve not yelled at people as much.” And then Woz paused and said, “And if I had run Apple, we probably wouldn’t have done the Macintosh.” Each person gets to answer [that question] by the end of the book. And most of them say, “He didn’t have to be this mean, but I ended up wanting to walk through walls for him.”

And when I asked Steve, “Did you have to be so cruel to people?” he said to me, “When people do something that sucks, I have to tell them it sucks, because I’m just a middle-class kid trying to make sure I don’t have B players on my team. I can’t afford to be gentle and nice.”

Now, I do not try to answer the question fully in the book. I want each reader of Steve Jobs to answer it for themselves. I guess my answer in retrospect is no, you don’t have to be that mean. You don’t have to be cruel to people. You have to be tough, and you have to be intellectually honest. Bezos is, Bill Gates is. But they’re basically nicer.

Adam: Yeah, you were asked at some point, “What’s the one piece of advice that you would’ve given to Jobs?” And you said, “You could’ve been kinder.” And that resonated a lot for me. As our own Angela Duckworth would describe it, a great boss is like a great parent—they’re both demanding and supportive. I never met Jobs, but I’ve talked to a lot of people that worked closely with him. And he left out the supportive [part] a lot, and sometimes he took the demanding [part] way too far.

Walter: [At one point,] he looks at the circuit board inside the Mac and he tells the engineers, “The circuit board sucks. It’s ugly.” They say, “Steve, it’s in a sealed case. Nobody’s going to see it, nobody’s going to know.” And he says, “Yes, but you will know, and you fucked up. You’ve made something that sucks.” So they hold up shipping the Mac until they made the circuit board inside beautiful.

But at the end when they get it right, he tells them all to sign a white board, all thirty engineers on the Mac team. And they engrave it on the inside of the Mac. And he says, “Real artists sign their work.”

Looking at Leonardo for a second, when you get to the greatest painting of all time, it’s the wife of a cloth merchant in Florence—and the cloth merchant never gets the picture, because Leonardo keeps it for sixteen years. He’s putting on two or three hundred tiny brushstrokes to get the lips right. So sometimes, you have to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Steve was always saying, “Real artists sign their work, real artists don’t let go until it’s perfect.” But when he came back [to Apple] in the late 1990s, they gave him a little sign that says, “Real artists ship.” Which means sometimes, you just get the damn product out the door.

Adam: I think it’s encouraging when you see these different people and you say, “Okay, maybe I’m not like Jobs, but I can see some of my qualities in other great innovators.” What are some of the starkest differences you’ve seen in how they work?

Walter: Innovators and creative people tend to be very different, and the people who are the most innovative and successful realize that you have to put together a team of people with different styles and different talents.6 Ben Franklin’s greatest contribution as a founder was not being the smartest founder, because [there was] Jefferson and Madison. [He wasn’t] the most passionate because you’ve got John Adams and his cousin Samuel. [He wasn’t] a man with great gravitas like Washington. He knew how to put together a team.

When he was dying, I asked Steve Jobs, “What was your best product?” I thought he’d say the Mac or the iPhone. He said, “No, making a Mac or an iPhone is hard, but making a team that will always turn out Macs and iPhones—that’s the hard part.”

You have to get the Johnny Ive, with his temperament, duty, and sense of spirit. The Tim Cook, who knows how to keep the supply chains running. All these people have to be put on a team. You’re not going to play every position, so [the question is,] how do you get a team around you that innovates?

Adam: One of the most interesting things that you have been doing at the Aspen Institute has been trying to reimagine the future of innovation and education. You’ve just reinforced with the da Vinci book that we need to put the “A” in “STEM” to make it “STEAM” and say, “Look, the arts are often missing from technical education.” Where do you see that going?

Walter: Well if you look at Steve Jobs, what did he take at Reed College before he dropped out? Calligraphy, dance, poetry, design… Bill Gates can certainly code extremely well, but when they both do a music player, Bill Gates produces the Zune, and Steve produces the iPod. And because Steve had a feel for the humanities, he knew that beauty mattered. So I think that if you just go barreling down the path of “I need to know C++ better than anybody,” you’re not going to have the creative connections that will make you an innovator.

Art critics say, “It’s a shame [da Vinci] wasted so much time doing anatomy and astronomy and math and flying machines and engineering, because it diverted him when he could’ve finished more paintings.” Yeah, he could’ve finished more paintings, but they [wouldn’t be as good]. The Mona Lisa [came about from] a lifetime spent being curious about everything that you could possibly know, including the tongue of a woodpecker.

Adam: Fair enough. What about the challenge of encouraging people to become polymaths, so not just curious about many things, but [having] real skill in many areas. Do you have recommendations for how we can build that in companies and universities?

Walter: I don’t think you have to master every subject, but I think you have to appreciate the beauty of it, just like Einstein when he’s doing general relativity. [When he’s] having trouble with intensive calculus, he takes out his violin and plays Mozart. He says it connects him to the harmonies of the spheres, and it inspires him to understand the beauty of waves in motion.

We of humanities backgrounds are always doing the lecture, like, “We need to put the ‘A’ in ‘STEM,’ and you’ve got to learn the arts and the humanities.” And you get big applause when you talk about the importance of that.

But we also have to meet halfway and learn the beauty of math. Because people tell me, “I can’t believe somebody doesn’t know the difference between Mozart and Haydn, or the difference between Lear and Macbeth.” And I say, “Yeah, but do you know the difference between a resistor and a transistor? Do you know the difference between an integral and a differential equation?” They go, “Oh no, I don’t do math, I don’t do science.” I say, “Yeah, but you know what, an integral equation is just as beautiful as a brush stroke on the Mona Lisa.” You’ve got to learn that they’re all beautiful.

Adam: When you think about the different innovators that you’ve profiled, how did they define success? What were they after?

Walter: They were not after money. Steve Jobs could have made a lot more money at Apple.

I’ll give you a tiny example. The Mac that came out in 2000 had a handle on it, and they say, “This is a desktop machine. We don’t need the handle—people aren’t really supposed to move it around. It’ll cost us another sixty dollars [per computer].” And Steve said, “The handle is there because it makes the machine approachable. My mom is afraid of her computer, but if there’s a little thing [where] she can put her hand, where she can touch it and she knows it won’t break, that makes her connect emotionally to the computer better.” And he was right. But it cost money, and the Mac didn’t make as much.

Likewise, Leonardo doesn’t deliver the Mona Lisa to the cloth merchant. He doesn’t deliver Adoration of the Magi to the church. He’s doing it and keeping it. So whether you’re on the board of directors of an airline or you’re starting a company, sometimes you have to say, “We can’t have our lodestar be return on investments, profits, and relative margins. A lodestar has to be, ‘Are we making a product people will always love?’” Bezos does that, Steve Jobs did it, Leonardo did it.

Adam: In closing, are there any other tips you would offer, or myths to bust?

Walter: I’ll just tell you something small. The tongue of a woodpecker is three times longer than the beak. And when the woodpecker hits the bark at ten times the force that would kill a human, the tongue wraps around the brain and cushions it.5

There’s no reason you need to know that. It is totally useless information, just as it was totally useless to Leonardo. But every now and then, it’s good to know something, just for pure curiosity’s sake.

Full Article:

https://heleo.com/conversation-the-one-key-trait-that-einstein-da-vinci-and-steve-jobs-had-in-common/17410/

[thebookbeard-blog]

January was a weird month. I went through the first few days of 2017 feeling like I was coming down from a hangover of 2016, and I wish I meant that literally (I stayed in on New Year's Eve, partly because my mother spent the day at the hospital, partly because screw the idea of celebrating 2016). And then January just kept on going, and it just got weirder and weirder. You know what I'm talking about.

So I wanted to start out my reading year as gently as possible. I don't think I could have handled anything else. I wanted to pick out books that, to me at least, seemed warm and inviting.

Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel by Judith and Neil Morgan seemed like it fit the bill. I had already been inspired by kaptainkristian's superb video essay on Dr. Seuss and his rhyming techniques to finally pick this up (it had been sitting on my shelves for a while). Writer biographies are among my favorite things to read, anyway, so this seemed like a good place to start.

And it was. And it was indeed a gentle book, too -- although this didn’t always work to it’s advantage.

The Morgans were apparently good friends and neighbors of the Geisels, and so had access to a wealth of information and intimacies that would not have been available to many other would-be biographers. And this very much shows through in the book -- it reads very intimate. It’s an admiring and affectionate look at the life and labors of a well-beloved author.

A bit too admiring and affectionate at times, it turns out.

This is a mostly thorough book, covering Geisel's work from a very young age, up to college and adulthood and beyond. This life work is divided into chapters covering whatever big work Geisel was putting out that year (he really was a prolific man). A couple of these deal heavily with Geisel's political cartoons he created during the Second World War. The Morgans are quick to praise their artistry and ingenuity as well as the influence that they held, all the while glossing over the fact that a lot of them happened to also be extremely racist and anti-Japanese. This is a fact of Dr. Seuss that I had known for a while, and so I was on the look-out for discussion about it within the book. Alas. I wanted to make note of this in light of the fact that some of these cartoons have recently regained some prominence, given certain current events.

One other instance of the book being too gentle on its subject has to do with the chapter covering the death by suicide of Helen Palmer -- Geisel's first wife and a children’s author in her own right. It's a sad and somber account, and you feel like the the authors are writing about the death of an actual friend and person, and of a subject, which is commendable. I learned later, though, that one of the major reasons Helen decided to take her own life was the fact that Geisel was apparently having an affair with one of their close friends -- the same woman that later became his second wife. This is, given the Morgans relationship with the Geisels, an understandable enough omission, to be sure, but it is also a very glaring one in retrospect.

And I guess an argument could be made about the ethics and moralities of having such personal things in a book that, to be fair, largely focuses on the creative aspect of its subject. But I'm of the opinion that unpleasant details like this should be acknowledged and discussed. Especially so in biographies of well-known and well-loved. They are the things that show us that the people we admire are every bit as flawed and damaged as the rest of us, but are still capable of making the occasional magic.

Those are just two examples that I thought were interesting to think about. As I said, though, the bulk of the book deals with the creative work of an imminently fascinating and intensely prolific figure, and it does so wonderfully -- the chapters dealing the creation Seuss's "major" books being particularly illuminating. 

Dr. Seuss was and still is an influential and inspiring figure, warts and all. He was an artist -- a proper artist -- who did a tremendous amount of good, not just for children’s literature, but for literature in general. And he was, much like the Cat in the Hat, a trickster figure, larger than life itself. Large enough to cast a deep shadow over an entire industry.

It’s just important to recognize the rest of it all, too.

Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley was the second book I read this year -- something that was completely unintentional but still greatly pleases me. Lost at Sea was the third. Both were re-reads.

Seconds is about Katie Clay, head chef of a relatively successful restaurant who dreams of one day opening up her own. After a series of setbacks that keeps delaying this dream she is visited by a house spirit who gives her the ability the change past mistakes by ingesting some mushrooms.

So, you know, hardcore realism.

O'Malley's books seem to come into my life at pivotal moments. Scott Pilgrim was a very formative book for me: I was an insufferable hipster kid with insufferable hipster friends, and was close enough to the age of the characters that I saw my life reflected on its cartoony pages -- which was an interesting and dissecting kind of experience, to say the least. It's a hell of a thing to see a reflection of yourself in the hero of a story only to realize that both the hero and yourself have actually been complete and utter gits all this time ha ha ha let me tell you.

Seconds also came out at an age-appropriate time, and again I saw myself reflected in the main character, Katie, with her dreams and her passions and her fear of failure and mundane complacency. I was in my second year of a projected three-year stint at an office job, but, much like Katie and her bigger and fancier restaurant, I had higher and loftier aspirations.

When I came to re-read it a couple of weeks ago, I was closer to the character not only in terms of age (we were both 29 now), but in situation as well. I was still at my office job (fifth year of the projected three year stint) and while being extremely good and efficient at it, and appreciating the job’s relative safety, I found myself, like Katie, being frustrated by the mundane realities and setbacks of life. Trying to keep up with dreams is a challenge, but I wish it didn't always have to feel that way. It's exhausting.

Seconds is a story about taking control of your narrative at the expense of other people, and the meaning and consequences of it. It's a story about do-overs and what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. The main character finds all this out via the use of magic mushrooms, and while I'm not exactly fitting to go out into the real world in search of some enchanted fungi, I'm not going to say I wouldn't do the same as Katie did were I to come across such a thing.

This was, I believe, my third time reading the book. I've taken away something new after each read, and my love for it keeps growing exponentially. It's definitely O'Malley's most mature work, both in terms of themes and story, as well as art -- combining his hyper-graphic, chibi style of cartooning with the semi-realistic backgrounds and props of Jason Fischer and the gorgeous expressionist coloring of Nathan Fairbairn. 

They all compliment and enhance each other so well. Seconds has become my favorite of Bryan's books.

Lost at Sea is the only O'Malley book I've read at a time when I wasn't anywhere close to the age of the characters, since they are all teenagers. And this is very much a teenager story, all about trying to find yourself and the embarking on road trips in order to do so. It's a story about that deep and lonely aimlessness all moody and sensitive adolescents inevitably feel. 

It’s a feeling that we never really manage to outgrow, the vestiges of which manage to remain etched onto our aging souls, surfacing mostly during terribly long and existential nights. I was very much feeling when I first picked it up last year, and I was still feeling that when I decided to read it again this year. It helped both times. One of those books you read as an adult and wish you could go back in time and make a younger version of you read it as well. Maybe with the help of some mushrooms....

I love Bryan Lee O'Malley's books a lot. I hope he keeps making them for ever.

Between these I was also reading the collection Jillian Tamaki's SuperMutant Magic Academy, her gorgeous and gorgeously weird webcomic. Ostensibly the story of a group of super powered/magical/gifted teenagers at a boarding school, it’s described as a mash-up between Harry Potter and the X-Men, but really it's nothing like these. It is its own strange little thing.

I love that you can tell it began as an excuse for Tamaki to just let loose on the page. Tamaki is known for her crisp and clean line art that she uses for her books, but the art in a lot of SuperMutant strips -- and especially in the early ones -- are rough, almost sloppy, as if they were done quickly and in the moment. It fits the throw-away nature of the humor. The art style starts to get tighter as the strip goes on, and the light gags begin give way to darker jokes and meditations. Tamaki never chooses to permanently stay in one form or the other, though, neither in terms of art or story -- they never stop fluctuating. This gives the comic a kind of fluidity that make the strips range from the relatively straightforward

to the surreal

to the somber

more or less on a strip-to-strip basis.

(My favorites of these are the ones featuring Everlasting Boy, her immortal, silent character, whose strips consist of what I can only call playful existentialism.)

The strips are mostly self-contained, one-shot things, although the last few dozen that end the collection feature a poignant take on the Chosen One story that is so wonderfully and beautifully done that it borders on frustrating (it is so short). It's so good that it could have been expanded to it's own graphic novel. Maybe one day. What do you think, E.B.?

[drubblernews-blog]

New Post has been published on http://drubbler.com/2017/02/24/parade-of-vanity-and-death-icon-of-american-politics/

Parade of vanity and death: icon of American politics

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Dmitry Tretyakov, February 24, 2017, 21:18- REGNUM

Conceited people cause contempt the wise, delight for fools are idols for parasites and slaves of their own passions.

Francis Bacon

February 23, on Russian screens released biographical drama “Jackie”, dedicated to challenging Dole 34-year-old Jacqueline Kennedy, at one point losing her husband’s position in society and the House, which did not become “their” for her. For the role of the first lady Natalie Portman has been nominated for an Academy Award and nominated for many other awards, but only the Venetian Festival drew attention to the wonderful scenario of the film. Screenwriter Noah Oppenhajm, apparently, in close collaboration with filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s paintings could nudge mountain “cult character” and discover after her mouse of a living person.

what could be a film about Kennedy, and even more so about the Kennedy-woman in the run-up to the presidential elections in the United States? (The film was released in the world rolled back in September.) One would expect to see on the screen agitku the Democratic Party — a woman terpjashhuju her husband’s infidelity for the sake of the country, transforming the classic political Beau Monde in modern fashionable reception, a female diplomat, companion of the great father of the nation, only due to the limited era do not raskryvshuju in itself leadership qualities. Perhaps this “order” and would have to develop the film. But it is precisely this attempt fails. More precisely, for all the glitter and grandiosity here and there are moments that make wary: “something is wrong here.

the structure of the movie quite typical of biographies is a film adaptation of the famous interview given to a widow just a week after the death of her husband. This technique provides the ability to mount a story from different time layers, simulate memory in which the time and logical link of events gives way to associations and emotions. Of course, the Central plot turns out to be the President’s assassination and the subsequent funeral — unprecedented courage of Jacqueline (she went over her husband’s coffin through the streets of Washington, not fearing the likely sniping) made her the heroine of the world press. In this temporary layer of woven, but they all relate only to the period of life in the White House, though for the biographer is not so important who was the man, not yet faced hundreds of cameras.

we see very different Jackie: inexperienced and somewhat naive before the camera its tours of the residence of Presidents, shokirovannuju and lost myself in the day of fatal shots, dedicated during the funeral and cold and calculated and driven in front of the journalist. In this way in the “present tense” film layer picture widow is strikingly different from all others. And it is here that a viewer can observe the amazing process of “deikonizacii” or rather a deconstruction of icons. Almost all other events the film is only a story — presentation of themselves, and because they are so smooth and prilizanno parade. But in this story there are reservations — hints at something else, something the second alternative text.

it is “wrong”, this additional text is not opening film. No need to think long to suspect public person in vanity. Especially if the main achievements of this man are various interviews and organization of public processions of thousands crowd with an led. But that’s served this idea more than elegant. Penetrating game Portman-Jackie, selects, that it is more important: the safety of children or publicity of the funeral, and later justified the choice in sudden self-fulfillment: “we were before hundreds of cameras!” (and immediately: “I didn’t say”). Her desire to hold the ceremony, repeating in detail the funeral of Lincoln (until personal horses, going beyond the coffin President that is understandable in the 19th century, but raises questions in century XX). In dozens of other, “accidentally” obronennyh phrases: for example, during a rehearsal before telejekskursiej someone advises first lady to replace the words in the phrase “I am pleased to welcome you at the White House, our home” to “people’s House”. Not long thinking, future “mother of the nation” gets rid of the title at home, but not from his conditioning to her personally with the President.

vanity and naturally accompanying hypocrisy (including before itself) are represented in all its glory. But, I think, the main thing in this picture is not it. Not study nature desires imaginary sponsored women. It seems to me that the film soon on how policy is constructed in our time it is at the first place, and that all the remaining tenths. Deconstruction of one of the icons in the iconostasis of dekonstrukciju turns or even the whole Church.

No work of art does not exist in a vacuum, it’s hard to imagine that picture man watch comes Larrain had never heard of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, not knowing that he is perhaps debatable, but “great” President. You might not know that his wife is an example of a first lady at all times, even in that post prevzoshedshaja Castile Roosevelt, but some cultural context is captured even in Russia, far from the exaltation of the wives of foreign Presidents. In many ways, the film relies on the knowledge behind the Viewer, but still in a frame sound notes of reproach the President triumphantly razreshivshemu Caribbean crisis, “which he himself had previously and arranged, and vtjanuvshemu America in the shameful war in its modern cultural history. The brother of the President clearly indicates his widow on the inappropriate copying of funeral events: Lincoln “at least won the civil war. All these reproaches are swept aside a terrific desire to widows be minded. Desire, as we understand it, osushhestvivshemsja.

in the United States the greatness of Kennedy almost as surely as Nixon otvratitel’nost’ is its direct competitor, where the war had actually ended. Greatness, which rely on film at least partly secured by the vanity of his wife. So what is more important: the real achievements, actions and economic indicators or show-off and tinsel are called dinners, noisy procession and “candid” interview? I think that today this question more than rhetorical.

in the twenty-first century enough for race as absolve themselves of responsibility for the outbreak of war and the transformation of entire States in a zone of endless conflict, Secretary of the strongest country in the world is enough to lift a television series in which slightly more young and cute version of this Secretary becomes a victim of the vicious intrigues. In an age in which the Nobel Peace Prize is given out in advance and, indeed, for colour, it should be clear that PR won. Win infinite Jackie, which importantly — thousands of cameras on the axis. What is happening outside the lenses? It just doesn’t matter, this does not exist . Hundreds of people could die from rockets fired by bespilotnikom with incorrect coordinates or as “derivative losses” at the “elimination” of one conditional terrorists identified by indirect evidence via satellite, but the world will mourn about the girl from the fictional “Instagramma”.

the new President of the United States already had more than once have to pay not only for the lack of glamorous attitudes and actions, but for the inaccuracies of the journalist, before time including microphone. The Russian power, as the opposition increasingly chooses the way Jackie — external and internal policies and their criticism are transformed into permanent dokuchnyj PR farce. Among the cheerful economic reports progress and international cooperation among the sad sighs on convicted nudistah in an unknown direction lurks one ally after another flourish of war and the unrecognized republics, and fellow workers every day more reminiscent of slavery.

we have to Live in this twenty-first century, and we don’t have any choice?

Read earlier in this story: Spy, superhero, President and Iranian — anecdotal portrait of America

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WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Conan O’Brien, the longest tenured late-night TV host, has had them all in his 25 years on the air. Oscar winners. Hall of Famers. Bowie, Springsteen, McCartney.

But there’s one person who keeps saying no — someone whose work has been a near-obsession for the host for some time.

“At a certain point, I have the power to book a lot of people,” O’Brien said over dinner at Lucques, a Mediterranean-inspired restaurant here. “I’ve been around long enough. There’s a point where you feel like you’ve met everyone. Everyone. And then there’s Robert Caro.”

For years, O’Brien has tried to book the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Power Broker” and the multivolume epic “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” And for years, Caro has said no.

O’Brien, 55, started to realize his love for the biographer-historian was perhaps unrequited some eight years ago.

At the time, he had recently made the move to TBS after 17 years as a late-night host at NBC — a run that had come to an end with his brief stint behind the desk of “The Tonight Show.” Newly ensconced at “Conan” in the lower-stakes environs of basic cable, he had the freedom to give serious airtime to guests who would have gotten five-minute segments during his network days.

“We’re talking about authors and I’m thinking, ‘Let’s get Robert Caro on — I’ll do two segments with him,'” O’Brien said. “The request went out. It was the equivalent of putting a penny in a well and never hearing the splash.”

Later invitations also resulted in polite refusals.

“The Path to Power,” the first installment of Caro’s biography of Johnson, was published in 1982 when O’Brien was a student at Harvard. He received the book as a Christmas present from his father and soon fell under its spell, as did his roommate, Eric Reiff. They shared their new enthusiasm during a trip away from campus.

“Think of two guys in college going on a road trip,” O’Brien said. “You think about how we get a bunch of beer, we go to Fort Lauderdale, we get hammered. No. We go to a quiet beach in Rhode Island and we’re lying there and yelling at each other back and forth about Lyndon Johnson. ‘It was his father! His father had been disappointed!’ ‘But what about Pappy O’Daniel?'”

The later works in the epic series, which have been published at a rate of roughly once a decade, have more than lived up to the promise of the first in O’Brien’s view. Caro, 82, has said he is closing in on completing the fifth and final volume and the pompadoured comic is among those eagerly awaiting its publication.

“The Lyndon Johnson books by Caro, it’s our Harry Potter,” O’Brien said. “If there were over-large ears and fake gallbladder scars that we could wear instead of wizard hats while waiting in line to get the book, we would do it.”

After having been rejected numerous times, O’Brien came up with a plan to land his prey: a relatively sober streaming interview program called “Serious Jibber Jabber.” Guests have included best-selling nonfiction author Michael Lewis, historian Evan Thomas and data journalist Nate Silver.

“I pretty much made this thing as a bear trap to catch Robert Caro,” O’Brien said. “I keep getting other people who are great. But no Robert Caro.”

The host sent word that he would be willing to interview the author in his hometown, New York City. No dice, Caro replied through an intermediary. O’Brien then asked him to dinner, without cameras. Maybe next time.

A onetime writer for “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” O’Brien is one of the brainiest people in late night, even if he favors a loose, absurdist brand of comedy that has little in common with the topical style of Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers and Samantha Bee.

O’Brien arrived at the restaurant for our interview carrying a sheaf of notes filled with dates and facts tracing his obsession. It included the time he attended a Caro reading at the Barnes & Noble in New York City around the release of “Master of the Senate,” Volume 3 in the LBJ series.

“I’m just checking,” O’Brien said, flipping through his notes, when asked what year he saw Caro. “I want to make sure I have as many answers as I can for you.”

It was 2002. O’Brien did not introduce himself.

“I don’t want to bother Caro and go up to him and say, ‘Of course, you must know me from the Masturbating Bear and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who will poop on you,'” he said, referring to comedy bits that were staples of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” the NBC show he hosted from 1993 to 2009.

Caro’s penchant for leaving nothing out — the still-growing LBJ series runs to more than 3,000 pages — is a quality that has wearied his detractors while inspiring special devotion among fans like O’Brien.

“One of the things that makes him one of the greatest biographers of all time is he’ll write about Lyndon Johnson, but when he encounters another character who’s interesting — Coke Stevenson — he will drop everything and go down deep, incredibly deep, into, ‘Who is this man really?'” he said. “He’ll find all this deep rich ore, which, once you know it, it’ll make the whole story that much more powerful. Whereas other people would dispense with those characters in a paragraph or two.”

O’Brien was insistent that Caro’s team has been nothing but polite in sending its regrets. In fact, a few years ago, O’Brien received a signed copy of “The Path to Power” with the inscription: “To Conan O’Brien. From A Fan — Robert A. Caro.”

The gift only confused matters.

“It just cracks me up,” O’Brien said. “It’s like the White Whale writing Ahab a note, saying, ‘Hey, man. We’ve got to get together. I’m a fan!'”

Caro has appeared on other programs over the years, including “The Colbert Report,” “CBS This Morning” and “The Daily Show” in its Jon Stewart iteration. When asked for this article why he had yet to appear on “Conan,” the author said in a statement: “'Conan’ — You mean it was O’Brien? I thought it was The Barbarian.”

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman at Knopf, Caro’s publisher, said of O’Brien’s many entreaties, “Suffice to say, his people have been in touch a few times (email, phone, Conan standing outside the building), and we remain cautiously optimistic about Caro making an appearance on the show before the decade is out.”

The refusals have done nothing to lessen the host’s affection for the author. “The biggest thing I want to stress is that my inability to get him to sit with me only makes me respect him more,” O’Brien said.

In his morbid fantasies, he imagines Caro appearing on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where the guests often play games with the host.

“I know that someday I’m going to turn on Fallon and see Caro playing Pictionary,” he said. “And I’m just going to be enraged. He’s going to get everyone cheering, and Cardi B’s there, high-fiving him. And I’m just going to be enraged.”

As he continues his quest, O’Brien said he will draw on what he has learned from Caro’s epic series. “Like Johnson, I have an incredible drive and a complicated relationship with my father,” he said. “I’ll stop at nothing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

John Koblin © 2018 The New York Times

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