The Poetry of Sight: December 2022

Saturday, December 31, 2022

hide that typewriter and you go into the closet

Henry Miller, in Robert Snyder, This is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974—

[When he was married but, as a writer, without an income] now and then my wife wasn't working maybe and, of course, I wasn’t selling anything—we’d have to separate, and I’d go home to live with my parents and she with her parents. That was frightful. When I’d go home to live with my parents my mother would say, “If anybody comes, a neighbor or one of our friends, y’know, hide that typewriter and you go in the closet, don’t let them know you’re here.” I used to stay in that closet sometimes over an hour, the camphor ball smell choking me to death, hidden among the clothes, hidden y’know, so that she wouldn’t have to tell her neighbors or relatives that her son is a writer. All her life she hated this, that I’m a writer. She wanted me to be a tailor and take over the tailor shop, y’know. It was a frightful thing—this is like a crime I'm committing. I’m a criminal, y’know. This standing in the closet… I'll never forget the smell of camphor, do y‘know. We used it plentifully.

Saturday, December 24, 2022

the process by which creativity works / video

Just posted: HOW TO WIN KINGS AND INFLUENCE CABBAGES: The Process By Which Creativity Works

mammoth flyer / elephantine mastodon hybrid

Before I became a university professor, I taught briefly in a public school. One day, in a class of seventh grade students, I came prepared to talk about usually unnoticed connections between familiar objects, and in particular, about skeletal structures. I brought with me to school that day various examples of medical x-rays, a plastic model of the skeleton of a mastodon, and the balsa wood wings of an unassembled model airplane. I displayed these on a table top in preparation for my talk. But I was then distracted by some other event in the classroom, and I briefly turned aside.

When I returned to the table, I found, to my surprise and great delight, that one of the students had spontaneously attached the airplane wings to the skeleton of the mastodon. I was so pleased by this invention that I permanently mounted the wings, added a wooden base, and painted the hybrid construction. Obviously, a new idea had taken flight, and the title I later chose for it was the Mammoth Flyer. It appealed to a wide range of people, as was confirmed, a few years later, when it was stolen from an art exhibition.