The Dish

Perhaps we overrate his tortured works:

Kafka felt that his talent was “for portraying my dream-like inner life.” But dreams, however gripping they can be, are aesthetically unsatisfying, especially in their endings. Kafka himself did not find the ending of “The Metamorphosis,” his greatest story, satisfying, and it isn’t. Perhaps for the same reason, he was unable to complete his novels: dreams, especially nightmares, want for artistic endings. …

In the end, Henry James wrote in an essay on Turgenev, what we want to know about a writer is, “How does he feel about life?” Kafka found it unbearably complicated, altogether daunting, and for the most part joyless, and so described it in his fiction. This is not, let us agree, the best outlook for a great writer. Great writers are impressed by the mysteries of life; poor Franz Kafka was crushed by them.

Jonathan Franzen talks about how his passion for bird-watching has changed him:

Do you find that you look at landscapes differently now?

My whole conception of what is beautiful has changed because I’ve come to love birds so much. I respond to landscapes that have birds in them, that are friendly to birds. A dismal swamp behind a rail yard now has a kind of beauty for me that a bird-free beach in the Mediterranean doesn’t.

Love changes your idea of beauty inevitably. When you love a person, you are not thinking in terms of magazine beauty or newscaster good looks. A deeper kind of beauty comes into play. That is very much what happens when you begin to pay attention to birds and you begin to love them.

Franzen’s new piece on songbirds in Egypt is here.

(Photo of a Little Ringed Plover by Ferran Pestaña)

Maria Konnikova says yes:

[We] know that much of what we associate with creativity—whether writing a sonnet or a mathematical proof—has to do with the ability to link ideas, entities, and concepts in novel ways. This ability depends in part on the very thing that caffeine seeks to prevent: a wandering, unfocused mind.

Caffeine also interferes with sleep, another ingredient in creative thought. Then again, your increased concentration could all be in your head:

Some research has found that attributes like increased alertness and focus can be replicated by the placebo effect. In a 2011 study at the University of East London, a group of psychologists examined the effects of caffeine on problem-solving ability and emotional responses. In the double-blind study, eighty-eight habitual coffee drinkers were given cups of caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee at random. Half were told that they were receiving regular coffee, and half were informed that they were given decaf. Each participant then completed tasks that measured things like reaction time, self-control, reward motivation, and mood. In the Stroop task, which measures reaction time, improved accuracy was observed in subjects who believed they had ingested caffeinated coffee, even if they had only consumed decaf. Subjects who received caffeine and were told they were drinking decaf did not show an improved reaction time.

Daniel Suarez sees fully autonomous weapons as a threat to democracy:

Such weapons scare the hell out of most Americans:

As these break-out charts detail, this finding is consistent across the political spectrum, with the strongest opposition coming from both the far right and the far left. Men are slightly more likely than women to oppose the weapons; women are likelier to acknowledge they don’t have sufficient information to hold a strong opinion. Opposition is most highly concentrated among the highly-educated, the well-informed, and the military. Many people are unsure; most who are unsure would prefer caution. Very few openly support the idea of machines autonomously deciding to kill.

Marilynne Robinson riffs on her advice that young writers must learn to “trust the peripheral vision of our mind”:

I think it’s probably a lot like meditation—which I have never practiced. But from what I understand, it is a capacity that develops itself and that people who practice it successfully have access to aspects of consciousness that they would not otherwise have. They find these large and authoritative experiences. I think that, by the same discipline of introspection, you have access to a much greater part of your awareness than you would otherwise. Things come to mind. Your mind makes selections—this deeper mind—on other terms than your front-office mind. You will remember that once, in some time, in some place, you saw a person standing alone, and their posture suggested to you an enormous narrative around them. And you never spoke to them, you don’t know them, you were never within ten feet of them. But at the same time, you discover that your mind privileges them over something like the Tour d’Eiffel. There’s a very pleasant consequence of that, which is the most ordinary experience can be the most valuable experience. If you’re philosophically attentive you don’t need to seek these things out.

Leon Wieseltier confirms, once again, that he really doesn’t like blogs:

I have to say that there is not one blog, out of the eight million that must exist, that I read. The thing about blogging is that it is either someone’s first thoughts—which we know by definition are never their best thoughts—so that’s not interesting, or as time goes by they simply repeat themselves. Moreover there isn’t a lot you can say about anything consequential in 300 words. I write the back page of the magazine and I always wish it was three times as long as it is…

Fred Clark pounces:

[H]ere, then, is Wieseltier’s standard for “consequential” writing: Never say in 300 words what you can say, instead, in 1,500. That explains a great deal about why his columns read the way they do. “I have made this letter longer than usual,” Pascal once wrote, “because I lack the time to make it short.” Wieseltier seems to subscribe to the opposite point of view.

He’s also cheating himself. He wishes that his back-page column could be “three times as long as it is” because he has more to say than he can fit into that single page published 20 times a year. Wieseltier doesn’t seem to realize the obvious, common solution to that problem — take the best stuff that doesn’t fit and post it online.

Morgan Meis ponders the connection between Albert Bierstadt’s “Hetch Hetchy Canyon” (seen above) and 19th century Americans’ Emerson-inspired approach to nature:

Emerson had spent his whole life sending the imaginations of American artists out into nature. He’d done it with his famous essay, Nature, written in 1836, and furthered his cause with the stream of essays and lectures that flowed from his pen in the years following. In Nature, Emerson explained that Americans have a special relationship with nature and, thus, a special responsibility to connect with nature’s beauty as it can be found in the American landscape. Painters like Albert Bierstadt took up this task with gusto. They got out there into the wild and they put nature on the canvas just as they thought Emerson had directed them to. And that’s why the folks at Mount Holyoke College started their museum with Albert Bierstadt’s painting. “Hetch Hetchy Canyon” is an example of the first uniquely American movement in painting as it was inspired by the thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

How the meaning of the painting has changed:

With the obliteration of Hetch Hetchy Canyon the place, “Hetch Hetchy Canyon” the painting is now a cautionary tale in the limits of Emersonian metaphysics. The painting no longer seems to give us a true picture of nature, but nature as we once fantasized it should be.