Sendak’s death has hit me hard, as I’m sure it has for anyone whose childhood was after 1960. Whenever a touchstone figure from our collective childhoods dies, the boundaries between public and private dissolve and our most intimate memories are revealed as shared experience. If you’re old enough to remember watching the Muppet Show during its original run you know what I mean. So it is with Sendak: all of us remember being sent to our rooms without any supper, and the forest that grew and grew and grew until the ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around.
And yet, memory is also specific, and Sendak’s particular, peculiar role in my childhood was not only as a mirror to my own psychology but as my first bridge to times and places not my own. When I read (or more properly, when my mother read to me) In the Night Kitchen there was a rich strangeness that went far beyond the dream-logic of the plot. There was an odd cadence that I could not place: the strange clipped exclamations in the word balloons. Many years later (when I was ten) I discovered Little Nemo in Slumberland in a collection of old comic strips and my head exploded. Theme, plot, an style had been stolen from the 1905 cartoon, but they had also been transformed into something new.
Sendak’s world was full of the stuff of his own life as the child of Polish Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, but it was also full of Oliver Hardy and Mickey Mouse and Tin Pan Alley and all of that rattled around in his mind and spilled onto his pages. As child I puzzled over who these strange identical cooks were and why they were intent on baking Mickey and those second- and third-hand memories stuck with me until I was old enough to understand whence they came.
So to Mr. Sendak, my thanks for the following lessons: The world is a very big place and very old. The past is still with us and will always be. Nostalgia isn’t only for your own memories.
So Canada has decided to stop minting pennies. It’s a boldly unilateral move; for a country that complains about being seen as an appendage of the United States, they sure do love copying our coins—not only in denomination but in the same exact size, thus ruining countless laundry days for American apartment dwellers in what can only be seen as a vast passive-agressive conspiracy.
But my point is not numismatic plagiarism; my point is that in explaining why Canada will no longer be striking Elizabeth II’s profile in copper, the Canadian Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, gave the reason “It costs taxpayers a penny-and-a-half every time we make one,” which is a textbook stupid argument that sounds smart. There are many reasons one could give to stop minting pennies—they represent a unit of value that is too small to be useful; they cost too much when compared with their utility; they all end up in a big heap on your dresser and when you try your best to quietly remove them from your pocket at night you end up spilling them everywhere and waking your long-suffering wife—but to complain that the cost of producing a coin is more than its face value is to misunderstand how money works in a spectacular way and makes me wonder if Mr. Flaherty also thinks that banks are huge money bins in which millionaires swim through gold coins.
If you sift through your own personal pile of pennies on your dresser, you are almost certain to find pennies from the 70’s and 80’s. You are not that unlikely to find ones from the 50’s and 60’s, and still-circulating coins from the 40’s and earlier are out there. In a year’s time a penny may be used in dozens of transactions; by the time it rolls behind the couch of history, a coin may well have been used in thousands. This is because money is not used up when it is used.
So I’m belaboring this point, or as my friends to the North would say, “belabouring.” (Did you know those extra U’s cost millions of dollars a year? But they’re Canadian dollars, so it’s not such a big deal.) But the Finance Minister’s glib remark touches a nerve with me. Not for any love of pennies—they should all be melted for circuit boards—but because it perfectly encapsulates how a clever turn of phrase will always beat out a well-reasoned argument, particularly in the face of complexity. “It costs a penny and a half.” “Corporations are people.” “Nine, nine, nine.” Sometimes you have to sweat the details. Otherwise, you’re both penny and pound foolish.
A box office flop in 1982, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner today enjoys a preeminent position in geek culture: the first (and best) movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick, whose dystopian vision set the art direction for hundreds of later films. But the best thing about the movie is the way it perfectly demonstrates two hilarious Hollywood clichés. The first is the “enlarge and enhance” scene, where Harrison Ford’s character reviews a still photo and instructs the computer to not only zoom in on a hopelessly out-of-focus scene and fill in the detail, but also to magically change the angle of view to peek around a doorframe. The second is the “check…checkmate!” scene, where the crafty replicant, Roy Batty, instructs the genetic designer J. F. Sebastian on how to defeat the mastermind Dr. Eldon Tyrell at chess in the following bit of dialog, conducted over the building intercom:
Computer: New entry. A Mr. J. F. Sebastian. 1-6-4-1-7.
Tyrell: At this hour? What can I do for you Sebastian?
Sebastian: Queen to Bishop 6. Check.
Tyrell: Nonsense. Just a moment. Mmm. Queen to Bishop 6. Ridiculous. Queen to Bishop 6. Hmm… Knight takes Queen.—What’s on your mind Sebastian? What are you thinking about?
Roy: (whispered) Bishop to King 7. Checkmate.
Sebastian: Bishop to King 7. Checkmate, I think.
Tyrell: Got a brainstorm, huh, Sebastian? Milk and cookies kept you awake? Let’s discuss this. You better come up, Sebastian.
Anyone who has logged more than a few games knows that that is some wiggy chess right there. Barring obvious blunders, successful play is a matter of gaining slow advantages, developing your position, and calculated sacrifices. Winning is never sudden; instead it’s a slow build towards an increasingly unavoidable conclusion. But in movies it’s always “Wot ho, I do believe you’ll find that is check.” “Is that so, now. In that case…checkmate! Sorry, old bean.”
This is the Romance of Genius: the mistaken belief that brainstorms are at the heart of problem-solving. It’s the lightbulb-over-the-head concept of invention or the sing-to-me-O-Muse concept of creativity. I’m not saying that Aha! moments don’t happen; it’s just that they’re very rare, and usually come as the result of slow, deliberate, and incremental work. (See Stephen Johnson’s concept of the “slow hunch” in his talk Where do Good Ideas Come From.) The most important ingredient to being creative is to show up. The most productive period of my life for writing was when I was in a creative writing program that required its fellows to write two short stories every week. How did we come up with all the ideas? We didn’t have a choice. Scheherazade probably didn’t know she had all those stories in her before she had a sword at her throat.
One reason I’m obsessed with copyright and patent reform is I’m convinced that our laws are based on this faulty premise of how creativity happens. By fetishizing novelty we devalue work that is derivative, collaborative, or interpretive. But more often than not, innovation is an emergent quality that arises from combining what is already at hand rather than from creating something original. A good example of this is the iPad. When it was introduced, detractors branded it as nothing new—simply a collection of existing technologies. And even as that, it was missing some obvious features. But none of that mattered to the users who sat down with one for the first time and found its particular mixture of form and function at once humanistic and compelling. Similarly, Edison was not the inventor of the incandescent lamp, but it was his laboratory that found the right combination of filament and vacuum that made the lightbulb a practical invention.
I don’t want to discredit the role of intuition, of the flash of insight. But “sudden” inspiration is always the result of hard work, patterns of thought, and cultural context. It might not be as showy as an unexpected checkmate. That’s because real chess is a conversation.
