The Mumpsimus

John Eliot Gardiner, from Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Preface): A nagging suspicion grows that many writers, overawed and dazzled by Bach, still tacitly assume a direct correlation between his immense genius and his stature as a person. At best this can make them unusually tolerant of his faults, which are there for all to see: a certain tetchiness, contrariness and self importance, timidity in meeting intellectual challenges, and a fawning attitude toward royal personages and to authority in general that mixes suspicion with gain-seeking. But why should it be assumed that great music emanates from a great human being? Music may inspire and uplift us, but it does not have to be the manifestation of an inspiring (as opposed to an inspired) individual. In some cases there may be such correspondence, but we are not obliged to presume that it is so. It is very possible that "the teller may be so much slighter or less attractive than the tale." [ source ] The very...

Dear denizens of the internet, While I'm busy over here grading mounds of student work, perhaps you could help me out with a question I've got: What's your favorite movie that depicts the creative process? How you define "depicts" and "creative process" is up to you.  And if you want to mention more than one movie, I won't stop you. Many thanks, Mr. Mumpsimus PS I'll be back to posting things of substance sometime in the coming weeks...

I just discovered the other day that Tin House Books is offering a set of four of their books for $35.99 via their website as The Tin House Writers' Series .  This is a wonderful deal: The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House ; The Story about the Story , a collection of thirty essays; The World Within , a collection of interviews; and The Journals of Jules Renard , which was the subject of one of my personal favorites among my Strange Horizons columns . I'm planning to use the bundle as an assigned text for a course I'm teaching in the fall, "Writing and the Creative Process" because the content is varied and high quality and the price still allows me to assign another book if need be (I'm thinking of perhaps also using Lynda Barry's What It Is , but I'm still early in the planning process; a sales rep from Norton said he's sending me some things to look at, and he was friendly and knowledgeable, so I want to give those books a fa...