When I was involved with …and Ladies of the Club a few eons ago I received an offer for the audio rights for the book. This was to be a condensed version, since the book was more than 1000 pages long. I asked for a sample script from the audio producer, and it turned out to run some 75 pages. You had to laugh. Gone were the inner lives of the two principal characters. Gone was the story of the fifty years of the development of the U.S. from the Civil War to the Depression. Gone were the discussions of ideas. Left was the barest shell of the events of the novel. Anyone buying the tape would have been defrauded, believing they were about to hear anything that resembled this masterpiece. We declined the offer.

Screenplays are similar. No matter how long the original novel, a screenplay is, with few exceptions, not going to be longer than 125 pages. A screenplay is double-spaced, descriptive paragraphs honed down to nothing, and lots of space taken up by the character’s names before their speeches. Bob. (line break) “You know what I’m thinking?” (line break) Jim. (line break) “No. What?” (line break) Bob stirs the campfire. (line break) Bob. (line break) “There’s something out there in the dark.” (line break) In a screenplay, you’ve just eaten up almost half a page.

Which brings me to the umpteenth zillion obituary for the book that has ocurred ever since the new media arrived. That would be movies. Then radio. Then television. Now it’s the Kindle and iPhone. Books are perpetually finished. Who would ever read a book again once they’ve seen that Charlie Chaplin? I can’t imagine. Read more…

My mother was a live book reviewer in Cleveland, an activity that seems to have gone the way of the traveling magic lantern lecture tent show. Fortunately for Mom, the traffic lights in our community were exceedingly slow, and she always had a book by her side. We joked that she had completed War and Peace just by judicious use of her time at red lights.

Book reviewers were prime entertainment at women’s organizations until somewhere around the late 1960s, possibly replaced by book clubs where everyone was supposed to actually read the book for themselves. Until then, the job of the book reviewer was to bring the ideas in important books to life for a whole community, to put it into context, to enrich the listener. The expectation that most of the audience would rush out and purchase the book, as Oprah’s audience does today, was not there. With a good book reviewer, you didn’t need to do any stinking page turning yourself. Read more…

You’re third in line for takeoff, finally ready to depart La Guardia and get to your lunch meeting in Chicago. The pilot comes on the P.A. for a last-minute cheery message: “Thanks for your patience. We hope to make it up one we’re in the air and get you to O’Hare on time. Or at least someplace not too far from there. We’re thinking maybe Gary or Indianapolis. As the President says, we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential. So wish us luck.”

What if that were acceptable? What if we never got where we were hoping to go, and it was okay?

What are the implications when President Obama tells us that part of his philosophy is, “We shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential?” Sounds reasonable, in a way. Don’t want to be a perfectionist about everything. Wouldn’t be realistic. Never get anything done. Got to compromise, make a deal. Make progress of some kind.

I’m not so sure about throwing the perfect overboard. Read more…

In the golden days of radio the great symphony orchestras of the world broadcast over short and long wave bands, creating pockets of listeners all over the globe. In isolated Japan in the 1940s the young composer Toru Takemitsu learned the ways of Western music from the Armed Forces radio network. In Maine, Charles Ives listened to the premiere of his 2nd Symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, over the radio.

When FM came in after the Second World War, sound quality improved, but the since the range of FM is limited to line-of-sight, those millions of listeners lucky enough to get an ionosphere bounce from New York to Vermont or Chicago to Colorado were left in silence. The advent of the long-playing record took the thrill and necessity away from live broadcasts, and radio audiences shrank. Read more…

I don’t idealize a great many people that I’ve known, but Richard Maddy is an exception. A violin maker, legendary string instrument rebuilder, WWII paratrooper, and son of the founder of Interlochen Center for the Arts, I met Richard when we were both serving on the alumni board of the organization his father had founded. When the board would get bogged down in the minutiae and politics of whatever problem had wound its way around us, Richard was always there to remind us what we supposed to be doing. He would ask, in some form or another, “Is it good for the kids?” Read more…

A few weeks ago I posted an open letter to GM CEO Fritz Henderson on the first day of GM’s entering into bankruptcy protection, offering my concern that Mr. Henderson’s reliance on great GM design to save the company might be a problem since GM had put so much ugly tin on America’s roads. I also noted that GM’s culture needed to change, and this was their last chance to get it right. I didn’t mention that most experts on corporate change say it requires 3 — 5 years to accomplish, if you know what you’re doing.

In an amazing display of exactly what I was talking about, Mr. Henderson tossed my article over the fence and assigned the response to Global VP for all design, Ed Welburn, who wrote a public letter back to “Gerald Sindell of the Huffington Post,” which contained an impassioned defense of GM design, and the thousands of artists and modelers at work around the clock around the world creating beautiful new GM cars. Mr. Welburn invited me to visit GM dealerships, look at and drive the new Chevys, Buicks and Cadillacs. I was also invited to visit to global design headquarters in Detroit and see for myself. Read more…

English man of letters Samuel Taylor Coleridge crafted the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” to describe what it takes for us to be able to take a fresh look at something. When we settle into our seats in a theater and gaze up at the proscenium, that framed and draped window where a play or movie or opera is about to come alive, we are prepared to be, for a moment, less skeptical. We look up at the frame, and wait. We are in an extremely unusual frame of mind.

The first proscenium arch is generally agreed to be the one in Parma, Italy, in the Teatro Farnese, built in 1618. What is quite spectacular about the Teatro is that the space on the stage side of the proscenium is almost as large as the space on the audience side, indicating that the theatre was built to be able to present a complete alternate universe to an audience. (The designers were so committed to the possibilities of the theatrical experience that they also built a huge floodable area in front of the stage, so miniature naval battles could also be staged.) Read more…

Delighted as I was to be greeted Friday morning by David Brooks’s book reviewish column headlined Genius: The Modern View, and as much as I admire Mr. Brooks, I was surprised to discover that he wasn’t writing satirically when he described the path to genius. According to the two new books he was discussing, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle and Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, you can develop your children into geniuses. All it takes is 10,000 hours of focused practice at an early age, plus a dash of family tragedy and toss in some neighborhood inspiration. Get the ingredients right and, ta—dah! Instant Mozart.

I must beg to disagree. I was privileged to have grown up alongside thousands of “geniuses” of the 10,000 hour class. I went to the Interlochen summer camp for the arts as a youth (Slogan — Home of the Gifted Youth of America — weren’t we special!) and two of my children went to the year round arts academy there. By now almost a hundred thousand gifted youth from all over the world have gone through Interlochen, and they provide some 10% of the personnel of all the leading American orchestras. Interlochen alumni are prominent in all fields, including Larry Page founder of Google, the composer George Crumb, opera stars Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Jessye Norman. Many of these young people were the bright and often brilliant ones who put in their 10,000 hours. But only a very, very few of them have a certain level of gift that is completely beyond anything 10,000 or even a million hours of focused work can give you. These are the geniuses. And their gift came from inside, not from a parent dying at 12. Not from the good fortune of having a novelist living down the street. Read more…

Is it possible for a book to make you smarter? Most of us recognize that books can teach you something new, give you information about anything and everything. But the part of you that thinks is in you, isn’t it? Can a book change the way your mind works?

Seems highly unlikely. Read more…

On May 1, 2009, you will be able to purchase a copy of The Genius Machine: The Eleven Steps That Turn Raw Ideas Into Brilliance. A few months ago Jason Gardner, my wonderful editor at New World Library, asked me if I thought about processes in the book as being a real machine. That got me thinking. Where is the genius in The Genius Machine? Is it in the book? Or is the genius latent in the user, and the book works to bring it out somehow? Or maybe the genius is to be found in the space in between the user and the book.

In George Soros’s recent book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, he tries to explain his concept of reflexivity, the idea that there is an interplay between people and the markets that most market analysts can’t even see. (I say “tries” since Soros would have been greatly helped by a Jason Gardner.) Difficult as it may be to understand Soros’s theory, its validity is easily found in the billions that Soros makes in the markets using his insights, and the fact that others, who don’t understand reflexivity, are losing those billions to him. I think reflexivity might also explain how The Genius Machine will work with readers. They will act on the book, and the book will act on them.

The Genius Machine is intended to be a real machine — you take your notion, work it through the eleven steps and, Bingo! — out comes your idea brilliantly thought through and ready for prime time.

But there’s another side to The Genius Machine. And that’s while you’re using the machine to change your ideas into pure brilliance, the machine is doing something to you, too. Read more…