“I encourage them to go to the circus and tell me about an experience they had … Whatever is working at the circus to entertain consumers would probably, even if you tweak it a little bit, work in what we’re doing.”
From “Creative Connection,” a recap of a creativity roundtable discussion among public relations professionals, in the January 2012 issue of PRWeek (quoting Nielson’s Cheryl Pearson-McNeil, whose department specializes in event management).
Say you’re a mechanical engineer training for a cross-country ski competition by running. Add in the fact that you’re also an inventor, and then consider that you’re training in Minnesota in the winter and keep slipping on the ice. Well, you’d think up a way to bring your training indoors, wouldn’t you?
That’s basically the story of “Ed Pauls, whose frustration at running on ice-slick Minnesota roads led him to develop the cross-country skiing simulator known as the NordicTrack,” according to Bruce Weber’s obituary of Mr. Pauls in the November 12, 2011 issue of The New York Times.
He built his new invention in his garage in the early ’70s and intended it only for himself and his family, not to sell it, but one thing led to another and “it found its true niche among up-scale exercise enthusiasts as the fitness movement became a national trend and the home exercise equipment market boomed.” The company his invention spawned grew to employ 400 people in Excelsior, Minnesota, and turned out a half-million NordicTrack machines before being sold out of the family’s hands in 1986.
“On a dark winter evening when Yankee Stadium is all lit up, it radiates an annunciatory glow, as if an amazing idea had just occurred to it.”
From “Knights vs. Cyclones” by Ian Frazier in the January 16, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
“The penny post (with its stamps and its uniform rates) arrived in the United Kingdom in 1840, and in the decade that followed Anthony Trollope, a postal inspector, was travelling all over Ireland on the swift new express trains and persistent locals, to make sure that every letter, wherever bound, was actually being delivered the next day. On those same trains, he sat and wrote novels, and in the novels dukes and barristers and young MPs and wary heiresses and country doctors were writing letters that moved the plot along or reversed or tilted it in some way.”
From a Roger Angell essay on the Postal Service and the writing of letters, in the January 2, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
Being a water person, I was interested to read that “growing up by the sea” was a major influence on the development of architect Renzo Piano’s ideas. In an Q&A with Belinda Luscombe in the July 4, 2011 issue of Time magazine, Mr. Piano explained the desires/obsessions this caused: “Growing up by the sea, you get an idea of the infinite surface of the world, and you grow up with a number of desires … One is for light. Light is probably the most untouchable, immaterial material of architecture. I have another obsession: fighting gravity. In the sea, everything floats.”
Another early influence — the fact that he came from a family of builders — accounts for Mr. Piano’s ability to mesh the often disparate worlds of contruction and architecture. He said, “I’ve never betrayed the idea that architecture starts with construction. Architecture is the art of making good, solid, safe buildings for humans.”
“He began his writing career with stories drawn from his childhood and his wartime experiences, but he instinctively found his way to poetry. ’One night, I woke up in the middle of the night and a poem started,’ he told National Public Radio in 2006.”
From the August 25, 2011 New York Times obituary of poet Samuel Menashe.
“The idea was long dismissed as a quixotic fantasy.”
These words — describing an idea that is now a flourishing reality, a park called the Walkway Over the Hudson — were written by Peter Applebome in his October 17, 2011 New York Times article about a nearby Hudson River span, the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is slated for demolition and replacement. Some people want see the Tappan Zee preserved and also turned into walkway (the first one was a former railroad bridge) or a bikeway. Others envision a park like Manhattan’s High Line, another long-shot project that has blossomed beyond anyone’s expectations.
What caught my atttention was the description of any idea being “quixotic fantasy” — as if there’s something wrong with that. I think not! I turned to a website called www.quixote-quest.org for some comfort. “Quixotic,” of course, refers to Don Quixote, the much-beloved literary hero whose weak spot is that he “is an idealist seeing things through rose-colored glasses at times. He fights impossible symbolic battles while the rest of the world says it can’t be done and mocks him for trying. It is ironic that a crazy man is showing humanity the ‘right way’ to live.”
Why is it so easy to mock someone for trying?
“Adolph Gottlieb told me to see how big my ideas could be. I thought: Why not how small? De Kooning once praised a tiny photo-booth portrait I had done with eraser fluid. But Richard Upton told me that after a divorce he was lugging gigantic canvases about. His father said to this fabulous draughtsman: ‘Why so damn large?’ And he never painted more than 10″ by 10″ again, that is inches, not feet. They stand together, like little poems of Dickinson, who is so vastly compacted herself.”
From a long series of “Improvisations” by David Shapiro in the November 2011 issue of Poetry magazine.
“He stopped sketching to music at one point because he feared he was becoming dependent on it. ’I just challenged myself and said “No, you do it with no music,”‘ he said.”
From Stephanie Rosenbloom’s August 7, 2011 profile of designer Olivier Theyskens in The New York Times (citing an example of how Mr. Theyskens “takes pleasure in testing his discipline”).
“‘I decided to become inspired by the story.’”
This was Michael Schulman quoting playwright Katori Hall in his article in the September 19, 2011 issue of The New Yorker about the genesis of her two-character play “The Montaintop.” Ms. Hall was telling the story — heard frequently within her family — about how her mother, as a child, missed attending what turned out to be Martin Luther King’s last speech, the night before he was assassinated, because her mother forbade her to go, fearing violence.
Decided to become inspired?
I had never thought of it that way. It had never occurred to me that choice or control was a factor. Either something inspired me — came to me, grabbed onto me, struck me, carried me away — or it didn’t.
Ms. Hall’s words made me remember. An art class, for example, where I was faced with a seemingly dull still-life set-up. Dismissing my complaint, the teacher challenged me, “Look. There is always something you can draw.” And in fact, when I looked hard enough, there was.