How to Become an Intellectual

“Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.” – Ambrose Bierce, famous for a.) his dry wit and b.) his mysterious disappearance into the chaos of the Mexican Revolution.

Boing Boing (is that an onamonapia?) recently offered up a rather interesting piece on the one and only Gérard de Nerval, who plays a somewhat-prominent role in How to Become an Intellectual. It discusses how the poet and essayist skittered along the jagged line of genius and madness (“To make matters worse, the lunacy that had tormented him all his life was back, scrabbling at the basement door of his mind.”) as well as his influence on other intellectuals and writers (“T.S. Eliot sampled him in his modernist mash-up The Waste Land.”) but spends much of its length talking about the man’s unusual choice of pets: a lobster that he sometimes walked around town on a leash of blue ribbon.

When confronted about this lifestyle choice, Nerval reportedly responded:

“Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gobble up your monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn’t mad!”

But the article delves deeper: is it possible, in fact, to leash a crustacean and take it for a stroll on dry land, without causing the poor beast to expire? Scientists are divided, apparently, about the feasibility of such a thing. Lobsters can walk a bit in the open air, although “prolonged exposure to air” will eventually kill them (ambient temperature can also create a problem). All that being said, though, One scientist thought a short walk would be possible under certain conditions.

The whole article is well worth reading. Whether or not the lobster walk was true, or yet another embellishment of an already-weird life, Nerval was an interesting character.

“Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.”

- Chuck Palahniuk, in his novel Invisible Monsters.

As crime writers go, Raymond Chandler was rather cerebral. He didn’t write with the fevered intensity of Jim Thompson or Mickey Spillane. His fiction, which featured detective Philip Marlowe drifting around Los Angeles, didn’t feature the wall-to-wall gunfights or the twisted freaks that stuff most pulpy literature. But Chandler’s writing process was definitely a little tortured, at least based on this quote I found the other day:

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”

Or as someone else once memorably phrased it: write with your heart, re-rewrite with your head.

Let’s put aside the fact that it’s Black Friday, or Cyber Monday, or Deal-of-the-Week Tuesday, or whatever. Simply stated, it’s the holidays, and you need a gift for that brainiac in your life—preferably something that involves words printed on pulped wood (or its digital equivalent). You could buy them a boxed set of Twilight novels, as a joke, but their heads might explode at the sight of it (and not in a good way). Or you could offer a copy of our modest tome, the only one—so far as we know—that combines Einstein, Shakespeare, the best recipes for ostrich brains, discussions of the space-time continuum, The Magic Flute, the ideal rules for bullshitting, and much more into one tasty package.

From The Huffington Post: a lighthearted bit on the art world’s biggest intellectual landmines.

Although they would likely profess otherwise (at least in public), many an intellectual thirsts for some degree of fame and fortune. Who wouldn’t want their books to earn millions, or to step into an auditorium crowded with cheering fans?

But fame and fortune can also have a downside—and no, just not hangovers and a creeping sense that you’ve sold your intellectual fire for a fat bank account. Fintan O’Toole’s review of Gordon Bowker’s James Joyce: A New Biography in the recent New York Review of Books describes an altogether different hazard attendant to renown: that your message, thoughts—everything that made you famous in the first place—can end up drowned out in all the applause.

O’Toole suggests that such a thing happened to Joyce:

“It was good, of course, that one of the greatest of Irishmen was at last being honored in his own country, and especially in the city that was, even after he left it for the last time in 1912, his imaginative universe. But Joyce really is dirty and scandalous. Those precious pages, for each of which the Irish government paid around $30,000, stink of flesh, ordure, and bodily fluids. They are steeped in forbidden thoughts and dishonorable desires, in secrets, blasphemy, and sex. They were not made to become holy relics.”

Joyce, of course, didn’t live to enjoy such widespread accolades (quite the opposite, in fact, at some points). But in O’Toole’s view, fame is having a detrimental posthumous effect on someone (he argues) who stands as one of the most ribald intellectuals of all time.

Just in time for back-to-school season: a few tips and tricks from the book on becoming (or at least aspiring to become) a well-rounded thinker of the old school. Featuring cameos by T.S. Eliot and a koala frozen stiff as a popsicle. (Yeah, that second thing makes perfect sense in context.) Check it out here.

On a totally unrelated note, a thoroughly touching letter from poet Ted Hughes to his son about “inner armor.” Lengthy but well worth checking out. (Originally posted at Brain Pickings – thanks GB.)

A new HuffPo piece (adapted from a Maxim in the book) attempts to draw a somewhat practical lesson from the infamous Gore Vidal-vs.-Norman Mailer feud of a couple decades ago.

Gore Vidal was the last of a generation of literary lions who attempted—sometimes with spectacular success, but also a healthy amount of failure—to broaden the possibilities of fiction and nonfiction. In contrast to the usual stereotype of intellectual-as-wallflower, Vidal was also famous for being a literary brawler of the first order: witness this pleasant little conversation between him and William F. Buckley Jr.:

Or this equally notable brawl between Vidal and Mailer (which is mentioned in Intellectual’s Maxim 95):

The intellectual life: it’s not for wimps.