Netflix 1909

" [Guy] De Maupassant wrote with the conviction that in life there could be no phase so noble or so mean, so honorable or so contemptible, so lofty or so low as to be unworthy of chronicling—no groove of human virtue or fault, success or failure, wisdom or folly that did not possess its own peculiar psychological aspect and therefore demanded analysis.

     Robust in imagination and fired with natural passion, his psychological curiosity kept him true to human nature, while at the same time his mental eye when fixed upon the most ordinary phases of human conduct, could see some new motive or aspect of things hitherto unnoticed by the careless crowd."
— Modern Mechanix

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Block/Flow/Flood

"Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase, while others, hunched over a notepad or keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (Houghton Mifflin, January), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the hows and whys of writing, revealing the science behind hypergraphia — the overwhelming urge to write — and its dreaded opposite, writer's block. The result is an innovative contribution to our understanding of creative drive, one that throws new light on the work of some of our greatest writers."

— Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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"Isaac Asimov, who wrote nearly 500 books, is a classic example. He would sit down and compose 90 words a minute on his typewriter and reportedly never suffered a blocked moment. Everyone thinks of Proust as hypergraphic because he wrote such a long novel over such an extended time. Other writers often described as hypergraphic include Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Agatha Christie, Anthony Trollope, John Updike, Herman Melville, and Joyce Carol Oates. [...]
     Certain brain conditions can trigger it [hypergraphia], and they all seem to involve the temporal lobes. It was Norman Geschwind [’51] and colleagues who first showed an association between temporal lobe epilepsy and hypergraphia. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s temporal lobe epilepsy almost certainly caused his prolific writing. Just before his seizures, he would enter a state of religious ecstasy in which his world was flooded with meaning. Between seizures, he wrote hypergraphically, often about his struggle with the fact that the periods in which he seemed to experience the highest truths were also the product of a disease."
— Alice Flaherty, in conversation with Paula Byron (Harvard Medical Alumni Journal)
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Write, Eat, Write, Eat, Eat, Eat...

From: Monique's Passions

"In Balzac’s Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac, author Anka Muhlstein regales readers with anecdotes and excerpts from the great French writer’s life that underscore the importance of cuisine in his oeuvre. [...]
     During creative periods—which were often, as he had to write to fend off creditors—he stinted himself for days, subsisting on water and fruit. Muhlstein writes how on certain occasions Balzac breakfasted on 'a boiled egg … or sardines mashed with butter.' Come evening, he might nibble 'a chicken wing or a slice of roast leg of lamb.' To keep the creative juices flowing, he ended his meals with 'a cup or two of excellent black coffee without sugar.' These productive phases saw Balzac practicing austerities that would befit the strictest cloister, but once he sent the proofs to press he would race to the nearest eatery to down 'a hundred oysters' and chase them 'with four bottles of white wine.' And these delicacies were merely hors d’oeuvres. Subsequent courses consisted of 'twelve salt meadow lamb cutlets with no sauce, a duckling with turnips, a brace of roast partridge, a Normandy sole.' Dessert followed, as did 'a special fruit such as Comice pears, which he ate by the dozen.' He usually sent the bills for these orgiastic bouts to his publishers."
— Christine Baumgarthuber, The New Inquiry
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