Thanks to Steve Hay’s comment (now a post), I’m still stuck on the Inklings for a bit. The Company They Keep by Diana Gyler is only a couple years old and full of insight.
Reading through it though, I’ve found the footnotes to be more interesting than her actual thesis (that the Inklings thrived off interaction with each other, despite their frequent insistence that they acted alone).
Describing Lewis’s room where the Inklings usually met, Humphrey Carpenter writes:
The main sitting-room is large, and throught certainly not dirty it is not particularly clean… Lewis never bothers with ashtrays but flicks his cigarette ash … on to the carpet wherever he happens to be standing or sitting. He even absurdly maintains that ash is good for carpets. As for chairs – there are several shabbily comfortable armchairs and a big Chesterfeld sofa in the middle of the room – their lose covers are never cleaned, nor has it ever occurred to Lewis that they ought to be. Consequently their present shade of grey may or may not bear some relation to their original color.
Here, Gyler stops to mention some research done on highly productive people:
In Organizing Genius, Bennis and Biederman point out that shabby surroundings are the norm, not the exception, in the groups that they studied: “For reasons still to discovered, creative collaboration seems to be negatively correlated with the plushness of the office or the majesty of the view. Awful places have come to be seen as almost a requisite for a Great Group.”
-Diana Gyler, The Company They Keep, p.24
“for reasons still to be discovered” – or not. I’ll tell you what’s up with this: Guys who do great things spend all their time working, not buying gear and reading magazines. This is why any city has a thousand mediocre guitar players with beautiful $5k axes and $3k reverb units to go with their state of the art amp setup. They’re playing would sound great if they spent half the time practicing as they did on gear-enthusiast message boards.
The only place where this gear issue is perhaps worse is with photographers.
English grad students don’t actually write any books. They just talk about writing books and occasionally write about other’s books.
I think the messy office goes right along with this. If you spend your time and money on having a beautiful posh retreat to do your art, you probably aren’t producing much.
Chad Fowler wrote an excellent post about this here.