on monsters

helping someone achieve their dreams is not the same thing as achieving your own.  Or put another way, making someone else the focus of your ambition is not the same as having a self-centered, work-centered ambition. The two are different. One is selfish, the other is selfless. And lately I’ve been thinking: why is it so difficult—maybe impos

All of these prolific geniuses in devotional service to their craft were  monsters . Writer Claire Dederer:  “[t]he female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: ‘I wish I had a wife.’ What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfis

There are so, so many of these men freckled throughout history. Paul Erdős, a renown mathematician characterized by his eclectic genius and all-consuming obsession with math, didn’t butter his own toast until he was an adult. There are several stories recounting how he often offloaded domestic or non-math related tasks to the women in his life

It’s very telling how ‘wife’ is used here — a feminine partner is defined as a role of service, assistance. A wife is the antonym of a monster in this context. For a male art monster (or more generally: a  craft  monster), his female counterpart serves as an extension of him making sure the roads of his megalomania are slick and unblocke

One example: the number of women who cook vastly outnumbers the number of men who cook. And yet only 10% of Michelin-starred chefs are female. I believe this is because, as Jenny Offill put it, women rarely become art monsters. From Dept. of Speculation:  “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almos