Beyond Rage and Despair
On wisdom from a genius and cultural homage
Hello friend, 👋🏾
This week on the My Imaginary Friends podcast, my interview series “Imagining Success” continues, and I get to talk to beloved romance author Beverly Jenkins.
I was so thrilled to speak with someone who I respect so much and who has had such a personal impact on me. We speak about why she started writing, why she keeps writing, and how she defines success in a publishing industry with a history of systemic inequality that is still all too prevalent.
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📝 Listen to Einstein
While neither you nor I may share the intellectual capability of Albert Einstein, his seven rules for a better life, as detailed in this article on BigThink, are ideas that all of us could take to heart.
His generally disheveled appearance was a function of rule #1: “Expend your efforts on the things that matter.” For him, that meant eschewing barber shops, and varying wardrobes, and socks. I’ve long considered adopting a standard “uniform” a la Steve Jobs and his black turtlenecks in order to avoid the decision fatigue of figuring out what to wear each day.
…choosing not to put effort into the things that are superfluous to what’s actually important to you is a way to become more mentally efficient, which frees up your mind to focus on what actually matters most to you.
Rule #5 is especially relevant to today’s times. “Don’t let politics fill you with either rage or despair.” A difficult task to be sure when the world is constantly whipping us between both poles ad infinitum.
I’d be interested in learning more about how he put this advice into practice, but from a practical standpoint, rage and despair are not the best engines for meaningful action that makes change. They are reactions and perhaps it is only once we get past them that we can start seeing solutions.
This connects to rule #3: “Have a puzzle mindset.”
With a flexible, non-rigid worldview, Einstein would easily challenge assumptions that others couldn’t move past, allowing him to conceive of ideas that others would unceremoniously reject out-of-hand.
How much more difficult is it to solve a puzzle when you’re filled with rage or despair?
Also incredibly relevant is rule #6: “Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of the truth.”
Once we abandon our critical thinking faculties because we are certain we know the answer, we tend to simply go along with those who agree with us and oppose those who espouse anything different. To Einstein, this represented the death of the rational mind, which he called “collective insanity” or a “herd mind.”
To me, this sounds exactly like Twitter and I do not mourn its decline.
📝 Language, Worldbuilding, and Adaptation
This article from the New Yorker, “‘Dune’ and the Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages” makes an interesting point on how removing author Frank Herbert’s Arabic culture and language references for the film may change its resonance.
While I haven’t read the original books, I do love both of the films (though I admit Dune 2 felt like being whipped around by a plot sandstorm for nearly 3 hours). Herbert leaned heavily on Islam and Arabic cultures for his fictional culture.
…many of the campaigns that inspired him were by Muslims: by Chechens against Russians, by the Sudanese against the Anglo-Egyptians, by Algerians against the French. Herbert also said, in a 1976 interview, that he resented the tendency “not to study Islam, not to recognize how much it has contributed to our culture.” By making it a “strong element” in the book, Herbert may have been trying to convey the “enormous debts of gratitude” that he felt humanity owed Islam.
This episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Imaginary Worlds, “The Book of Dune” features several Muslim Dune fans speaking about how the book resonated with them deeply. Though I’m sure there are others who feel Herbert’s inclusion of a culture and religion not his own represents cultural appropriation. Perhaps that’s why so much of the original inspiration was removed from the conlang (constructed language) of the film.
Although [conlang creator David J.] Peterson’s version of the Fremen language retains a vaguely Arabic sound, almost all other traces of the language have been expunged from Villeneuve’s “Dune” films.
Though the article states that Peterson’s stated reasons have more to do with the internal logic of a constructed language.
“The time depth of the Dune books makes the amount of recognizable Arabic that survived completely (and I mean COMPLETELY) impossible,” he wrote on Reddit.
I love the depth that Peterson goes into when creating an authentic language, including simulating the evolution of speech from ancient forms. But removing the original creator’s inspiration paints the worldbuilding with a different brush. It’s the kind of thing that happens with any adaptation, and one which living authors who have their work adapted for the screen must accept, perhaps with gritted teeth.
🏃🏿♀️March Madness Writing Sprints
This month, join a community of writers to get your writing done. I’m joining other Authortubers for writing sprints! I’ll be going live on YouTube Thursday March 21 & 28 at 7pm ET to sprint. Come join in the fun!
Full Sprint Schedule | YouTube Playlist
🚀 Quick Bites
Do you like lists? How about some lists with your lists? The Superlist app gives you supercharged list making abilities that calls to my inner list lover.
🎙️ My Imaginary Friends: Episode 235 — Imagining Success with Beverly Jenkins
The My Imaginary Friends podcast is a behind the scenes look at the journey of a working author navigating traditional and self-publishing, where I share insights on the writing life, creativity, inspiration, and this week’s best thing.
“Imagining Success” is an interview series where I talk to authors who have achieved career milestones that others only dream about and ask them how they got there and where they go from here.
In this interview, I speak with legendary romance author Beverly Jenkins about the power of representation, her unique relationship with her readers, and why she doesn’t have imposter syndrome.
Find Beverly Jenkins at https://www.beverlyjenkins.net/.
Her most recent novel is A Christmas to Remember.
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Ya, these Dune movies are so Americanized. But on the other hand, if the Islamic influence was more blatant, the director might end up with a Fatwa and a target on his back… so it’s safer to downplay the links to the Sunni’s in this era, though Frank Herbert did not downplay them and copied a lot from the Sunnis.