Download Daily Rituals: How Artists Work AudioBook Free
Franz Kafka, frustrated with his living quarters and day job, composed in a notice to Felice Bauer in 1912, "time is short, my strength is limited, any office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a nice, uncomplicated life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by simple maneuvers." Kafka is one of 161 encouraged - and inspiring - minds, included in this, novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, experts, and mathematicians, who describe how they subtly maneuver the countless (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the task they like to do, whether by waking early on or being up later; whether by self-medicating with doughnuts or bathing, ingesting vast levels of caffeine, or taking long daily walks. Thomas Wolfe composed taking a stand in the kitchen, the very best of the refrigerator as his workplace, dreamily fondling his "men configurations..." Jean-Paul Sartre chewed on Corydrane tablets (a variety of amphetamine and aspirin), ingesting ten times the recommended dosage each day... Descartes liked to linger during intercourse, his head wandering in sleep through woods, backyards, and enchanted palaces where he experienced "every pleasure imaginable." Listed below are: Anthony Trollope, who demanded of himself that each morning hours he write three thousand words (250 words every quarter-hour for three hours) prior to going off to his job at the postal service, which he kept for thirty-three years through the writing greater than two dozen books...Karl Marx...Woody Allen...Agatha Christie...George Balanchine, who do most of his work while ironing...Leo Tolstoy...Charles Dickens...Pablo Picasso...George Gershwin, who, said his brother Ira, did the trick for twelve hours a day from late morning hours to midnight, composing at the piano in pajamas, bathrobe, and household slippers... Here also are the daily rituals of Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol, John Updike, Twyla Tharp, Benjamin Franklin, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, Anne Grain, and Igor Stravinsky (he was never able to compose unless he was sure no person could listen to him and, when clogged, stood on his check out "clear the mind"). Brilliantly put together and edited, and filled up with fine detail and anecdote, Daily Rituals is irresistible, addictive, and magically inspiring.
