Finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Kaz Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World.

Gladwell's book focuses on breaking down the myth of the self-made genius, analyzing a variety of case histories/stories where opportunity, privilege, access to resources, and circumstances played a large role in ensuring success and/or genius. He spends a fair amount of time analyzing why Asians are good at math (attributing abilities with math to the linguistic system and the short/compact words which form the basis of numbers in the Chinese language system, which allows even the youngest child learning how to count, to count to a higher figure than his/her Western counterparts). He talks about statistical odds, generational/historical opportunity, time investment, and the ancestral legacies that shape experience. While I didn't love this book, it did give me much to reflect upon, in terms of analyzing the privilege and resources that were available to me, and the sacrifices made by my parents to provide some of those opportunities. I would not be the person that I am, if I had stayed in Riverside at the age of 17. I would not be the person that I am now, if my my mother and I hadn't worked very hard to pay my way to studying abroad in a foreign country during my college years. I would not be the person I am, if my father had never decided to leave Taiwan, when he did. Does my dad's work ethic come from cultivating rice paddies and farming (which he literally did), as Malcolm Gladwell would suggest? And does my own work ethic stem from the transmission of these values? And would I be a very different artist/writer, if I put in 10,000 hours a year into my writing? I don't know, nor is this necessarily a practical or relevant question. We live the lives that we live and balance multiple priorities and commitments.

Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World also took me awhile to warm to. But the book really picked up speed for me when the protagonist of the novel, a famous painter who uses his talents to further the Japanese nation-making project, renounces his past activities and beliefs for the sake of marrying off his 26-year-old daughter. The whole story takes place post-War, under the American occupation, when the island is beginning to rebuild and rapidly transform. The story is told in flashbacks. Ono remembers his early days as a painter, training under various teachers, and his relationship with his major teacher who sought to reinvigorate the style and subject matter of Utamaro, using Western techniques and aesthetic approaches. But Ono tires of painting pictures of the pleasure district, geishas, and night scenes lit by lantern light, applying himself to political themes and images which estrange him from his studio. But there is much to be learned in the master's efforts, in his understanding that the floating world is ephemeral, though its pleasures and joys are no less real because of that quality of ephemerality. There is a message here too about living and practicing one's art and life with conviction - whether for political or aesthetic impulses of the heart. Did Ono and his teacher log 10,000 hours of painting time a year, qualifying themselves as savants? I think the more important question is did they practice their art deeply.