Billionaire Inventor Who Doesn't "Think Straight"

James Sorenson's teachers said he'd never learn to read, says Monday's USA Today. His mom said he could do anything he set his mind to. A friend and dean of a business school says he's a "non-linear thinker." The reporter who wrote the story said that "his thoughts meander so much that a few hours (with him) produced a...notebook full of disconnected clutter."

Yet Sorenson has, over his several decades, put his thoughts together extremely well and come up with a list of medical inventions to his credit. Many of his ideas have come to him while he's soaking in the bathtub with a washcloth over his face.

Now at 86 he has begun the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, sampling DNA in 107 countries. He wants to show that people have a common ancestry, without regard to races and ethnic groups. His hope is that demonstrating this will lead to world peace. His wife of 60 years says," I stand back and wait, because he does the impossible...You can't tell him he can't do something."

Biography Research: Repotting a Book-in-Progress

When I was a few months into my research on my biography of painter Elisabeth Chant, I bought a thrift shop item to house my growing stacks of notes.

That piece of furniture, shelves that were more like mail slots, was fine for a while.

But recently I realized I needed more space, and lots more different files. The distinctions in topics were growing ever finer, in addition to the added piles of bulk material.

So: a new container. I'm up to a very deep-drawered file cabinet, dressed in a sari from Varanasi, the setting of my novel Sister India. (This is the very distinctive Banarsi brocade.)

And this doesn't count the shelves of books, or the digital material.

I expect I'll have to repot another time or three before this book is done. It's a satisfying piece of the process, seeing it grow.

Repurposing

I like using things in ways other than their original purpose. To me, that's one of the three basic approaches to creativity, to making up new stuff:
1. use a familiar object for a new purpose
2. look at the familiar from a different perspective
3. combine elements that haven't been put together before (or never so well.)

This assemblage to the right is my project of last weekend: the idea being to do something with the unsightly nearly-six-foot multi-armed "stump" at the edge of my woodland garden.

I find it wonderfully phantamagorical, and expect the flower-pot-handed arms to start waving, hydralike.

Another nice thing about this kind of project is: it's not my writing, my career, and all that...I'm free to do it as sloppily as I want. Very liberating.