And it is, let’s face it, a little embarrassing to admit that though as young writer I secretly wanted to be considered a Nabokovian genius, I know it’ll never happen. I still like Spelling Bee, but the sharp thrill of being a first-time genius has, alas and alack, evaporated. You start to feel the flimsiness of the designation, and it measures off the distance between you, a mere puzzle solver, and your cultural heroes. But I must admit: If you’re dubbed a genius every single day, the joy derived from the experience inevitably depreciates.
That’s pretty good! According to Luke Summerlin, a data and analytics manager at the Times, only about 25 percent of Spelling Bee players hit the genius level at least once a week. I’ve played it every day since and have always (eventually) earned my genius card, usually in about 30 minutes of work. The “genius” thing is what made Spelling Bee seem well worth the effort. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery,” sub-Joycean scribblers across the globe take solace. When Stephen Daedalus says in “Ulysses,” “A man of genius makes no mistakes. The sneaking suspicion that one might, just might, be a genius has snared better writers than me. Or consider the moment in “The Royal Tenenbaums” when Owen Wilson’s character, Eli Cash, asks, regarding a review of his novel: “Why would a review make the point of saying someone’s not a genius? You think I’m especially not a genius?” Nicholson Baker, in his 1991 book “U and I: A True Story,” pondered why the novelist Edmund White had once called Vladimir Nabokov someone “who knows he’s a genius.” Baker captured the aspiration and anxiety perfectly: “Did Edmund White say this of Nabokov because he, White, knew he was a genius himself, or because he knew he wasn’t, or because he wasn’t sure? The possibility of such knowledge made me uncomfortable, because of course I badly wanted to be a genius myself someday and I didn’t yet feel any of that sort of foursquare certainty.” It’s one of my favorite passages from Baker because he’s being massively, even comically, open about his literary hopes. turn out to be pretty much average in their accomplishments. But the endorphin convention kicked off by the g-word illustrated why geniushood is the dream of so many creative people who, in the course of life. Yes, I understand it’s just a stupid online word game. One doesn’t hear many people - outside of Kanye West - talking out loud about their own level of genius, but there I was, doing precisely that.
It was an odd, and oddly intoxicating, experience. Suddenly I was on a self-appointed mission to inform friends, family, and various Internet strangers - pretty much everyone in ear- and/or eyeshot - that The New York Times had called me, Ken Gordon, a genius. I hit the genius level the first time I played.