Richard Feyman’s Stripper Drawings
My father, who briefly attended Cal Tech and took Richard Feynman’s freshman physics class, used to marvel at the man’s skill on the bongo drums. But I never knew before today that he was also a fairly talented artist of the female form, and used that skill to illustrate some of the strippers of his acquaintance:
We’re looking at Dancer at Gianonni’s Bar, 1968. From here, with this to accompany it:
He started drawing at the age of 44 in 1962, shortly after developing the visual language for his famous Feynman diagrams, after a series of amicable arguments about art vs. science with his artist-friend Jirayr “Jerry” Zorthian – the same friend to whom Feynman’s timeless ode to a flower was in response. Eventually, the two agreed that they’d exchange lessons in art and science on alternate Sundays. Feynman went on to draw – everything from portraits of other prominent physicists and his children to sketches of strippers and very, very many female nudes – until the end of his life.
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I highly highly recommend his autobiography, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”, and (though to a lesser degree) its sequel, “What Do YOU Care What Other People Think?”
If you read between the lines, he did a lot of stuff that he’s not talking about explicitly in the sex and drugs department.
That said, one annoying thing is that he fell into a proto-1950s hookup-artist philosophy of treating women badly in bars in order to pick them up, those parts are painful to read.
Leaving that aside, though, this book was the single most formative thing I ever read. I read it in my mid-to-late teens, and it caused me to realize that you don’t have to *feel* confident in order to *act* confident, and that if you act like you’re confident, it’s just as good.
This book came up in conversation with a girl the other month and she all of the sudden said to me, “Oh my God! You have Feynman’s personality!” I said, “Yes, because I chose to – when I read it, I was a standard-issue socially uncertain nerd.”
For a man who probably didn’t call himself (primarily), an artist, and who likely never had any real formal classroom instruction in art, he was quite talented.
Even though he may not have known how to treat women well, he obviously had an affinity for them…
An interesting fellow he…
I think once he got involved with them, he did treat them one-on-one OK. I don’t know for sure, but I get the feeling that very early on he was cheating a lot, which obviously isn’t OK. Later in life, though, even if he lacked the vocabulary of “poly” I suspect he was mostly going out with women for whom it was at most an open secret that he slept around a bit.
Unfortunately when he was young someone turned him on to the “trick” of “negging”, and he stuck with it because it worked (perhaps without really thinking about it much – in the book he basically treats at as this really weird mystery that it works).
My personal take on “negging” and PUAs in general is that what’s really “working” there is a combination of training guys that they actually *can* approach women; and confusing “being an asshole” with “being confident”. What most women want is a confident man. It’s true that assholes are confident – the error is in thinking the only way to be confident is to be an asshole, or that women prefer assholes.
But, don’t dwell too much on these relatively small parts of his books – he has a lot of great stories and real lust for life. It really was very formative for me to take his “I’m going to try this interesting thing and damn the consequences” approach – I think if I’d not read those books I would’ve had a much less interesting and fun life. I don’t let fear of embarrassment let me stop me from anything, now.