Poets' Odd Jobs(poets.org) |
Poets' Odd Jobs(poets.org) |
WARNING: personal, non-verifiable theory about to be presented
When coming across modern writers I will often check their biography to see what odd-jobs they have had. I feel that modern man can become so insulated in modern life (e.g. spending an entire career in academia with, say, no hobbies that are grounded in actual life such as fishing, serious gardening, etc) that he can become very disconnected and overly "heady" or "abstract". As such, I often am glad to see when an artist or writer has some terribly mundane and tactile job on their resume. I know that as somebody drawn to the arts I have been incredibly thankful for my unplanned career in software as it has opened my eyes to many naive thoughts I had as to "how the world works".
>“I had gone to install a dishwasher in a loft in SoHo,” he says. “While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
https://kottke.org/18/04/philip-glass-i-expected-to-have-a-d...
I agree with the idea but I was very surprised by the last part of your comment because, in my experience, software engineering fits perfectly into the type of job that you call "disconnected" and "abstract" rather than anything "grounded in actual life".
You can try to abstract as much as you want, but you can’t hand wave the speed of light or even just the messy world of user problems / 3rd party software issues.
> Every day for a year a group of us would meet after lunch and try every recipe ever devised for Jell-O. They were all elaborate and time-consuming. Finally we happened upon a recipe for small slices of concentrated Jell-O that you could pick up with your fingers. I had all the men on the team make them with me. We figured if we could make them, anyone could. We added the idea of shapes and negotiated with Bill Cosby to advertise them. Every box in the U.S. sold off the shelves. My job at the National Endowment for the Arts is oddly similar: to understand how to take all the agency’s resources and, in addition to everything else we’re doing, come up with a few ideas that are transformative.
And more relevant to this thread:
> I would tell young poets worried about struggling to make a living at their craft to consider alternatives in business before launching an academic career. A poet always struggles. If you work in business, you have the freedom to choose the ring you struggle in. There are many jobs in which a creative person who can write excels. An N.E.A. grant can be a watershed in a writer’s career. It’s the first time some people can write full time. The grant is financial, but also validating. Honor can be even more valuable than money to artists. It gives them the right to take their artistic vocation more seriously.
I have freed
the symbols
from your
clumsy lines
which
the linter probably
considers
in error
Indulge me
it's more readable
neat functions
in neat formCoffee? Yes, please !
It's probably just a neurodivergent quirk, but it's always felt far more readable and just... right.
I have experimented with Javascript eval(``) ... but prefer not to talk about it.
on the orange site, we write
in curiosity, we find delight
here: a land of the bit and the byte
It was...not great. I still think the work was a decent expression of my emotional state at the time, even if the UML-ified version sucked.
(but then, _a lot_ of UML sucks, so....)
When you support yourself through odd jobs, you can make bolder artistic statements, and show a middle finger to the art world, if you will. When an artist is a professor/teacher whose job is to teach the tradition in the mainstream way, they end up being immensely conservative. Just look at someone like Schoenberg who is -- of course -- considered an iconoclast by the academic art elite but his music is an extremely conservative extension of Western counterpoint and late German Romanticism in a very predictable way: make it more harmonically adventurous/experimental within the 12EDO framework... It's been everyone's go-to since forever, I mean Chopin made a fortune (and a mountain of novel piano music) off of it. Schoenberg simply refused to see what was right in front of his eyes, even though he clearly had gigantic artistic talent, spirit, and motivation (he is also one of my favorite composers, so I'm biased, granted). I really think teaching is not very compatible for artists who first and foremost want to be artists. Someone who wants to create, first and foremost, something new, profound, and personal... Of course, you'll find countless people who'll disagree with me staunchly...
Wasn't an odd job though, he had a pretty good career as I understand it
File that in the Staff Picks nooks
As one nine six dash three
(though not at all LOC) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" books
And the Beatles' "Please, Please Me"
(Note that Zweig puts the beginning of sexual intercourse at 1918; does every generation think their kids invented it?)
I suppose that the modern equivalent would be holding down a job in academia and writing op-ed articles about how terrible it is for the country. But you can't sing an op-ed.
https://creativewritingmfa.info/rankings/Nograduatecreativew...
How do you view your day job? As a necessary evil to pay the bills? As a good “real world” counterweight to the arts? I ask in good faith and genuine curiosity as I am likewise drawn to the arts but have over the years come to appreciate how my tech career keeps my feet planted on the ground.
Not to imply that it's in any way a quality peculiar to those who write poetry in their free time (I know it isn't), but my need for creative expression regularly seeps into the coding standards to which I hold myself, insofar as I demand a certain beauty-- such as such a thing is ever even possible-- out of the libraries I write.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/nov/24/arts.highe...
> Einstein on the Beach was premiered in Avignon on July 25 1976. Glass and Wilson were then offered the option of two performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where the critical reaction was delirious: "One listens to the music just as one watches Wilson's shifting tableaus," wrote John Rockwell in the New York Times, "and somehow, without knowing it, one crosses the line from being puzzled or irritated to being absolutely bewitched." The day after the performance, Glass was back driving his taxi: "I vividly remember the moment, shortly after the Met adventure," he says, "when a well-dressed woman got into my cab. After noting the name of the driver, she leaned forward and said: 'Young man, do you realise you have the same name as a very famous composer'."