Chelsea Light Removals

> Here Reich fell in with musicians, dancers, sculptors and filmmakers. Sculptor Richard Serra was a neighbour of Reich’s at the time in Lower Manhattan, as was experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. For a brief period, Reich helped out with fellow minimalist Philip Glass’s removal company, Chelsea Light Moving. He recalls paying $65 a month in rent for a loft on Duane Street. “But I had a hard time paying that,” he says.

From

https://www.ft.com/content/02edd1fa-8e18-4483-ba24-7559d329a...

(also https://archive.is/C1TiZ)

I recollect reading that Reich made a definite decision against teaching as a day job because of the demands if you do it right.

That is both a comical and sad state of affairs.

Perhaps you would like the archived page instead if you don't have an adblocker, though I recommend installing one.

https://archive.ph/WeRN4

I have had ad blockers for so long that I forgot how the unfiltered web looks like. I don’t know how people do it.

I think complaining about ads on a website is reasonable if you're paying to access the website.

If one day it becomes possible to host a website for free, it would also be reasonable to complain about ads on it.

From my impressions so far, writing might be safe for far longer than many of those day jobs. At least provided there are enough people interested in reading good literature and willing to pay for that

Brandon Sanderson often says in interviews that "laying bricks" is the best job a writer can have. He also says being a software engineer is particularly bad job for writers because you cannot do it on autopilot. I can confirm.

Back then, all jobs moved at a much slower pace. There was a lot more off time during work hours.

Compared to the postal workers, accountants and insurance agents named in this article they can count as exceptions too, save for the creative writing teachers.

I think Don DeLillo quit his job before his first book and never looked back.

If you read John Fante’s Ask the Dust, he has a number of dollar amounts in there for short story sales. Those numbers are better than pretty much every contemporary opportunity without adjusting for inflation. I would say that the 20s and 30s were the ideal time. Right now, it’s pretty grim for nearly all writers. Substack and other venues tend to be kind of peanut money and there are few writers who make a living from them, especially compared to the long tail of those who make nearly nothing. And most of those who earn significant money had big reputations before Substack.

His book Suttree is effectively biographical, down to his impoverished 1950s Knoxville streetslang.

I haven't read anything else, but the film No Country for Old Men is incredible storytelling (and I only started Suttree after a /hn/article from a few months ago described the polymathic dismantling of his impressive library).

His short article The Kekulé Problem sheds serious insights (to me, at least) on whether or not LLMs can, alone with language, ever become truly conscious (are words, alone, enough?). Not the main point of the article (rather: about lucid thinking/states leading to wordless solutions presenting themselves to "discoverers," dreaming).

Wolfe is one of my favourite writers, and I highly recommend New Sun.

That said, it is a challenge for a lot of readers. It's a single, very long novel that introduces a complicated and mysterious cosmology that is rarely fully understood until the second or even third reading. A common saying among fans is that you don't read Wolfe, you re-read him. It requires a certain amount of patience.

An easier intro is The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is also one of my favourite novels. It's very short, but its puzzle box structure is no less satisfying or challenging than New Sun. Parts of the fun is figuring exact out who is narrating the three different stories that make up the book — it's probably not who they claim to be — and exactly what happened.

Thinking about the article's reference to Herman Melville, Ursula LeGuin actually called Wolfe "our Melville", "our" meaning science fiction writers as a group.

I don't know what you like, but in addition to the Book of the New Sun I really enjoyed his three-volume "Soldier" series, about a mercenary in ancient Greece who suffers from Memento-style amnesia (although this series far predates Memento).

The "Wizard Knight" series (two books) I also really enjoyed if you like something with a bit more fantasy bent.

Can't recommend Wolfe enough!

Nah, that's the one to read first.

In a similar vein I prefer Stephenson's Anathem