June 2013
“I seem almost a plagiarist. [I quote a lot because I’m] just trying to be honorable and not to steal things. I’ve always felt that if a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better? If I wanted to say something and somebody had said it ideally, then I’d take it but give the person credit for it. That’s all there is to it. If you are charmed by an author, I think it’s a very strange and invalid imagination that doesn’t long to share it. Somebody else should read it, don’t you think?”
—Marianne Moore
“I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself…I write as one amateur to another.”
—C.S. Lewis
“All wells went dry—the moment you stopped looking for new ones was the moment your fortunes began to decline.”
—Philipp Meyer, The Son
“I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I’ve already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That’s very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it’s not the ideal, it’s not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe—if I go ahead and finish it anyway—I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.”
—Joan Didion (via) cf. “The Life of a Project”
Okay, I guess I have the opposite problem of the previous question. I'm going to graduate next year with a double major in linguistics and mathematics. I really have no interest in academia as a career but most of the advice I've gotten says I should pursue an MA in either because I wanted to work in either applied or computational linguistics or cryptography. However, I worked a cube job last summer and was really productive writing. Do I go for my dream job or my other dream (writing)?
Why not go for both?
So I have been accepted into an M.A. Program Without a Teaching assistantship. After being trained to be a vigorous reader of literature and graduating summa cum laude, what can I do besides going to grad school? I love to read. however, I don't want to work a factory Job and don't want to be stuck in a cubicle, but I also don't want to jump into 30k plus debt. I'm afraid I have invested way too much energy into a skill that makes it impossible for me to turn back.
Okay, tough love this morning, because I just woke up:
If your dream job is to teach English at a university, find a grad school that will pay you an assistantship and go get your M.A. and your Ph.D. But beware that there are way more bodies with PhDs than there are teaching gigs, and the pay is pretty low. So even if you did go $30,000 into debt, and even if you did find a teaching gig afterwards, it would still cramp your style, and you would still have trouble paying off your loans and doing all the other things adults want to do, like buy a house or a car or have a family. Also: teaching ain’t just sitting around reading books. The work load is pretty intense: lesson plans, paper grading, publishing, navigating academia. If you didn’t soak yourself in debt to get there, you can always hit the eject button, and all you’ve lost is time.
If you don’t know what your dream job is, don’t go into debt trying to figure it out. Go get a job in a factory or in a cubicle or at Starbucks or wherever the hell else you can find one. I worked in a bonafide cubicle for about four years. If you have a cubicle that’s about five feet high and you have a computer with an internet connection, it can be pretty sweet. They give you health insurance and a paycheck and a lunchbreak where you can read whatever you want, and go home and read some more.
As far as I know, there are no jobs that pay you to be a professional reader. Well, except mine, that is.
If you’re trying to figure out what you want to do (aren’t we all?) and how you can do it without grad school, I recommend Kio Stark’s book, Don’t Go Back To School, and this tag.
Good luck.
“If you don’t make Christmas presents…don’t talk to me.”
—Kanye West
“We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation.”
—John Green (via)
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”
—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (via)
Listen
Al Green, “Loving You,” The Belle Album, 1978
Here’s a damned fine Al Green album you might not own. It’s the first one he produced himself without the help of Willie Mitchell and his normal gang. Here’s Greil Marcus:
This is a completely idiosyncratic album — Green produced it, cowrote all the songs and plays precise acoustic and electric guitar — but it’s hard for me to understand how anyone could find it inaccessible. Its subject matter — God’s grace, and how good it (It?) feels — isn’t pushed; there’s no ad for Green’s ministry on the back cover, and while most of the lyrics are religious, the only song title that even hints at anything beyond the secular realm is “Chariots of Fire.”
When you come to love, in hindsight, an artist with a long, varied career, you tend miss the gems like this. There’s something about this day and age of abundance, when there’s so much you could listen to, that makes me, even with artists I love, not bother tracking stuff like this down because it seems “minor,” and I stick to whatever Allmusic.com tells me are the “classics” worth my time. And lets face it: whether something is a “classic” means nothing as to whether you’ll actually like it. What a stupid mistake to make.
I’ve had the same experience with “minor” Woody Allen movies and recently Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard—not a “classic” necessarily, but solid, enjoyable work that, because it’s an artist you like, is still better than the best stuff from another artist.
Anyways. This is a great album.
Filed under: my listening year 2013
