Month: August 2013

Charles Bukowski on “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

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In 1969, publisher John Martin offered to pay Charles Bukowski $100 each and every month for the rest of his life, on a single condition: that Bukowski quit his job working at the post office and commit to becoming a writer. The then 49-year-old Bukowski did just that, and in 1971 his first novel, Post Office, was published by Martin’s Black Sparrow Press.

Fifteen years later, Bukowski wrote the following letter to Martin and spoke of his joy at having escaped full time employment:

8-12-86

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

“I put in 35 years…”

“It ain’t right…”

“I don’t know what to do…”

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!”

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank

In Factotum, he was even more direct:

It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so

Fascinating. It’s incredible I haven’t read Bukowkski before. I am remedying this situation by having ordered the Kindle versions of his books: You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (only $2 on Amazon), Love is a Dog From Hell (also $2), and Women ($3).

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(via Letters of Note)

Jesse Eisenberg Should Stick to Acting

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Your mileage may vary, but Jesse Eisenberg’s short story titled “A SHORT STORY WRITTEN WITH THOUGHT-TO-TEXT TECHNOLOGY” published in The New Yorker is a clunker. I think he should stick to acting, thank you very much.

Jesus, I’ve written another loser.

…

That barista keeps looking at me. She’ll probably ask me to leave if I don’t buy something. She’s kind of attractive. Not her hair—her hair seems stringy—but her face is nice. I should really buy something.

Their divorce was remarkably amicable. In fact, John would often tell his parents, “Rebecca and I are better friends now than when we were married!” In fact, John looked forward to the days when he and Rebecca, with their new partners, would reminisce about their marriage, seeing it in a positive light, like two mature adults.

Maybe I’ll just get a pumpkin-spice loaf. That way I can still sit here without going through a whole production of buying a coffee and giving my name and feeling like an asshole while it gets made.

…

I’ll say something cool, like “The coffee’s not the only thing hot in here.” And she’ll probably be like, “I get off at seven.” And I’ll probably say something like “I don’t have a real job, so any time’s good for me.” Jesus, who am I kidding? I’m a loser. She would never like me. Even a stringy-haired barista with a slutty back tattoo would never like me.

Can you convince me the merit of the piece in the comments? Because I didn’t find it interesting or funny!

On Growing Up Feeling Unattractive

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In a post titled “I Was Not a Pretty Child,” Hannah Dale Thompson reflects on what it was like growing up feeling unattractive and being made fun of by peers:

Being unattractive in your youth forces you to develop positive personality traits. That’s why comedians are not sexy. Relying on something other than appearance for attention breeds a larger-than-life personality. It breeds a confidence that is more than superficial. It breeds humor, and a social awareness and empathy that, I think, can only be developed from the outside. I am more charismatic, confident, interesting, and funny because I was an ugly sixteen-year-old. I am slightly less superficial and marginally more open-minded. I can stand up for myself. Three days after the best first date I have ever been on, my half-drunk suitor called to tell me I have more moxie than anyone else he’s ever met. I am proud of all of these things; people should take pride in overcoming obstacles and developing better personality traits. Even if the obstacles involve bushy eyebrows and the personality bonus leads to self-diagnosed histrionic personality disorder.

…

Being unattractive in your youth separates you from even the other awkward, unattractive kids. I never had a real date to a high school dance. The entire concept of “Sadie Hawkins” terrified me. I never made anyone’s “top five girls” list. I never made anybody’s “girls” list. By the age of eighteen, I had approximately zero experience with games or manipulation or difficult social interaction. 

It’s interesting to read about how she developed as a person as she grew more attractive in her twenties:

Sometime around my twentieth birthday, I became reasonably good-looking. I started dating lawyers and financiers in their late twenties and early thirties. I became the kind of girl other women approach. I live with a model. All of my friends are beautiful and interesting. If I’m being very honest, I’m always a little angry when I have to purchase my own drink. At the grocery store last November, a boy who was mercilessly cruel to me in high school approached my mom and told her that he was “sorry for being so mean to HD in high school” because he “saw on Facebook” that I was “pretty hot now.” My mother, God bless her, pointed out to him the ridiculousness of that apology.

But what of friendship?

Women my age, particularly the bright-young-thing-in-a-big-city set that I am lucky to be a part of, are inundated with advice. About sex, careers, feminism, children, boyfriends, hook-ups, grad school. Lean in, but not too far. You can do anything a man can do, as long as you’re well put-together and relatively inoffensive. Ask for more, but don’t get cocky. No one tells women my age about the importance of friendship.

In the end, these two sentences dig deep:

This wound is new, but feels familiar. It’s something I remember being used to.

I’ve gotten used to being ignored as well…

E-Books vs. Lattes vs. Cigarettes

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A premise in this thoughtful essay by Kaya Genç on the trade-offs between buying coffee or books: What would George Orwell choose: e-books or lattes?

Kaya lives in Istanbul, Turkey where international editions of books and magazine subscriptions are more expensive than the digital counterparts. Upgrading to an e-book reader last year, there are lamentations of this sort:

In the good, old, and expensive days of literary shopping I would choose books from the shelves, walk to the counter, pay in cash, and head to a coffee shop with my purchases — the favorite ritual of my teenage years. I would open the first book’s cover, accompanied by a cigarette and a cup of strong Turkish coffee. These would always be very physical experiences: I remember the crinkling pages, the waft of the smoke, the oils of the coffee. Afterward my hands smelled of nicotine; my mind hungered for more books.

Lately, however, this ritual has all but disappeared from my life. My reading materials have been thoroughly digitized. I have lost touch with both the printed book and the banknote. In the long chronicle of my reading habits I am currently living through the age of the .EPUB file and the plastic card. It is a chilly period, I must admit, a dark age, and at times it makes me yearn for the good old days of my undergraduate life. 

Citing Orwell’s Books v. Cigarettes essay, who pinpointed his spending habits on books vs. cigarettes:

To fully estimate his reading expenses he added to the sum the cost of newspapers and periodicals. Orwell typically read two daily papers, an evening paper, two Sunday papers, a weekly magazine, and “one or two” monthly magazines. He added these and the cost of his library subscriptions. In the end he concluded that his “total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have been in the neighbourhood of £25 a year.”

In contrast, he had spent £40 a year on cigarettes. His reading habit was cheaper than his smoking one. The workers had had little reason to complain about the cost of books, he decided. If they were not reading literature it was probably because they found books boring — not because they couldn’t afford them.

In the similar vein, Kaya calculates how much money he spends on coffee vs. e-books:

My e-reading expenditures, then, cost me around $385 — less than my coffee expenditures for the same period, which were in the neighborhood of $1,800. My e-reading habit thus costs only a fifth of my drinking one (maybe a little more when I’m not working on a novel). For every dollar I spent on the likes of Tolstoy I spent four on coffee beans.   

An exercise for the reader: do you spend more on coffee or books/e-books? I will update this post when I finish my own calculations for the year 2013…

How Climate Change is Changing the Taste of Fuji Apples

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Fuji apples were, once upon a time, perhaps the most delicious apples you could sink your teeth into. However, these days the Fuji apples just aren’t quite hitting the spot like they used to, and we might never see them reach their former glory again.

By comparing samples of modern-day Fujis to similar studies from the 70s, a team of researchers has discovered that the formerly glorious Fuji has recently grown substantially mealier and has a lower flavor concentration. The likely culprit? Climate change. Per the abstract:

The effects of climate change on the taste and textural attributes of foods remain largely unknown, despite much public interest. On the basis of 30–40 years of records, we provide evidence that the taste and textural attributes of apples have changed as a result of recent global warming. Decreases in both acid concentration, fruit firmness and watercore development were observed regardless of the maturity index used for harvest date (e.g., calendar date, number of days after full bloom, peel colour and starch concentration), whereas in some cases the soluble-solids concentration increased; all such changes may have resulted from earlier blooming and higher temperatures during the maturation period. These results suggest that the qualities of apples in the market are undergoing long-term changes.

Interesting.

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(via Smithsonian Magazine)

Confessions of a Long-Time Fantasy Football Player

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Fantasy Football season is upon us once again. I have my live draft scheduled for next week, but I’ve yet to do any preparation.

Tony Gervino, in an essay titled “Eternal Bragging Rights,” reminisces how he’s been playing Fantasy Football since 1991. Since then, his friends have married, divorced, re-married, lost jobs. Only the enthusiasm for Fantasy Football, it seems, has remained static. He confesses further:

A few years ago, I offered to host the draft on my Greenwich Village terrace, but apparently I failed the most important criterion. “Do you have a pool?” a league member asked. “Because the hotel has a pool.” I confessed that while I could have almost anything their hearts desired delivered to my apartment, day or night, I did not, in fact, have a pool.

It has been widely assumed for some time now that I would eventually quit our league. No one has said as much, but I’m not an idiot. I’m the only one who lives in New York City. I don’t play golf or smoke cigarettes. I’m childless and devour The Paris Review. And my team moniker, The Fifty-Pound Head, is derived from the dark British comedy “Withnail & I.” I’m closer in species to a unicorn than I am to some of my friends. Yet I am also resolutely unwilling to surrender one of the few uncomplicated pleasures in what has become an increasingly complicated life — and the tether it provides to friends I might otherwise fall out of touch with.

Is your FF league a lifetime commitment?

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For a humorous take on Fantasy Football, I highly recommend the TV Series The League. It’s pretty hilarious. Shivakamini Somakandarkram!

Is LinkedIn Cheating Employers and Job Seekers Alike?

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Nick Corcodilos started headhunting in Silicon Valley in 1979, and has answered over 30,000 questions from the Ask The Headhunter community over the past decade. In this post for PBS, he is skeptical of the new way LinkedIn is aggressively targeting job seekers and employers:

I couldn’t believe that LinkedIn was going to sucker an employer — who was paying thousands to find the best job applicants — by putting me at the top of the applicant list just because I paid for it.

(Tomkins got the exact same pop-up ad six months ago, listing the same #2 and #3 profiles beneath his own. He notes they are in the “San Francisco Bay Area,” thousands of miles from his own location. You’d think LinkedIn would gin up a pitch that at least delivers “results” that include “candidates” from the same geographic area!)

Could LinkedIn be taking money from job seekers and misleading employers with fake applicant rankings? Thinking that Tomkins and I had somehow gotten this wrong, I did what any LinkedIn user might do: I contacted customer service.

A LinkedIn representative, LaToya (no last name given), explained via e-mail that, if I pay the $29.95, the advantage “is that your at the top of the list rather than listed toward the bottom as a Basic applicant. [sic]”

But what about those other poor suckers, the Basic applicants, who ride free — and whose qualifications might be better than mine?

And what about employers — don’t they get upset when they see someone paid to get bumped to the top of the list of applicants? Another customer service representative, Monica, told me that, “Unfortunately, there isn’t a way for the employer to turn this off.”

So job seekers pay for top billing, and the employer knows the top applicants paid for their positions because their names are highlighted and have a little badge beside them. (Wink, wink! You paid, but employers know you’re not really the top applicant!)

This is today’s leading website for recruiting and job hunting?

My inbox has about a half-dozen emails from LinkedIn, encourage me to pay up to $29/month to sign up for this premium service. I say, no thank you.

Nick Corcodilos goes on to say that LinkedIn has become a cheesy job board:

The changes came quickly. In summer of 2011, we were treated to “LinkedIn’s New Button: Instantly dumber job hunting & hiring.” A user merely clicked an on-screen button which made it ultra-easy to apply to lots of jobs, making it clear that quality of fit was certainly not a top concern. This was truly silly job-board-class “innovation,” to be outdone only by the more recent, meaningless “endorsements” that accomplish little but generate enormous numbers of profitable clicks and traffic for LinkedIn.

Lots more to consider in the post.

MacDo: On The McDonald’s Franchise in France

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Very interesting post at Roads & Kingdoms how the McDonald’s in France caters to local taste:

It’s not quite a bistro, but it’s close. This is McDonald’s as a decidedly more grown-up experience, where hard plastic is traded for leather banquettes, pull-out chairs for angular cushioned stools, and golden arches for burnt sienna and low-lit nooks where couples can steal a quiet moment. You can still find a Big Mac and a box of nuggets here, but they are overshadowed on the menu boards by the bigger stars of the French universe: the McDoo, a warm ham and cheese take on the croque-monsieur, leafy salads that bounce like a Kardashian’s backside, and a line of burgers featuring artisanal French cheeses like Comté and Camembert that McDonald’s rolled out earlier this year.

I had no idea about this trivia:

It may surprise some, but McDonald’s France—called MacDo by the locals—is the highest-grossing McDonald’s market outside of the United States (despite the fact that worker pay, a recent source of controversy in the US, starts around $12—France’s minimum wage). It’s a fun story to tell: the lowbrow American chain that won over the fastidious French. Something about it makes Americans feel like a warm apple pie inside. That’ll show those French snobs! But this didn’t happen by accident. If McDonald’s has found success in France, it’s because in many ways it has become the anti-McDonald’s: The service is warm, the interiors thoughtfully designed, and, above all, the food—from the baguette vessels to the pain au chocolat to the camembert-swaddled patties—is made for French palates.

Next time you find yourself in a McDonald’s in France, make sure to order something else besides the Royale with Cheese.

Your Thoughts Can Release Abilities beyond Normal Limits

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This is an interesting piece at Scientific American on how our thoughts may expand/better our cognitive and physical limits:

Our cognitive and physical abilities are in general limited, but our conceptions of the nature and extent of those limits may need revising. In many cases, thinking that we are limited is itself a limiting factor. There is accumulating evidence that suggests that our thoughts are often capable of extending our cognitive and physical limits.

Can our thoughts improve our vision? We tend to believe that an essentially mechanical process determines how well we see. Recent research by Ellen Langer and colleagues suggests otherwise. It is a common belief that fighter pilots have very good vision. The researchers put people in the mindset of an Air Force pilot by bringing them into a flight simulator. The simulator consisted of an actual cockpit including flight instruments. The cockpit was mounted on hydraulic lifts that mimic aircraft movement and performance. People were given green army fatigues; they sat in the pilot’s seat, and performed simple flight maneuvers. They took a vision test while “flying” the simulator. A control group took the same vision test in the cockpit while the simulator was inactive. People’s vision improved only if they were in the working simulator.

To rule out the possible effect of motivation, the researchers brought another group of people into the cockpit and asked them to read a brief essay on motivation. After people finished reading, they were strongly urged to be as motivated as possible and try hard to perform well in the vision test. The test was conducted while the simulator was inactive. They did not show a significant improvement.

In an eye exam, we are used to start experiencing problems at the bottom third of the eye chart, where letters start to get small. In another experiment, Ellen Langer and colleagues showed people a shifted chart. At the top, it included letters equivalent to the medium-size letters on the normal eye chart and the chart progressed to letters of very small size at the bottom. Because people were expecting to read the top two thirds of the shifted chart as well, they were able to read much smaller letters.

Here is the paper in which this premise is made clear: vision can be improved by manipulating mind-sets.

This reminds me of this adage I first encountered in high school: “If you believe you can or can’t, you’re right.”

List of Things Debunked by Mythbusters

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I wouldn’t really say these are things everyone believes in, but Thought Catalog compiled a list of things that have been debunked by MythBusters:

1. Walter White is awesome at chemistry

MythBusters tested two Breaking Bad scenes–whether a body could really be dissolved with hydrofluoric acid and whether mercury fulminate would really cause a giant explosion. No on both counts.

2. Sharks are highly evolved killing machines

MythBusters has busted a ton of misconceptions we have about sharks including the fact that they can ram a boat with enough power to damage the ship (false), that they can smell a one drop of blood in a swimming pool (it only matters if it’s fish blood, not human blood), that playing dead won’t dissuade a shark from attacking you (it can work), and the fact that sharks have reached peak evolution and have remained unchanged for 400 million years (more like 100 million).

3. It is impossible to swallow a spoonful of cinnamon

Yes, someone did this successfully in the MythBusters experiment but um, be careful. And also, why?

4. A duck’s quack doesn’t echo

While it’s difficult to hear, it’s more difficult to believe that there’s something special about the noise a duck makes that defies the laws of sound.

5. Your friend can “totally” trick a breathalyzer by sucking on a penny/eating an onion/chugging mouthwash

The MythBusters team tested all of these folk remedies to no avail. Also, the police can do a blood test.

6. “A high fall over water can be survived by throwing a hammer ahead of oneself and breaking the surface tension.”

Nope. You will still die. Might even be more painful. Do not try at home.

7. Dropping a penny off the side of the Empire State Building could kill someone

No, it couldn’t. A penny is not big enough or dense enough to do this, even factoring in the distance it would fall. The MythBusters team even fired a penny out of a rifle and it’s fall was still not deadly.

8. You could pick up radio stations and phone calls on an old tooth filling

No, a tooth filling will not act as an antenna.

9. Using your cell phone while pumping gas could trigger an explosion

An explosion could occur while pumping gas due to the gas vapor in the air combusting with an electrostatic charge–but it wouldn’t be your phone’s fault. This kind of static discharge can occur when getting in and out of your car.

10. A playing card could slice through human skin if thrown fast enough

The best card thrower on the MythBuster’s team was able to throw a playing card at a speed of 25mph which caused no injury. With the help of a machine they invented, the card the card speed up to 155mph which still caused only a very minor injury.

11. Quicksand sucks you underground until you die

This is an invention of the movies and our imaginations, fortunately. Real quicksand would be even more buoyant than sand--we’d float to the top.

12. Opening an umbrella while falling from a skyscraper will slow your fall and you can survive

Only in cartoons, unfortunately. Opening the umbrella would slow your fall slightly, but you would still die.

13. You can survive an elevator crash simply but jumping right before the moment of impact

While it seems somewhat logical, this be nearly impossible to time correctly. Even if you could jump at the perfect moment, the velocity of the falling elevator would be so great that you would crash violently into the ceiling. 😦

14. When gathering ocean water to put out a wildfire, a firefighter helicopter could accidentally pick up a scuba diver and drop them onto the fire

No, lol.

15. You could destroy someone’s car by putting sugar in the gas tank

Nope. In the experiment the car actually ran better after the sugar was added.

16. “A Daddy long-legs spider has the most potent venom of all spiders, but is unable to pierce human skin.”

Urban legend.

17. When you store your toothbrush on the sink germs fly up and land on it when you flush your toilet

The fact that this happens didn’t get busted, the fallacy that it matters did:

Fecal coliforms were indeed found on all the test brushes, including the control ones. However, none were of a level high enough to be dangerous, and experts confirm that such coliforms were impossible to completely avoid.

18. A goldfish has a memory of only 3 seconds

Nope, this is just an old wive’s tale. The team actually trained a goldfish to remember an obstacle course a month after it had last swam through it.

19. If you drop a piece of food on the floor, you should apply the 5 second rule

If you’re willing to eat food that’s been on the floor, it really doesn’t make a difference if it was there for 5 seconds or five minutes, the amount of yucky stuff that’s collected on it is going to be the same.

20. You shouldn’t store a tissue box in the back of your car because in the event of a crash, it could fly up, hit the back of your head and kill you

Another old wive’s tale. A box of tissue is so light that it could not kill you.

The rest here.