I'm wondering.
I'm wondering what do we do, what kind of life do we live, should we starve, or ought we purchase granite counter tops? Most of us have been at least partially yuppified at one or various or all points in our lives--do we succumb to that propensity for easiness* and seek out the middle class life, or do we say screw it and suck it up and just be poor until our big break comes, even if it never comes?
I am, of course, speaking from a very real place. I almost got Google-made^ just a few weeks ago, and for the months preceding it and for the weeks since I've been applying and looking for jobs of its ilk all over the Bay Area. "[I]ts ilk"? You know: office jobs, jobs with salaries and paid vacation, jobs without punchcards and with 401ks. Adult jobs. Jobs for people who, if they were jobless like me, wouldn't be spending their downtime going everyday to cafes in order to write the novel they're writing. Because they most likely wouldn't be writing one. Because not all of us are writers.
But I am, and if I am indeed a writer what am I doing looking for other work? For real work, that is, 40+-hour a week work, 401k work, a job I wouldn't be ashamed being caught by my Choate buddies in.** Pynchon did it for a spell (advertising)...and, uh, well, what did Bellow do? And Roth? Anyone else I'm missing? No I'm not including academic jobs--that's different, not what I'm getting at here. I'm not yet sure why but it is. [And don't worry, poets, I know all about Stevens (doctor) and Eliot (banker), but you all are a special case, different, and I'll get to you down below.]
Do you see what I'm getting at here? Maybe you don't--here, an anecdote: After Stage 7 of the [11 Stage] Google Process was complete, I was walking back to a cafe I often write in, 16th between Valencia and Guerrero, and on my way in I had a flash of whatthellamIdoing? It was tangible, and it made sense. I was walking back into that cafe, thinking of all the work I would have to do if I got the job, thinking about how long the shot was that I would even get it, I was thinking of myself as I had always, until about a year ago, thought of myself, as a Destined Writer...I was thinking all these things, and it occurred to me, What the hell am I doing? Do I really want this job? Do I want all that comes with it? Shouldn't I try to tough it out with all the rest of the artists in town, tending a bar somewhere, slinging coffee somewhere else, working the register at a bookstore.... Because me, youpeople, I'm not made for this, and I've known I'm not made for this, known it for years. A job? Business Casual clothes? Planned vacations?.... And then my inner Holden came out and all I wanted to do was smoke a cigarette and think about how I didn't feel like doing anything, not really. And then I just got depressed.
But do you see what I'm saying? I feel trapped between two worlds: the one that was promised to me by Choate and Williams and my upper middle class, half-Jewish Connecticut childhood, the one that was promised to me by me by all my younger selves...and the one that I've come to feel in my adult years is more like home, comes a whole lot closer to making sense for who I am, not who I was raised to be. The Yuppie World versus the Bohemian World, or something like that.^^ Because I feel like I'm at an impasse here, right now. Live like Henry Miller (okay not exactly like Henry Miller) (well, maybe exactly like Henry Miller), or live like someone else, like my father, like most writers now live, safely ensconced in their middle class worlds, no longer bleeding meals from willing friends, through with the 17-year-old maturity level so oft associated with artists, "the creative types"....
Poets: In a way, this is both not addressed to you, and addressed to you more than to anyone else. Because you guys, of course, can never hope to make a living on just your art--sorry, but you knew, right?--so the whole alternative means has always been on your radar, in fact probably walked through your door about a half-pace behind Poetry. So what do you all think, have you ever thought about pursuing a 9-5/M-F job (outside of academia) in addition? And where have you imagined yourselves? Did you ever say, Fuck it, I'm gonna just bartend and go to artist's openings and put lots of gel in my hair, maybe toss my head in an oven when I'm 33...? And was there a struggle? Is there still?
Happy Sunday to you all. Yes I swore in the title to this post.
*This phrase, "succumb to that propensity for easiness," is actually not meant to be judgmental, denigrating. Rather, it seems the most accurate way to describe the relationship I, for one, have with this life choice, whether to make it, the fact that living the other, bohemian way would be to me more of a struggle, and so a longer, harder leap to take.
^As in, I almost convinced them to employ me; I figured since "google" has all but become a verb in the English [other languages??] vernacular, I'd here coin another possible usage.
**No really, that happened. Chicago. 2002. I was working the register at Starbucks and I saw in line a girl I went to Choate with, perfectly adorned with husband, rings, and a weekend off from a clearly office job. It was the closest thing to petrifying shame that I have ever experienced.
^^God, come to think of it that would make a great Celebrity Death Match, wouldn't it? (dxm hands off--that's my story idea.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
instant road repair! why, I've been looking for that almost my whole little life! no, really youpeople, I have A LOT to say on this topic. perhaps tomorrow after my road has been repaired, instantly.
If you have only yourself to look after then who needs a job? I wouldn't work if I didn't have to. In fact, I spend an awful lot of time trying to convince my wife that I don't need to work for the next year and a half, that if she just trusts me I'll spend that time writing a novel while we stretch our meager savings, and that I believe my novel will give us enough to live off of until I write the next one. I believe this because I'm an optimistic fool. I believe all my dreams, and it usually gets me in trouble, which is fine fuel for a fiction writer. Be careless. Stay jobless. Smoke cigarettes from the ashtray. Instantly repair your road with your last few dollars because you suddenly feel it's the right thing to do, and don't regret it when you realize the county would've repaired your road for you, that taxes are collected and allocated for just that purpose, even if they do take their time getting to the potholes in front of the studio apartment you share with two other people--one whose name you forget and the other who makes "chinese food" everynight, fails to clean up and spends an unusually long time in the bathrrom with the lights off afterward. Do it, live it and love it before you have children.
Yo, just for the record, living in San Francisco or New York--the two places I could live if I'm gonna live in this country, on which I haven't yet given up--is basically like having a child. Plus I don't have any savings. (Or actually that's not true--I have $322.03.)
Or do you mean by "job," masticated, the kind of job--salary, vacation, 401k, et cetera--I was referencing in my post? Because then that makes a little more sense....
Unless, ahem, you know of ways for screw-off writers like myself/us to get by, to earn a little bit of money here and there off of our winning, winsome talents with the word....
ps: I've been thinking of running for public office. U.S. Representative. The fuckers make, like, 130k a year!! And once you've served one term--just one term--you get a 55k pension for life!! That's all I need, even in New York that's all I need! Shit man, I'm gonna get on that. Who wants to write my campaign slogan?
Youpeople, I've been thinking a lot about this. It's sad that what we do for money in this society is allowed to define us, that when people ask you “what you do” it means “what you do for money,” and that those who don’t work in this sense are seen as less worthwhile, and those artists slogging away on their projects are still seen first as “baristas” (on a good day) or “sales associates” or whatever. On a side note, I’ve been working on an essay about this---this self-identifying as writers, the way so many view being a Writer at best a character flaw--- in conjunction with all the literary wars going on in the world (n+1 and the believer, Franzen vs. Marcus, etc.), and my thoughts on it are everywhere, so I apologize for the rambling to come.
First, the corporate world disgusts/frightens me. But I wouldn’t go as far to say that getting a job with some sort of security and nice pay is somehow selling out--not that you’re alluding to that, youpeople, but it’s often the accepted opinion. I think this: If you're a writer, you're a writer. Period. Whether you sell ad space for a newspaper or write code for google or work in some sort of nondescript office. Most people work because they have to. Yes, the corporate world is damn scary, and I see the obvious apprehension about venturing into it, but isn’t there some sort of happy medium? Or, are there so many artists in NYC and SF that all these happy medium jobs (nonprofits, etc.), are few and far between, and when you get one, you get one? I think many people would be *happy* working in a bookstore, but how in the hell do you survive in either of these aforementioned cites with 8 dollars an hour? I guess get an apt. with 12 other people you work with, right?
The most important thing to ask yourself is this: what type of job would allow you to continue writing? For me, and probably for most of us, it’s NO job, obviously, that is, besides writing, but unless I dig up an old trust fund that I’ve forgotten about, I will probably always have to work. For me, teaching, even though sometimes it kills me, is really the best option I've found, at least so far.
The trick, I guess, is finding the job that will give us the most money--because time is money after all--with the least amount of emotional drain. Whether you’re working 50 hours at a coffee shop year after year or two hapless years at some high-stress, high-stakes finance job, save a bunch of money, and then take a year off to write, work is work. The majority of Americans just want a job to pay the bills and feed themselves and their families, and whether it’s working at Walmart or a diner or selling insurance, they do it. That being said, the majority of Americans do not aspire to be artists, and I mean this in the way that art is like a second job and takes just as much time, but even among those who do, it’s not always as simple of a question of whether to take the corporate job or the anticipated artsy-friendly barista job.
But also important is to find something that doesn’t suck up all our creativity and drive; I mean, I know it’s called work and therefore isn’t always going to be a party, but some types of work are obviously better suited to certain people. Slinging drinks, I found, is exhausting; you work until at least 3, and then you stay up too late smoking and drinking, and you go home when the sun is rising, and when you wake up at noon at the earliest, smelling like smoke and french fries and whiskey, and you think you’ll write until you have to go to work at six, but by the time you feed yourself and watch three hours of the Real World, it’s like, oh well, I’ll write tomorrow. Oh, wait, that was my experience, but then again, I’ve found my most productive writing hours to be after I’ve slept and before the sun has come up, and when I’m not spending my nights with a pack of smokes, a bong, and a six pack. I’ve a friend who bartends every night and writes like a madman during the day. He doesn’t abuse substances. I, obviously, was too young then and had no discipline. Bartending, at least, tends to make more money than making coffee drinks or selling books (in a store, that is, not a completed novel that you sell to a publisher).
Before graduate school I spent 10 years (yes! 10!) in the working world. Well, the first of those was spent waiting tables, and there was a definite divide between those self-identified artists (thought I’m not sure how many of them were actually producing any art…) and those there for an income and who would perhaps be thrilled with the prospect of a fatter paycheck, a 401 K plan, and a nicer hourly wage that didn’t depend on if you smiled and flirted. You know, those people who don’t drink Pabst because it’s ironic, but because it’s cheap, unless of course, they don’t drink Pabst at all because of the mass amounts of layoffs the company performed years back… The idea of the workplace equivalent of the “noble savage” who is just happy and satisfied with his or her shitty job is a fallacy, and I’ll add an offensive one at that.
The next four years I’ve spent in research laboratories (okay, kind of academic, and not really 9 to 5, but more; I spent many midnights doing strange experiments and tending to my little cell cultures, and one of those years was as a graduate student in physiology, which obviously was not my bag, and during that time I still waited tables because research does not pay well when you don't have advanced degrees; in a way, I was waiting tables to support my "art" at the time, which happened to be molecular biology--weird), and the next five as a copyeditor. I didn't get much writing done at any of these jobs, which is partly why I decided to get an MFA. Then again, I'm much more committed to writing now than I was before, so I don't want to blame my jobs on my lack of productivity those years.
But, I've never been in the position to not work and have often been perplexed at how people do it, even before I had a mortgage, etc. Fuck, I'm still paying off college loans and I went to a mediocre Big 10 college and graduated in 94.
But it is also how much you're willing to do or not do to live the boho lifestyle. I'm much too much of a private person to want to stay on someone's couch, and I've always needed my own space. Perhaps that sounds rigid, though, as I think a true “artist,” whatever that means, might purport that she will do anything to continue to make her art and put it as the first priority. I wish sometimes I were that way, but I’m not.
I’ve been working since I was about 15; yes, I have a small house now, a Kitchen Maid Mixer, an equipped kitchen for yuppy meals, though with the ugly 70s countertops it came with and with hand-me-down and garage-sale furniture, and it took ten years of working to come up with the money to buy it--could these years have better spent writing and not working and living off very little? I don't know. I already was living off very little, but I came out of college with tons of debt already and so I immediately had to work. Then again, I worked all through college, too.
I do, sometimes, feel I’m working for stuff. Now that I have all this stuff, I’ve got to pay for it, so each year I seem to dig myself deeper into debt. Sometimes I fantasize about getting rid of it all and living, with my hubby, a very spartan lifestyle on a small Greek island.
What I'm saying is this: Can you, youpeople, get by financially without this corporatelike jobby job? Or, is it simply more of a pride thing, that working at Google might sound a little “better” or “respectable” than working at Starbucks? Do you have enough saved or enough resources to not, or are you finding it horribly difficult even to eat? I need to eat to make art. And, I need to have beer in my fridge and chocolate, too, why not. And I feel like I’m about to choke if I don’t know where my next montly paycheck is coming from. Yes, it might be the easier way out--though easier would be not working at all, but so it goes-- If you can live an ascetic lifestyle and survive off hot tea and the kindness of your friends (perhaps who have 401 K plans), go for it. Particularly if you can finish your novel and perhaps even live off the advance for a short while, while you start your next project. But can’t you have health insurance and some sort of security without becoming a crazy, drone-like, uber-consumer, not letting what you own and what you make define you and still finding plenty of time and energy for art, and fulfillment, and for sanity?
This is all I have to say for now. I’m sorry it’s so much, and so all over the place.
here's what: if there's one thing I know for sure after changing jobs every year for the past six years, it's that even though I always think the next job is going to be so much better, give me so much more time to write, be more fulfilling in whatever way, it's never really the case. the best thing about this whole conversation is that we are all agonizing about the choices we can make. which is great--we have so many choices! masticated brings up the very good point that after children appear on the scene, those choices become somewhat less, although not as less as many people seem to think, I would argue. I plan on being a "cool" mom.
here's the other thing: even though we have so many choices, I thnk the reason no one is really satisfied with them is that going to work in America really sucks. no, I'm not going to turn this into a pro-union rant, but I really think that the American work ethic (if you're not doing something all the time you're lazy, and just sitting around thinking doesn't count as "doing something") and the American workplace are very unfriendly environments. imagine a world where we could work for three years in any kind of job and then take a sabbatical the way professors do. or a job where you participate in forming your work experience, where you actually have a say in how the work gets done. the best jobs have this characteristic, and I think don't think it's out of the realm of possibility for many more...teaching is sometimes a close fit, but as I can attest from recent experience, lecturers are shit on a lot here, & as ray-ray can attest, academica is an employment wasteland in the long-term.
basically I think so many job alternatives are really unsatisfying regardless of money or time because they lack diginity, and what we are all striving for in our writing (some way to interpret the world) does have that quality. this (middle class) division between work and the subservience of life outside of work seems to me a particularly American one. if we had jobs that were doing something we cared about in a way we could shape, wouldn't that be ideal--and then we could come home and write about the other parts of our lives that are still unsatisfying, like why there's isn't an automatic chocolate delivery to my house every day after school.
shit. I have to go teach.
It seems that I should give a shout-out to David Brooks, the least Jewish person on Earth, because he coined the term that describes perfectly, ignominiously, what I want to be: Bobo.
Yes everyone, that's right, I want to be a Bobo because I want to eat my cake and have it, I want to eat good sushi often and still do little else other than indulge my imagination in the day's cafe of my choosing. Which makes me my bohemianness utterly, shamelessly bourgeois. Oh well.
And as for what ray-ray's report of his friends who woke up one day and realized that their lives "never really got started, and yet somehow managed to occur and unfold and accrue value regardless"--yes. Exactly.
I think it would be a greater pain, for me, to come to that backward-looking point in my life and see that I had not tried to write. Sure, the pain of realizing I have no money is a daily experience, hourly even, but that regret, I think, would be a monster. And I've had enough regret already in my life.
ps: can someone shut up virginia?
Who's Virginia?
Rushdie worked in advertising, too, for the record.
I'm not sure that teaching is the best option for me, though many here seem to think it is. It probably depends on your personality; I think that teaching sucks a lot more out of me, emotionally and mentally, than it sucks out of other teachers. I don't really like jobs that require extended periods of interaction with other people -- note, I didn't say I don't like extended periods of interaction with other people, but *jobs* that require them. I don't like being paid to interact with other people. So the ideal money-making compromise for me would be one that allows me to be alone in my head, or mostly alone in my head, from 9 to 5. Of the jobs I've had, the ones that came closest to fulfilling this requirement were a library job (data entry in the Special Collections/Rare Books room) and editorial jobs (proofreading papers from plant pathology conferences -- no, really). If I needed to support myself without savings and such jobs weren't going to cut it, I'd take a job that required only the most superficial level of interaction with other people, meaning interaction out of which neither party is supposed to get anything more lasting or life-changing than a cup of coffee, or a new pair or shoes, or a copy of the latest vampire seabiscuit chicklit mystery.
P.S. I don't think this will really be news to you, youpeople, but most bohemians' bohemianness *is* utterly, shamelessly bourgeois, secretly or otherwise. Underneath our unwashed thrift-store clothing, don't we all want to eat good sushi (or chocolate or white truffles), see the world, and sleep on satin sheets? And it's not just bohemian-artist veneers that tend to be thin: when I was travelling budget-style in India because my bleeding liberal heart supposedly didn't believe I should have access to fully flushing, bowl-shaped toilets while other people took their dumps in the streets, I secretly (or not-so-secretly, depending on my mood) wanted to be staying at the Taj, ordering room service on silver trays, calling the waiter "Boy" (okay, maybe not that bit, or maybe not *as much*), and being sleekly shuttled past the slums in an air-conditioned hotel vehicle with tinted windows. We're all tangled messes of contradictions.
You know, cheese with a spoon, Lewis Lapham calls all his interns "boy."
Just thought you'd like to know.
Post a Comment