a bunch of poets from the 'beat generation' also lived of odd jobs
Poets' Odd Jobs
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: Poets' Odd Jobs
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philip Glass supported himself as a plumber >“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,’ h…
I heard a story once about Glass driving someone in a taxi and the passenger saw his license and said what an interesting coincidence, he was on his way to see a concert of music by a man named Philip Glass. I don’t remember if Glass revealed his identity or not.
I think I found the source for that. Doesn't say whether Glass revealed his identity, though.
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'."
Re: Poets' Odd Jobs
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard a story once about Glass driving someone in a taxi and the passenger saw his license and said what an interesting coincidence, he was on his way to see a concert of music by a man named Philip Glass. I don’t remember if Glass revealed his identity or not.
I think I found the source for that. Doesn't say whether Glass revealed his identity, though. 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 Wi…
That’s the story. Well done.
Re: Poets' Odd Jobs
#34We poets walk amongst you on HN also. Our poems aren’t very good, but then our code isn’t either ;)
do you also do line breaks in your code like you would in a poem? the linter doesn't understand. i broke the line like that for a reason, mainly because it makes it more readable. have never worked with a programmer who understood that.
Re: Poets' Odd Jobs
#35I'm actually more curious what current poets do.
I build and deploy business process automations to AWS using Python.
I love this response. The beauty of claiming one’s art with a confident but plain “I” and then following with a clear and concise answer.
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.
Re: Poets' Odd Jobs
#36We poets walk amongst you on HN also. Our poems aren’t very good, but then our code isn’t either ;)
do you also do line breaks in your code like you would in a poem? the linter doesn't understand. i broke the line like that for a reason, mainly because it makes it more readable. have never worked with a programmer who understood that.
In chat programs today and all the way back to my early IRC years, I've been putting a space between a ? or ! and the preceding word, if the word is at the end of the line/paragraph.
Coffee? Yes, please !
It's probably just a neurodivergent quirk, but it's always felt far more readable and just... right.
Re: Poets' Odd Jobs
#37This reminds me of a book I recently enjoyed: Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self Help Book by novelist Walker Percy. One of his best questions was on "the problem of re-entry", i.e. how does one go from plumbing the very depths of existence/meaning back to the mundane of standing in line to buy groceries. How does one "re-enter" "normal life"? The book doesn't so much as answer the question as make the reader ponder i…
> 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 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".
Re: Poets' Odd Jobs
#38A modern example is Dana Gioia, who switched from poetry grad school to business school, did that for ~15 years, and eventually went back to full-time writing, chaired the NEA, and is I think the current poet laureate ot California. Here's a bit from an interview, about his time working at Jell-O, that weaves this together [1]:
> 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.
Re: Poets' Odd Jobs
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I build and deploy business process automations to AWS using Python.
I love this response. The beauty of claiming one’s art with a confident but plain “I” and then following with a clear and concise answer. 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…
I find myself grateful I can support my family financially, as it's statistically unlikely my art can ever permit me to quit my day job.
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.
Re: Poets' Odd Jobs
#40This reminds me of a book I recently enjoyed: Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self Help Book by novelist Walker Percy. One of his best questions was on "the problem of re-entry", i.e. how does one go from plumbing the very depths of existence/meaning back to the mundane of standing in line to buy groceries. How does one "re-enter" "normal life"? The book doesn't so much as answer the question as make the reader ponder i…
> 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…
I always found software to be extremely concrete activity. All that stuff going on in your head still needs to be typed or nothing changes. A failing memory model on your development machine is a really unpleasant wake up call that all this stuff is operating in the real world.
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.