experience
That’s not my chair. Not my chair not my problem.
Life presents all too many situations in which we’re forced to place our trust in people we’ve no particular reason to trust. The classic example is driving: you can buy the safest car available, and take all the advanced driving tests you like, but hitting the road is still ultimately a matter of entrusting your fate to hundreds of strangers – people who, by definition, you’d never leave your kids with, and who might, for all you know, be drunk, high, overtired, hallucinating, prone to uncontrollable violent outbursts, convinced they’re immortal deities from alien planets, or just massively stupid.
Except for giving up driving, there’s not much you can do about this. But it was only a few months back, heeding the urgings of several writers on productivity, that I came to realise that a somewhat analogous, if mercifully less lethal, situation pertained in many areas of my life – because I wasn’t keeping a “waiting-for list”.
The argument runs as follows: multiple times a day, at work or outside it, most of us make requests of people – underlings, superiors, friends, service providers – and simply assume they’ll follow through. (…)
Based on an unscientific survey of my acquaintances, what proportion of people have a systematic way to keep track of who they’re waiting to hear back from? Zero per cent, approximately.
It turns out that keeping a “waiting-for” list is like being handed a pair of x-ray spectacles for peering inside your colleagues’ lives. Based on what does or doesn’t get crossed off the list, as people do or don’t get back to me, I’m pretty sure I now know who’s on top of things, and who’s inefficient or just lazy, their email inboxes backed up like clogged drains.
Yellow and burnt by the sun
You never really cared that much before. But suddenly (it was so sudden) you found yourself wondering… Deep, deep breath… Why you’re not married.
Well, I know why. (…) The problem is not men, it’s you. Sure, there are lame men out there, but they’re not really standing in your way. Because the fact is — if whatever you’re doing right now was going to get you married, you’d already have a ring on it. So without further ado, let’s look at the top six reasons why you’re not married.
1. You’re a Bitch.
Here’s what I mean by bitch. I mean you’re angry. You probably don’t think you’re angry. You think you’re super smart, or if you’ve been to a lot of therapy, that you’re setting boundaries. But the truth is you’re pissed. (…)2. You’re Shallow. (…)
3. You’re a Slut. (…)
4. You’re a Liar. (…)
5. You’re Selfish. (…)
6. You’re Not Good Enough.
photo { Lina Scheynius }
Freedom lies in the recognition of necessity
A difference between an addict and a recovering addict is that one hides his behavior, while the other can’t stop talking about it. Self-revelation is an important part of recovery, but it can lead to awkward moments when you meet a person who identifies as a sex addict.
For instance, within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 years, he told me about the time in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at the Los Angeles airport so he could purchase a service from a prostitute. Afterward, he noticed what he thought was red lipstick on himself. It turned out to be blood from the woman’s mouth. He washed in a gas-station bathroom, met his girlfriend at the airport and then, in the grip of his insatiability, had unprotected sex with her as soon as they got home — in the same bed he said he had used to entertain three other women in the days before.
illustration { Richard Wilkinson }
Not every movie has to be a massive epic
In September 2010, Wright, his editor, the New Yorker fact-checking team and the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick, met for eight hours with the spokesman for the Church of Scientology, Tommy Davis, along with Davis’ wife and four lawyers representing the church, to discuss the facts in the piece.
{ NPR | Continue reading | Why screenwriter and director Paul Haggis resigned from the Church of Scientology after spending nearly 35 years with it | The New Yorker | full story }
photo { David Stewart }
‘I used to be different, now I’m the same.’ —Werner Erhard
I’ve published several books, won adoring reviews, and even sold a few copies. But I’ve made almost no money and had my heart broken. Here’s everything you don’t want to know about how publishing really works.
Being the author of several critically acclaimed, moderately successful books has given me an extraordinary, exciting, occasionally lucrative, quite public life. It has also broken my heart.
Nothing makes me happier than writing. And, thanks to the rules that govern publishing today, nothing I’ve ever done for a living — housecleaning, data entry, creating campaigns for big-name, cutthroat ad agencies, full-time motherhood — has been as hard on me as being a writer.
Being an author is the culmination of a lifelong dream. And — because the sales of each book I write determine my ability to remain one — being an author has ruined many of my greatest lifelong pleasures. (…)
Believe me, I know I’m lucky to be published at all. I’ve read enough talented unpublished writers to realize just how arbitrary that privilege is. I’m more fortunate still to have had publishers who made significant investments in my books, editors who have gone to the mat for me, an agent I admire and trust. For more than a decade I’ve earned a reasonable living as a writer, raised a child as a writer, had a mostly great time being one. (…)
In the 10 years since I signed my first book contract, the publishing industry has changed in ways that are devastating — emotionally, financially, professionally, spiritually, and creatively — to midlist authors like me. You’ve read about it in your morning paper: Once-genteel “houses” gobbled up by slavering conglomerates; independent bookstores cannibalized by chain and online retailers; book sales sinking as the number of TV channels soars. What once was about literature is now about return on investment. What once was hand-sold one by one by well-read, book-loving booksellers now moves by the pallet-load at Wal-Mart and Borders — or doesn’t move at all. (…)
Book 1: Contract signed 1994. Book published 1996. Advance: $150,000.
(…)
Sales: I don’t ask. No one seems to care. Final tally: Hardcover/paperback sales combined are 10,000 copies.
Current status: Out of print. Small but loyal cult following; 10 years later adoring fans still show up at readings, clutching well-worn copies, eager to tell me how book changed their lives.
The Desperate Years: 1996-98
(…)
Agent submits new manuscript to Editor Who Still Loves Me (despite disappointing sales of first book). EWSLM, enthused, takes manuscript to pub board. Sales director rejects new book, citing losses incurred by first one. EWSLM acknowledges to agent: It’s not the book being rejected; it’s the author. (…)
Agent offers EWSLM unprecedented deal: If publisher will buy new book, we’ll forgo advance to help defray losses from first one. EWSLM gently advises agent to “pursue other avenues.” Agent gently advises me to “pursue other genres.” (…)
Question to potential new agent: “Do you think changing agents will help my career?”
New agent’s answer (in so many words): “It sure can’t hurt.”
Book 3: Contract signed 1998. Book published 2001. Advance: $10,000
Book takes two years, intensive research, mostly joy to write.
Book rejected by 10 publishers; lone editor making offer promises to “make up for the modest advance with great publicity on the back end.” Desperate to “get back in the game,” I accept advance that’s less than 10 percent of first one from editor who never returns my calls, continues to misspell my name.
Book 4: Contract signed 2002. Book published 2004. Advance: $80,000
Book takes two years, hellish research, difficult and delightful to write. (…)
Book 5
New book proposal written overnight, submitted to editor of Book 4. Editor loves idea, pitches to pub board. Pub board loves idea, agrees to make offer. Editor/agent have celebratory lunch. (…)
Three weeks after celebratory lunch, normally overly optimistic agent calls, sounding near tears. “It’s bad, Jane. They’re not going to make an offer.”
You see me shinin, lit up with diamonds as I stay grindin. Uh-huh.
I have only met Arianna Huffington once. I remember it vividly but my guess is she doesn’t remember it much at all, which says volumes about both of us. The scene was surreal. Huffington and I were in Larry Flynt’s office in Los Angeles, participating in an experimental online talk show Larry was trying to distribute over the Internet. Our topic for the moment was gun control: I was conflicted while Huffington was violently opposed to guns, citing their danger to children, which she thought should over-rule any constitutional argument. I made a point and she replied with the motherhood card, “Well you obviously have never had children.” Point and match for Huffington. Game over.
But I had children. Back then I was the father of two sons, one of whom had died in my arms only a few months before. That memory was still too vivid for me to even respond to Huffington, who took my silence as capitulation, and maybe it was. She easily threw her kids into the battle while I couldn’t do the same with mine.
Maybe she sensed my weakness.
That was long before the Huffington Post was even thought of, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I read this week that AOL was buying the blog for $315 million. What AOL is buying, primarily, is Arianna Huffington in her role as media baron (baroness?) in the Fleet Street tradition, and it is a perfect fit. Huffington is at heart a female Rupert Murdoch, she just came to it too late in life. Like Murdoch she is all about taking a position and relentlessly pushing it to attract like-minded readers and advertisers. The story is everything. Well that and the money.
Did I mention that, inspired by Huffington, this blog, too, is for sale? By her metrics it’s worth $20 million, but I’d take a tenth of that.
related { Barry Ritholtz | AOL-Huffington Post: Why the Heavy Breathing? }
And you won’t urbjunk to me parafume, oiled of kolooney
All teenage girls are at least half-lesbian, always admiring their friends’ still-shifting bodies, their superior wardrobes, their make-up application expertise, their better luck with the opposite sex. Teenage girls curl up together like newborn puppies, painting one another’s toes as if they were licking one another’s ears. If you sit long enough in any Starbucks, or loiter outside any high school, you will see girls climbing onto one another’s laps, kissing on the lips. They aren’t hitting on each other, not precisely, though they are in a constant state of arousal that borders on the insane. No other love is like the love of a teenage girl, all passion and fire and endless devotion—at least for a week.
There are many painful, moving stories about female friendship out there, but even the most beautiful stories about teenage girls fail to capture the obsessive, all-encompassing infatuations I remember. That is, all except one: My So-Called Life. It began on the air in August 1994, the summer before my freshman year of high school, and it was as if someone had placed a mirror inside my bedroom and broadcast it on television.
related { An after-school conversation with girls about sex and the Internet. }
For my fate gives me time
Interview with Curt Cobain, January 27, 1994 issue of Rolling Stone
Along with everything else that went wrong onstage tonight, you left without playing “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Why?
That would have been the icing on the cake. That would have made everything twice as worse. I don’t even remember the guitar solo on “Teen Spirit.” It would take me five minutes to sit in the catering room and learn the solo. (…)
Have you ever been that consumed with distress or pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself?
For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close many times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water. And then I had to play a show in 20 minutes. I would sing and cough up blood. This is no way to live a life. I love to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself.
photo { Tierney Gearon }
‘Life is a business that does not cover the costs.’ –Schopenauher
It has been a year since I drove a cab, but the old garage still looks the same. (…)
Shape-up time at Dover Taxi Garage #2 still happens every afternoon, rain or shine, winter or summer, from two to six. That’s when the night-line drivers stumble into the red-brick garage on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village and wait for the day liners, old-timers with backsides contoured to the crease in the seat of a Checker cab, to bring in the taxis. The day guys are supposed to have the cabs in by four, but if the streets are hopping they cheat a little bit, maybe by two hours. That gives the night liners plenty of time to stand around in the puddles on the floor, inhale the carbon monoxide, and listen to the cab stories.
Cab stories are tales of survived disasters. They are the major source of conversation during shape-up. (…)
A year ago or so, any woman hanging out at shape-up was either waiting to report a driver for stealing her pocketbook, a Dover stiff’s girl friend, or some sort of crazy cabdriver groupie. In those days, the two or three women who were driving were banned from the night line, which is notably unfair because you can make a lot more money with a lot less traffic driving at night. Claire, a long-time Dover driver, challenged the rule and won; now fifteen women drive for Dover, most on the night line. (…)
It doesn’t take a cabdriver too long to realize that once you leave the joy of shape-up and start uptown on Hudson Street, you’re fair game. You’re at the mercy of the Fear Variables, which are (not necessarily in order): the traffic, which will be in your way; the other cabdrivers, who want to take your business; the police, who want to give you tickets; the people in your cab, lunatics who will peck you with nudges and dent you with knives; and your car, which is capable of killing you at any time. Throw in your bosses and the back inspectors and you begin to realize that a good night is not when you make a living wage. That’s a great night. A good night is when you survive to tell your stories at tomorrow’s shape-up. But all the Fear Variables are garbage compared with the Big Fear. The Big Fear is that times will get so hard that you’ll have to drive five or six nights a week instead of three.
Of the many thousands of events canceled by the snow, it might have been convenient if Friday’s scheduled rollout of the great New York share-a-taxicab-with-a-stranger experiment of 2010 were not among them.
Alas.
Communal rides in the city’s yellow cab fleet will now start Wednesday, the Taxi and Limousine Commission said.
The share-a-cab program will allow up to four passengers to ride carpool-style along three preset routes in Manhattan, at a flat fare of $3 or $4 a head. Drop-offs will be allowed along Park Avenue down to Grand Central Terminal. For now, shared rides will only be allowed between 6 and 10 a.m. on weekdays.
photo { David Stewart }
What’s Hecuba to her, or she to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?
{ My primary interest in visiting your Web site is to examine every page on the site before I finally find your hours of operation and phone number in illegible type in a graphical footer. | neversaidaboutrestaurantwebsites.tumblr.com | more }
‘There’s good fascism and bad fascism. We’re the good one.’ –Gilbert & Georges
Last March, the small Parisian gallery 12 Mail devoted itself to a retrospective of one of my favorite publications: Didier Lestrade’s pioneering gay zine Magazine. The walls were collaged with the incredibly influential homoerotic photography and drawings featured in Magazine throughout the course of its seven-year run from 1980 through 1987, as well as framed portraits of legendary interview subjects such as Sylvester, Jimmy Somerville, Divine, Edmund White, Erté, and Tom of Finland. With the younger generation’s interest reignited, Didier has now begun uploading the entire Magazine archive to his website, as a gift to both the fans and the Tumblr crowd, who he hopes will go crazy grabbing pictures and articles for their own sites. After many years working as an outspoken AIDS activist, founding and leading the first French chapter of ACT UP, and co-founding Têtu, Lestrade moved to the French countryside, where he’s busy writing for minorites.org and working on his next book. We spoke by phone last week.
photo { Magazine, Number 3/4, page 85 | more: The entire collection of Magazine, 1980-1987 }
And it must follow, as the night the day
The thing makes a full circle with 20 years inside of it. Amazing, isn’t it? And what wonderful years and sad ending ones. I am back in the little house. It hasn’t changed and I wonder how much I have. For two days I have been cutting the lower limbs off the pine trees to let some light into the garden so that I can raise some flowers. Lots of red geraniums and fuchsias. The fireplace still burns. I will be painting the house for a long time I guess. And all of it seems good.
There are moments of panic but those are natural I suppose. And then sometimes it seems to me that nothing whatever has happened. As though it was the time even before Carol. Tonight the damp fog is down and you can feel it on your face. I can hear the bell buoy off the point. The only proof of course will be whether I can work — whether there is any life in me.
{ John Steinbeck, letters | This Recording | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
photo { Tony Stamolis }
The lady doth protest too much, methinks
Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 was a tent appliquéd with 102 names of the people she had slept with up to the time of its creation in 1995. The title is often misinterpreted, it is to be taken as a literal statement: “Some I’d had a shag with in bed or against a wall some I had just slept with, like my grandma.” The names include family, friends, drinking partners, lovers and even two numbered foetuses.
In 2004, the tent was destroyed in a fire at the East London Momart warehouse, along with two of Emin’s other works and some 100 more from Saatchi’s collection, including works by Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Martin Maloney.
‘Certain flaws are necessary for the whole.’ –Goethe
Many procrastinators do not realize that they are perfectionists, for the simple reason that they have never done anything perfectly, or even nearly so. They have never been told that something they did was perfect. (…)
Perfectionism is a matter of fantasy, not reality. Here’s how it works in my case. I am assigned some task, say, refereeing a manuscript for a publisher. I accept the task. (…) Immediately my fantasy life kicks in. I imagine myself writing the most wonderful referees report. (…)
This is perfectionism in the relevant sense. It’s not a matter of really ever doing anything that is perfect or even comes close. It is a matter of using tasks you accept to feed your fantasy of doing things perfectly, or at any rate extremely well. (…)
Well, seven or eight hours later I am done setting up the proxy server. (…)
Then what happens? I go on to other things. Most likely, the manuscript slowly disappears under subsequent memos, mail, half-eaten sandwiches, piles of files, and other things. (See the essay on “Horizontal Organization”.) I put it on my to do list, but I never look at my to do list. Then, in about six weeks, I get an email from the publisher, asking when she can expect the referee report. Maybe, if she has dealt with me before, this email arrives a bit before I promised the report. Maybe if she hasn’t, it arrives a few days after the deadline.
At this point, finally, I snap into action. My fantasy structure changes. I no longer fantasize writing the world’s best referee job ever. (…) At this point, I dig through the files, sandwiches, unopened correspondence, and, after a bit of panic (…) I find it. I take a couple of hours, read it, write a perfectly adequate report, and send it off.
I understand about the food, Baby Bubba
Gamers, as video-game players are known, thrill to “the pull,” that mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them, and keep playing them.
Miyamoto’s games are widely considered to be among the greatest. He has been called the father of modern video games. The best known, and most influential, is Super Mario Bros., which débuted a quarter of a century ago and, depending on your point of view, created an industry or resuscitated a comatose one. It spawned dozens of sequels and spinoffs. Miyamoto has designed or overseen the development of many other blockbusters, among them the Legend of Zelda series, Star Fox, and Pikmin. Their success, in both commercial and cultural terms, suggests that he has a peerless feel for the pull, that he is a master of play—of its components and poetics—in the way that Walt Disney, to whom he is often compared, was of sentiment and wonder. (…)
What he hasn’t created is a company in his own name, or a vast fortune to go along with it. He is a salaryman. Miyamoto’s business card says that he is the senior managing director and the general manager of the entertainment-analysis and -development division at Nintendo Company Ltd., the video-game giant. What it does not say is that he is Nintendo’s guiding spirit, its meal ticket, and its playful public face. Miyamoto has said that his main job at Nintendo is ningen kougaku—human engineering. He has been at the company since 1977 and has worked for no other.
A posse ad esse
William James Sidis (1898-19444) showed astonishing intellectual qualities from an exceptionally early age. By the age of one he had learned to spell in English. He taught himself to type in French and German at four and by the age of six had added Russian, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian to his repertoire. At five he devised a system which could enable him to name the day of the week on which any date in history fell. Hot-housed by his pushy father, Sidis entered Harvard at eleven, and was soon lecturing on 4 dimensional bodies to the University’s Maths Society.
At twelve he suffered his first nervous breakdown, but recovered at his father’s sanatorium, and after returning to Harvard, graduated with first class honours in 1914, aged just sixteen. Law School followed and by the age of twenty Sidis had become a professor of maths at Texas Rice Institute. (…)
Sidis was just 27 when he predicted the existence of what we now know as ‘black holes.’
{ Bookride | Continue reading }
In his adult years, it was estimated that he could speak more than forty languages, and learn a new language in a day. (…)
Sidis created a constructed language called Vendergood in his second book, entitled Book of Vendergood, which he wrote at the age of eight. The language was mostly based on Latin and Greek, but also drew on German and French and other Romance languages. (…)
Sidis was also a “peridromophile,” a term he coined for people fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems.
{ Wikipedia }
photo { Aaron Feaver }
And yet I fight this battle all alone
I scammed department stores and gyms and book chains. You’d be surprised how easy it was to lie — and get away. (…)
In those days, J.C. Penney had the loosest return policy. No receipt? No tags? No problem. They gave the item a once-over and found something comparable in quality to gauge the price. Most stores issued a gift card to a customer without any real evidence of purchase; J.C. Penney always gave cash. (…)
I must have pocketed $150 to $200 in books every month for the better part of a year. My biggest single score came when I discovered a dollar store that sold remainders. I bought a hardcover about Richard Nixon with a list price of $35, walked it to the bookstore and left with a gift card for the full amount. Then I went back to the dollar store and bought all eight remaining copies, returning them sporadically over the next year.
Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction
You think it would be really fun to have sex with me. Because, I think you can tell from my posts, I’ll do anything. But maybe you can also tell from my posts that it’s a little bit weird. Because you know that I’ll say anything, too.
Asperger Syndrome compromises one’s ability to read nonverbal social cues. A simple example of this deficit is answering the question, “How are you?” It is loaded with so many nonverbal issues that I simply freeze. Even if you tell me, “Just say fine,” sometimes the situation looks special to me, and I can’t figure out why it’s special, so I can’t talk.
So I’ve spent my life teaching myself the rules for what to do in each social situation. I study people, make notes for myself, and then test the notes to see what other situations my notes apply to. (…)
When I think about my sexual history, I think it is me basically not understanding that there are rules.
In college, where most people are experimenting with the rules of sex, I was missing them. Maybe because I was raised by my grandma, I honestly believed that if you had sex, it meant you were getting married. So I lost my virginity to a guy who said he’d marry me.
And on that day, I had no idea how sex worked. I don’t know why I had not bothered to find out.
He was propped up on his arms when he couldn’t find my vagina with his penis, so he said, “Put me inside.”
I said, “What?”
“Inside you. Use your hand.”
“I don’t know where the hole is.”
“What? Are you kidding me?”
“There are a lot of holes down there. I don’t know which one is for sex.”
“You are so stupid.”
He eventually put his penis in. He said, “Am I in?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
Then he came. And I returned to doing homework. (…)
So then I get married. The first time. We both have Asperger’s. We both like reading about sex, but having it is more traumatic. He would not go down on me, so I started writing obsessively about his not going down on me. (…)
We had sex two times in six years after we had a kid. And I got pregnant both times because I have studied my ovulation since I was 24, and I’m an ace at sticking my finger up my vagina and 1) gauging how open my cervix is and 2) pulling out some mucus on my finger and checking to see how elastic it is.
Even now I can’t help getting excited about ovulation. Go to the bathroom right now and check your cervical mucus. It’s fascinating. If it’s elastic you are ovulating. I can peg my ovulation to the hour if I check every half-hour, which I can do because I can stick my hand in my vagina anywhere—even in a job interview, if the person leaves the room to get some water. So that’s why I was able to have a kid (and a miscarriage) only having sex two times. (…)
And now, here I am with the farmer.
At this point, sex should be low pressure for me. I am one of the one percent of women who can have an orgasm just by thinking about having an orgasm. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe because my mom taught me to do Kegel exercises before I even got my first period. I can orgasm ten times before the guy has one.
photo { Christophe Kutner }
‘Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.’ –Donald Trump
What do you need to succeed in business? A mixture of luck and good judgement, according to Mikhail Fridman, one of Russia’s richest men and currently head of the Alfa Group. Gorbachev’s 1980s reforms made private enterprise possible – Fridman and others like him did the rest, as can be seen from this transcript of his lecture at the Publishers’ Forum in Lvov.
I think that to become a major, very successful entrepreneur, you really need to be in the right place at the right time – a lot of things have to coincide. It would probably be difficult to become an entrepreneur in a small or a very poor country. The world is changing and becoming globalized, and the list of the richest people naturally includes Chinese, Indians, Americans and Russians – Russia is after all an enormous country with enormous resources. But the richest person in the world is the Mexican Carlos Slim, who is certainly not from the largest and richest country in the world. Nevertheless, from his beginnings in a small town he created an enormous business empire, which works practically all over the Latin American continent and successfully competes with representatives of other economies of the world, which are much larger and stronger. So I think that everyone present here who decides to devote his life to entrepreneurship has a chance of achieving virtually unlimited success.
But the most important thing is not how to become a major entrepreneur or head of enormous business projects, but how to become an entrepreneur in general. For this I believe it’s not so much the circumstances that are important, as a completely different quality – entrepreneurial talent.
photo { Zackary Canepari }
