Fire-water Glissando
A list of recent observations having to do with professionalism and social grace.
Tuesday, 2008-12-02 | Lists
| "Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him." |
I've learned a few things in the week since my last full-length post. Allow me to share:
- The reason that certain people, e.g. William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens, were able to be taken seriously as writers while holding down full-time jobs was that they were professionals in a time when professionals had secretaries. These secretaries allowed them to do the research they needed to do and kept their records and notes in good order. This is, as anyone will tell you, the most important part of writing. What prevents many contemporary professionals from being successful writers is the fact that meat-secretaries have been replaced with productivity software and the current generation of professionals considers productivity software either a.) too difficult to learn or b.) somehow antithetical to the idea of being a writer.
- One of my favorite things to do is turn partially-remembered bits and pieces of famous literature into anecdotes and retell them as though I were somehow involved. "This one time, Nietzsche was like, 'writing a good novel simply requires writing a page's worth of words a day; almost anyone can do that' Man--what a crazy fucker". One of my favorite subjects for this is mythology, "OK, so then Zeus wakes up and, through a monster hangover, realizes that he's a.) alone on Mt. Ida and b.) that Juno is probably on Earth, making a shambles of the plan. It is at this point that he freaks directly the fuck out and I'm like, 'sidling quietly away...'." I do this because it's a charming way to bullshit my way through material that I cannot fully recall. Additionally, I do this so that if I do end up being called on my bullshit, I've got the fact that I was obviously not aiming for 100% factual accuracy.
- If you walk into a hostile co-worker's office with a big smile on your face and just keep smiling at them, they will eventually smile back. This has yet to fail me: I have smiled thousands of screw-faced stress cases into submission in my short time as a professional. You've heard of letting a smile be your umbrella? Well, a smile can also be a maul.
- There is such a thing called "keyman insurance". This insurance allows stakeholders in a given group or company to collect money from an insurer if something should happen to a certain member of that group or company. If, for example, you're a venture capitalist and you're invested heavily in a start-up company whose destiny is very clearly in the hands of a single man who was just killed while attempting to digest an incorrectly prepared fugu liver, this is the sort of insurance you'll wish that you had purchased months ago. The best thing about such insurance is that it allows investors--a notoriously nervous crowd--to put a monthly value on their own paranoia.