For Creative People Who Have to Keep the Bills Paid
This is Part 2 of my interview with poet, artist, and part-time cookiemaker Paul Hanson Clark, so you can check out Part 1 here.
But I Also Have a Day Job: So to make your life work and still do your art, you have to go to your web editing job during the day and make the doughs in the afternoon. Continue reading
I have zero interest in football, but I enjoyed Bissinger’s book because it’s mostly about the all-encompassing influence that football holds over midwestern culture. Bissinger spent a year in the west Texas town of Odessa following its high school football team to the state championship, and shows how completely football trumps academics and leads the town to build a $5.6 million stadium for its high school. He also discusses how racial tensions and Reagan-era politics affected the region—history seen from ground level.
There’s a lot of football play-by-plays too, but I kind of skimmed over those.
Bought online a few weeks ago, part of the research process for my new novel.
Bissinger reflects on Friday Night Lights 25 years later (Sports Illustrated)
Interview with Bissinger on the book’s 25th anniversary (NPR)
Paul Hanson Clark is a poet, visual artist, and occasional musician heavily involved in the local poetry and art scenes in Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska. Until recently he worked two jobs: mornings in an office doing web design and afternoons mixing dough for a cookie shop (more about this in Part 2!), though he went on to leave the cookie shop job several weeks after our interview.
We sat on the floor of his living room—a large, carpeted room with no furniture and walls hung with his drawings and paintings—to talk about structuring your time and keeping organized. Continue reading
DePietro’s collection covers forty years of interviews with British novelist and man of letters Kingsley Amis, who has a lot to say on the writing process, British politics, and the working-class hero in post-WWII fiction as he moves from card-carrying Communist party member to hardcore Thatcher supporter over the course of forty years. The collection also serves as a useful, expedited autobiography of Amis’s life (with his philandering only alluded to), but can be repetitive since Amis retells the same anecdotes over and over—how many times can we hear him deny being one of the Angry Young Men?
Bought online a few weeks ago as part of research for the new novel.
1975 Interview with Amis for the Paris Review
Or, check out Amis’s first and most famous novel Lucky Jim instead
A couple years ago, I had a Day Job where sometimes I had to go to parties with my coworkers and other people involved with where I worked. These parties were usually pretty awkward because I was the youngest one there and didn’t have much in common with the people around me.
At one of them, though, I met a guy a few years older than me who was pretty interesting, and I told him that I’d lived in Japan and was working on a novel about the lives of foreigners there. Continue reading
I found Mrs. Dalloway more accessible than other Virginia Woolf novels I’ve read, possibly because it’s also shorter. The stream-of-consciousness novel shows a day in the life of a fiftysomething socialite reflecting on the mundanity of her married life, the passionate love of her youth, and her deeply hidden feelings for a female friend. My favorite scenes, though, were the surreal and hard-hitting takes on WWI shell shock in the hallucinatory ramblings of ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith.
There’s a lot to like here, but it’s still high modernism and can get…dense.
From a grad school friend who had two copies, Summer 2015.
Virginia Woolf on Wikipedia
Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer (essay)
I used to commute. A lot.
Back when I started my first office job, I was driving 23 miles to work and back, which took 35 minutes AND since I used a busy commuter route I had to get to work 20 minutes early or waste even more time sitting in traffic. I listened to a lot of music during that time, though, to the point where I still to this day associate certain parts of M83’s Hurry Up We’re Dreaming album with that drive. Continue reading
Dick pics. Waiting exactly two hours before responding to a flirty text. Swiping through Tinder while at an actual bar because the people there aren’t quite good enough. Aziz Ansari reveals string after string of sharp, relatable truths about 21st century phone-based dating and how today’s young adults struggle through a new period of emerging adulthood in their quests for the perfect soulmate. The book smartly blends sociological research, jokes about rappers, insights into the dating scenes in Japan and Buenos Aires, and actual, useful advice for navigating the ever-changing world of modern romance. Well played, Aziz.
Bought online this September after telling myself for months that I was finally going to read the damned thing.
Aziz Ansari essay, Everything You Thought You Knew About L-O-V-E is Wrong
Budgeting is awesome and literally everyone should do it. As a creative guy with a Day Job, budgeting’s especially important for me since I need to track my Day Job hours and keep the accounts balanced while I finish my novel-in-progress. Not only that, it also shows me how I’m doing in my quest to pay off my student loans and helps me track how much of my income goes toward essentials (like rent!) and how much goes toward fun stuff (like books!). Continue reading
I like reading myths from other cultures because they capture the familiar spirit of the Greek myths with new sets of heroes. Ancient Sumer’s Gilgamesh is no exception: our hero befriends a sidekick from the wilderness, journeys through forests to slay a deadly monster, grapples with a jealous goddess, and seeks the prize of eternal life. There’s even an ancient flood that shares more than a few similarities with the Biblical one. Editor N.K. Sanders also provides a lot of textual background in her introduction, padding out the Penguin edition since the myth itself is so short (60 pages).
Bought used at a local book sale, October 2012, making it one of the longest-running books in the stack.
Craig Brandon exposes some of higher ed’s most pressing problems: rising tuition, overconstruction, bloated administrator salaries, and too many administrative positions, which lead to decreased education standards, unsafe party school atmospheres, worthless degrees, and lots of debt. Unfortunately, though, Brandon writes like a sarcastic and angry old millennial-basher who overgeneralizes, repeats a lot of his points, and writes to an audience of worried parents rather than exploring the issues facing college students’ independence from their level. This makes for eye-rolling chapters that leave the reader feeling angry, even though dumbed-down college-student experiences ultimately affect everyone.
Bought online in Summer 2015, years after originally seeing it reviewed in a list of new author releases.
Wall Street Journal review (summarizes Brandon’s points more succinctly than the actual book)
Higher Ed review (expands on the party school phenomenon with some solid insights)
So back in my Day Job Basics Guide I wrote about the difference between Day Jobs and Real Jobs, but in real life the spectrum’s a bit more complicated. I’m a big fan of being honest with yourself about how your job fulfills your goals and passions, since knowing one way or the other helps you organize your goals and make positive changes. Continue reading