Poets' Odd Jobs (opens in new tab)

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,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”

https://kottke.org/18/04/philip-glass-i-expected-to-have-a-d...

> 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".

Tangentially related, but I enjoyed the brr.fyi three-part series on re-entering "normal life" after a year at the South Pole: https://brr.fyi/posts/redeployment-part-one

first time i read the term “serious gardening”, quite poetic itself.

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.

with our eyes wide and bright

on the orange site, we write

in curiosity, we find delight

here: a land of the bit and the byte

We're bad poets and we know it - our git history shows it.

I wrote one once that I tried to also express using bad UML, as a sort of artistic experiment.

It was...not great. I still think the work was a decent expression of my emotional state at the time, even if the UML-ified version sucked.

(but then, _a lot_ of UML sucks, so....)

My favorite contemporary composer.

When you support yourself through odd jobs, you can make bolder artistic statements, and show a middle finger to the art world, if you will. When an artist is a professor/teacher whose job is to teach the tradition in the mainstream way, they end up being immensely conservative. Just look at someone like Schoenberg who is -- of course -- considered an iconoclast by the academic art elite but his music is an extremely conservative extension of Western counterpoint and late German Romanticism in a very predictable way: make it more harmonically adventurous/experimental within the 12EDO framework... It's been everyone's go-to since forever, I mean Chopin made a fortune (and a mountain of novel piano music) off of it. Schoenberg simply refused to see what was right in front of his eyes, even though he clearly had gigantic artistic talent, spirit, and motivation (he is also one of my favorite composers, so I'm biased, granted). I really think teaching is not very compatible for artists who first and foremost want to be artists. Someone who wants to create, first and foremost, something new, profound, and personal... Of course, you'll find countless people who'll disagree with me staunchly...

IIRC Leonard Cohen started performing his poems as a singer to make a living.

Art Garfunkel often gives performances of music and spoken-word poetry, but he refers to the poetry as “vignettes.” I believe it’s to keep the audience from being turned off by the word poetry.

Vachel Lindsay himself took a couple of long-distance walking tours where he eschewed carrying money and would knock on strangers' doors each night to offer his poetry in exchange for food and shelter. His book about one of these tours is fascinating, it was a very different time in America: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67947

  File that in the Staff Picks nooks
  As one nine six dash three
  (though not at all LOC) -
  Between the end of the "Chatterley" books
  And the Beatles' "Please, Please Me"

I remember hearing librarians described as "people who can find stuff, not only when it has been filed correctly, but also when it's been mis-shelved or just plain dropped behind something else."

(Note that Zweig puts the beginning of sexual intercourse at 1918; does every generation think their kids invented it?)

You can get an interesting sampler by picking up a recent Best American Poetry and looking at the bios in the back. Some are academics, but there are also doctors, lawyers, accountants, and so forth. I had a long-running project which attempted to rank graduate creative writing programs by their alumni’s appearances in the prize anthologies and one interesting byproduct was collecting a lot of author bios. I think the bios for those who I could confirm had no graduate creative writing degree or could not find evidence of one were the most interesting.

https://creativewritingmfa.info/rankings/Nograduatecreativew...

https://creativewritingmfa.info/rankings/unknown.html

I build and deploy business process automations to AWS using Python.

I know/knew a few, they usually balance things like teaching, magazine writing, maintaining social media accounts for brands, copywriting for ads, and tech jobs.

Creative writing teacher.

Cash trust fund checks.