that formerly clinking clanking sound

John Scalzi on internships:

What bothers me about unpaid internships is not fundamentally that they are unpaid (although that really isn’t a good thing), but that the purpose of internships seems to have changed in an uncomfortable way: it’s gone from a way to train students in practical real-world application of skills they’ve learned in college to a way to plug, for free, actual skill gaps in one’s work force. I don’t doubt interns learn something in the latter scenario, but what I suspect companies learn is that there’s little point in hiring for certain roles and tasks because there’s always a new crop of interns. Thus begins a baseline expectation for business that some labor is always meant to be free, and so long as they give themselves legal/moral cover by calling that work an “internship,” there’s no reason not to exploit it.

but--

When I was 13 my father went to Cali, Colombia as American Consul. My mother was a member of the book club, which worked like this: each member would undertake to read a book and report on it at the next meeting. The books, I think, were bought out of membership subscription to the club, and became club property, which any member could borrow. The collection was housed in our day, courtesy of my mother, in the Consular Residence. (This strikes me as a much better system for a book club than the common model, under which a group of people settle on a single book and discuss it; my sister spent years in a club thanks to which she either a) could not read what she liked because she had to finish, as it might be, Ya-Ya Sisterhood for the book club or b) had demoralising discussions with people who did not like All the Pretty Horses (her selection) because they would not normally read books about cowboys.)

The result was that we had a large, miscellaneous library of Book Club books that did not belong to us, but which I could read whenever I liked. Among these was a substantial collection of books by Agatha Christie. Cheek by jowl, you understand, with Tristes Tropiques, The Raw and the Cooked, Territorial Imperative, Nicholas and Alexandra, I forget. The result being that by the age of 14 I had read pretty much everything Agatha Christie had ever written. (I would love to say that I was devouring Levi-Strauss at the age of 13, but honesty compels.)

The recent exchange between Alain de Botton and Caleb Crain, anyway, brings to mind this early reading. For those unfamiliar with the Christie oeuvre: one of Christie's crime-solvers was an elderly spinster, Miss Marple, who lived in the village of St Mary Meade. Londoners came down to the village, imagining that its inhabitants enjoyed an existence of placid, idyllic tedium - little guessing that they had nothing to do but spy on each other and gossip about it. The blogosphere does sometimes have a way of putting the village into the global village.

Gossip gossip gossip. AdB left a comment on Crain's blog. Was this out of line? Was the review really as bad as all that? Meanwhile the subject of the book and the review drops out of sight.

The review begins with this sentence: Work is activity that earns money.

Äääääääähm.

So. Right. Say I start work on a novel. I have no way of knowing whether this is work or not! If I finish it and a publisher takes it on I then know that it was work, because I got paid. If I finish it but can't get it published it wasn't work. If an endless succession of timewasters disrupt, to the point where the book is never finished, none of the time I spent on it counts as work, because I can never get paid for it. Uh huh.

Or. I have a child. If I stay home to look after it, this isn't work, because I'm not getting paid. If I bring in a babysitter, however, the same activity counts as work because money changes hands. Uh huh.

Or. I'm 14 years old. I am legally debarred from performing tasks for money for more than a few hours a week. I am legally required to go school five days a week; if I want to qualify for decently paid labour somewhere down the line, I must carry out assignments at night and on weekends in addition to the time served in the classroom. But it's not work, because I don't get paid. What the teacher does is work, because s/he gets paid; if a parent comes in to help out in the class, on the other hand, this isn't work, because-- Uh huh.

Or. I'm a slave. I was captured in West Africa and taken in a ship to America and sold at auction. For the rest of my life I shall be required to pick cotton for my master, but it isn't work, because-- Uh huh.

Or. I'm not a slave, per se, I'm just an intern. I [work] for a company that has worked out that it can keep costs down by having a layer of unpaid persons doing what people used to get paid to do, by making this the entry-level position through which entry to doing the same things, only for, um, pay, is normally-- Uh huh.

Bourdieu talks at one point (sorry for bloggy vagueness, my books are in the other apartment) about the acquisition of a view of labour as something that is exchanged for a monetary reward, how ill this sits with certain cultures. He speaks of the indignation of a Kabyl father when a son asked to be paid to do tasks that would traditionally have been performed as matter of course by a junior member of the family at the request of the head of the family. That is, the question of whether an activity enters into a system of economic exchange depends very much on its cultural context; to state that an activity counts as work in virtue of successfully entering into such a system begs pretty much every question worth asking. (The UN Declaration of Human Rights outlaws child labour and slavery, and guarantees freedom of association; it includes the right to education; that is to say, it guarantees to every child the obligation to work without pay in a compulsory social setting till the age of majority by excluding school attendance from the categories of work and forced association.)

AdB cites Updike's requirement that a reviewer be fair. It might be better to ask reviewers to be useful. AdB's book has been written and published; it is too late for AdB to read Bourdieu et al. and bring their work to bear on his own. If someone who took the time to write a book on the subject of work missed seminal work on the subject, it's reasonable to suppose that the average reader of the NYTBR may also have missed this work; the reviewer could helpfully bring this work to bear. If the reviewer is himself unfamiliar with this work he might still be of some use if he were to give the subject two seconds' thought.

friendly fire

At what point exactly does quotation morph into plagiarism? Came across an old post on Joelonsoftware of terrifying relevance:

Once you get into flow it's not too hard to keep going. Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before getting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I've got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again that I really have to get started (9) launch the damn editor and (10) write code nonstop until I don't realize that it's already 7:30 pm.

Somewhere between step 8 and step 9 there seems to be a bug, because I can't always make it across that chasm. For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There's something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it's rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going. Like a bicycle decked out for a cross-country, self-supported bike trip -- when you first start riding a bike with all that gear, it's hard to believe how much work it takes to get rolling, but once you are rolling, it feels just as easy as riding a bike without any gear.

Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started.

...

When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can't fire at you. (That's what the soldiers mean when they shout "cover me." It means, "fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can't fire at me while I run across this street, here." It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you're not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you're not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.

I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn't matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side.

The problem for a writer is, friendly fire is an occupational hazard. You think you are hiring an agent to cover you, so you can write while they keep the enemy at bay. And, um, hm, it ain't necessarily so.

And, um, hm, here's the really terrifying thing.

You look around online, you go to agents' blogs, and you see that friendly fire is standard practice in the biz (and woe betide the writer who can't write under friendly fire, who unprofessionally complains instead of just getting on with the job while bullets fly in what is perceived, unprofessionally, as the wrong direction). These are the people who are allegedly passionate about Li-Tra-Cha. And you then go over to Joel Spolsky, who is passionate about um, hm, y'know, software development. And he's saying all the things you thought agents and editors would be saying, all this um, hm, by bookworld standards disgracefully self-indulgent stuff about protecting the developer's time. Protecting the developer from distraction.

It's hard to be sane.

Whole thing here.

high life, low life

From Languagehat:

[...] Concerning Vladimir Vladimirovich: people who have read his memoirs (I have not read them) write to me with amazement and indignation concerning his lines about me: they see them as nearly libelous. But I quickly cooled down, and I think that at that time, in 1915-16, there was something in me that provided fodder for his anecdote. The anecdote itself is an invention, but it is possible that he accurately reflected the disrespectful feeling I had toward those around me. I was very awkward: in gloves with holes, not knowing how to behave in high society—and then I was ignorant, like all newspapermen—an ignoramus despite myself, self-taught, who had to feed a large family with my clumsy writings. Vladimir Vladimirovich's father, on the other hand, was a man of very high culture. He had a particular game: enumerating all of Dickens' heroes, almost three hundred names. He engaged in a competition with me. I ran out of steam after the first hundred. We jokingly competed in our knowledge of the novels of Arnold Bennett. Here too he took first place: he named around twenty titles, whereas I had read only eight. I always treated him with respect and lovingly preserve his few letters and friendly notes in Chukokkala [Chukovsky's album].

Относительно Владимира Владимировича: люди, прочитавшие его мемуары (я не читал их), пишут мне с удивлением, с возмущением по поводу его строк обо мне: видят здесь чуть не пасквиль. Но я вскоре поостыл и думаю, что в то время – в 1915-16 гг. – во мне было очевидно что-то, что дало пищу его анекдоту. Самый анекдот – выдумка, но возможно, что он верно отразил то неуважительное чувство, которое я внушал окружающим. Я был очень нескладен: в дырявых перчатках, неумеющий держаться в высшем обществе – и притом невежда, как все газетные работники, – невежда-поневоле, самоучка, вынужденный кормить огромную семью своим неумелым писанием. Отец же Владимира Владимировича был человек очень высокой культуры. У него была особая игра: перечислять все имена героев Диккенса – чуть ли не триста имен. Он соревновался со мною. Я изнемогал после первой же сотни. Мы в шутку состязались в знании всех романов А. Беннета. Он и здесь оказывался первым: назвал около двух десятков заглавий, я же читал всего восемь. Я всегда относился к нему с уважением и любовно храню его немногие письма и дружеские записи в «Чукоккала».

This has more of a bearing on my work than may immediately be obvious.

Nabokov was taught French and English as a small child. In Speak, Memory he describes his childhood, describes reading the simple texts which introduced a child to these languages. He sat in a room in a grand house, while a girl swept the gravel on a path outside. He comments that the girl may well have been happier sweeping the gravel than performing the tasks assigned her by the Soviet system.

Every child can't live in a grand house, but every child could have a mind furnished with, as it might be, Homeric Greek. Flaubertian French. The Hebrew of the Psalms (which Milton thought the greatest poetry he knew). Our educational system does not want every child to have a mind furnished in the grand style. It sets up an obstacle course. Those who succeed can aspire, if they work very hard, to a house furnished in the Tyler Brulé style.

walkways

Courtesy Owen Hatherley at Sit Down Man You're A Bloody Tragedy, a terrific post on the Beech Street underpass at the Barbican on Will Wiles' Spillway.

There's also a personal meaning to the place for me. I have very early memories of being driven through Beech Street, and it had a powerful effect on me. For me, it screamed modernity, the first pioneering signs of a new city. It was strangely comforting - the warm orange glow of the sodium light, the rhythm of the coloured panels, the streaming lights, like the Enterprise going into warp speed. It was a snapshot of a city that had passed the period of even partial coexistence with the landscape, and was now a total structure - a cityscape. It still means to me a kind of density watershed, a Change of State in the city fabric like melting or sublimation.

(What I really want to know, obviously, is where WW found his template among the sad selection on offer at Blogger.)

Hatherley, meanwhile, has more, much more to say on walkways:

Critics and consumers alike seem to will any attempt to elevate everyday life to failure, anything that lifts us off away from the proximity of a coffee concession being some sort of mockery of the neoliberal city. Whether its the demolished walkways of innumerable council estates (usually for 'security' reasons, though it's moot whether they lead to endemic crime at the Barbican) to the imminent demise of Sheffield's multi-level tat extravaganza Castle Market (wonderfully, Sheffield City Council once planned to throw walkways over the whole Sheaf Valley), the attempt to create a pedestrian city that doesn't stay at a base level has become unpopular just at the point where it would seem most relevant, where it would make a (holds breath) sustainable urbanism something invigoratingly modern rather than tweedily conservative. It has been relatively intriguing, in the arid world of oligarchitecture, to see the reaction to Steven Holl's Beijing Linked Hybrid - not because it looks like it'll be a formally interesting building in itself, but because here the walkway has come back, and this seems to many critics to be an unforgivable urban faux pas.

More Hatherley here. Spillway link here, again, for the slothful.

yes, minister

Chris Bryant, the new Foreign Office minister, is encouraging British ambassadors to support gay communities.

In a letter to the British ambassador in Poland, Ric Todd, Bryant wrote: "I wanted to congratulate you on your flying of the Rainbow flag next to the Union flag last year, and your guide to lesbian gay and bisexual and transgender rights translated in Polish this year. I know you had some flak, but frankly more power to your elbow. Britain is not just a tolerant country. We fully respect the rights of everyone, regardless of their sexuality."

In the Guardian, rest here.

Terrific, and somehow so typical of Britain: if you happen to get shuffled into a Cabinet post, the obvious thing to do is pick up the ball and run with it. (But what did Humphrey say? We long to know.)

B, B

...la jeunesse est aussi ce fragment d'existence où arrive aisément que l'on s'imagine très singulier, dans le moment où l'on pense ou fait ce qui restera comme le trait typique d'une génération.

Badiou, Beckett