Today I discovered that you can use a stretch of the Shoal Creek Greenbelt trail to walk between Bookpeople and the Central Library. That means if I added less than a mile to one of my epic Greenbelt walks to the Central Library I could almost walk from my house to Bookpeople without using a city street…
What do people do all day?
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
—Studs Terkel
“More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary.”
—Tim Kreider
My boys have spend countless hours paging through Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? Originally published in 1968, there’s still nothing really quite like it. (Here’s a nice appreciation of the book.)
The book is probably even more influential than most people realize. In the documentary Studs Terkel: Listening To America, Terkel’s editor, André Schiffrin, admits the children’s book is where he got the idea for Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. “I thought, you know this is something we need to do for grownups.”

Terkel made his oral history by going around America with his portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and conducting one-on-one interviews. Once the book was published, the original tapes were boxed up and put in his archives. Here’s a terrific 40-minute podcast featuring a few of the unboxed interviews. Terkel mostly edited himself out of the book, so it’s interesting to hear what he asks and how he asks it.
Sometimes when you’re reading Scarry’s book you can feel sort of wistful in spots for the days when, as Tim Kreider says, people actually did work with tangible results. (See the comic parodies “Busytown in the 21st century” and “BusinessTown!”) But Terkel’s book really gets to the heart of how people feel about their jobs. This interview with a “token woman” ad executive is an example:
Do I ever question what I’m selling? Oh, I would say all the time, of course. I don’t think what I do is essential or necessary, even that it prefers much of a service. You know, you’re saying to a lady because this oil comes from the bottom of the algae on the sea, you’re going to have a timeless face. That’s a crock of shit. I mean, I know that. It’s a part of my job, I do it.
I highly recommend both What Do People Do All Day? and Working, and I’d also head over to the Studs Terkel Radio Archive and Working in America site when you get a chance.
Made to order
I am never more nervous than when I hand my wife a new manuscript, and I am never more relieved than when she says she likes it. She’s my first reader (first everything, really) and if I can write something that she really likes, I feel I’m a success no matter what.
Of course, I’m thrilled when anybody else likes the work. This week I got word that the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee started a book club and made Steal Like An Artist the first book up for discussion.
It’s wonderful but also a tiny bit unnerving how that book, which I wrote when I was 28 years old (I’ll be 35 this June), keeps having such a life of its own. I’d thought of Steal/Show as the Robin Hood duology — first you steal, then you share — and I didn’t see how it could go any further than that. But it’s clear now that I’m writing what is obviously the last book in a trilogy. It’s always more complicated when people have expectations, and it’s always a challenge to tie things up in a satisfying way, but I’m really excited about this book. It feels right to me. And long overdue.
Make it
This interview with the Adobe Make It folks was posted today, but it was filmed nine months ago, last August, which makes it odd for me to watch now, because I had no clue I was already working on the book I’m working on now. When Paul asks me what’s next, I say something about my kids and thinking about what creative people can learn from the way kids play. So funny. A lot can happen in 9 months. Whole humans can be conceived and born. Books, too…
The ones who disappear
“Fame in a world like this is worthless.”
—Marcus Aurelius, 121-180 A.D.
“Fame is hollow. It amplifies what is there. If there is any self-doubt, or hatred, or lack of ability to connect with people, fame will magnify it.”
—Alanis Morissette
“There’s nothing about fame that I’ve ever seen that is healthy…it’s very hard to survive.”
—Shep Gordon
“In many ways, fame is the industrial disease of creativity. It’s a sludgy byproduct of making things.”
—Mike Myers
“Last summer, I read a book by David Bohm, the physicist, called Order, Science, and Creativity. They gave chimps paint and found that they’d rather paint than do anything else, they even forgot to eat. The only thing that stemmed the flow of the hated word, “creativity,” was when they began to reward them for painting. I have seen in my life again and again what fame does to people…”
—Hedda Sterne
“How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”
—Emily Dickinson
“One can’t work
by lime light…”
—Kay Ryan
“The only thing that comes from fame is mediocrity.”
—Sleater-Kinney, “Hey Darling”
“The secret to longevity in the music business is to get away from it. Alright? You gotta leave it man… Learn how to be a deep sea fisherman. Go scuba diving. Whatever it is. Snow skiing. Become, and be, something completely else.”
—Sam Cutler
One celebrity I actually admire is Rick Moranis, who took a break from acting to raise his children after his wife died of breast cancer. “I discovered within a couple of years, I didn’t miss it at all,” he said. He explained that once he became a star, the real creative element of the work went out the window:
And once I became a commodity for hire, and was asked to be in other people’s movies, it stopped being about the creativity, the writing, and it became more about being a marketable entity. I guess what they call a star. Hitting the mark and saying the lines and doing the work that the scriptwriters and executives and the director wanted the actor to do, was perfectly acceptable way to spend time and make a living, but it was not fulfilling creatively, the way the early work had been. I knew as I was taking a break from it that if I went back to it, I was not going to go back to it in that way. If I ever went back, I’d go back to it in a much more creative way.
(He’s still around, by the way.)
I’m also reminded of John Lennon, who is more problematic, as we say. From 1973-1975, John Lennon lived what is known as “The Lost Weekend,” a period in which he separated from his wife, Yoko Ono, and spent his time drinking and running around with Harry Nilsson. The story goes that when they eventually got back together, Yoko got pregnant, but since she’d suffered several previous miscarriages, she said the only way she’d have the child is if Lennon agreed to be a “househusband.” He accepted, and from 1975-1980, they switched roles: Yoko tended to their business deals and Lennon stayed at home with their new son, Sean.
In a 1980 Playboy interview, when asked what he’d been doing, he answered, “I’ve been baking bread and looking after the baby.” The interviewer asked, “But what have you been working on?” to which Lennon replied, “Are you kidding? Bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job.”
Lennon wrote the song “Watching The Wheels” about this period away from fame:
People say I’m crazy
Doing what I’m doing
well, they give me all kinds of warnings
to save me from ruinWhen I say that I’m okay
well, they look at me kinda strange
surely you’re not happy now
you no longer play the game
In his later years, Lennon struggled with the notion of churning out rock ‘n’ roll product, so his househusband era was also a kind of retreat and sabbatical from the meat grinder. “Rock ‘n’ roll was not fun anymore…I had become a craftsman and I could have continued being a craftsman. I respect craftsmen, but I am not interested in becoming one.”
“I chose not to take the standard options in my business – going to Vegas and singing your great hits, if you’re lucky, or going to hell, which is where Elvis went,” he said. “Walking away is much harder than carrying on.”
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