I’m enjoying this element of the Austin Chronicle redesign. Might steal it for my newsletter. (Reminder: if you’d like to support my work, buy some books or hire me to speak.)
Take this job and shove it
In his book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris writes about this paradox at the heart of American parenting: On the one hand, we think of childhood as a place that should be free of labor — we’ve decided, collectively, that it’s inhumane for our children to slave in sweatshops or dig in a coal mine — and on the other hand, between the classroom, homework, and the extra-curricular activities picked to make a child the perfect college applicant, American kids work all the time.
[I]t takes a lot of work to prepare yourself to compete for twenty-first-century employment. Adults are happy to remind kids of this, telling them, “Put your nose to the grindstone,” “Stay on the right path,” “Treat school like your job.” When it comes to the right to organize, the dignity of labor, or minimum-wage laws, however, students are forced to be students rather than workers.
Maria Montessori said that play was the work of the child, but it’s obvious, now, that we see school as their job.
I’m inspired by students who walk out on their jobs. Students like Greta Thunberg, who started school striking on Fridays, protesting her government’s inaction on climate change.
Last year she said that “a number of members of parliament have come out to the steps to express support for her position, although every one of them has said that she should really be at school. Her parents think so, too, she said—that she should really go to school.”
And yet:
Here’s a lighter, funnier story from legendary soul singer Jackie Shane about school as unpaid labor:
“I don’t like to be played… At school I was a fast runner. Ooh! Honestly, I’m not bragging, I could run. I just sort of leaped through the air. They asked me to run [in an inter-school competition]. I said, “How much does it pay?” They said, “Well, Jackie, this is your school.” I said, “No, no, no, no! I don’t own this school. If I’m going to perform, I want to be paid.” Everybody said, “Child you’re too much.” No, I found out early that you cannot be too much in this world. You can’t. It’s impossible. If you don’t get your gethers together, people will take advantage of you. I told them “What do you mean my school? I’m not getting a nickel. No, no, no, no honey, you’ve got to give Jackie some money.” All of that nonsense and patting me on the back and giving me a slice of pizza. Give me some money!”
Earn it in reverse
My wife sent me this interview from The Cut with Disney heiress Abigail Disney about what it’s like to live with more money (that you didn’t earn) than you’ll ever need. I sent it to my editor, who said, “At first, I wondered why I was wasting my time reading this and by the end I wanted to know this woman.”
Disney talks a lot about how being rich alienates you from people of all regular walks of life, and describes the steps she’s taken to make sure she doesn’t lose touch with reality. “Just like I watched my father increasingly surround himself with yes men, I started to deliberately surrounding myself with no ladies.” (See: “The Need for Eyerollers.”)
At one point, talking about her fortune, Disney says, “My philosophy is you try to earn it in reverse.”
I love that. Whatever luck you’ve had, you might feel like you don’t deserve it, and, actually, you might be right. (If you’ve read my 3 thoughts on publishing, you know one of my favorite lines is from Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”)
Many people would tell those who’ve had good fortune, “No, you do deserve what you have! Don’t give into imposter syndrome!” I like this other approach, which leads you to new work: Why don’t you try to earn it in reverse?
Real wealth
“Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes.”
I think about that John Waters line all the time.
Only trouble is, he never said those exact words. He said this (from Make Trouble):
I’m rich! I don’t mean money-wise. I mean that I have figured out how to never be around assholes at any time in my personal and professional life. That’s rich. And not being around assholes should be the goal of every graduate here today.
The late Anthony Bourdain also had a “No Asshole” rule:
It is truly a privilege to live by what I call the ‘no asshole’ rule. I don’t do business with assholes. I don’t care how much money they are offering me, or what project. Life is too short. Quality of life is important. I’m fortunate to collaborate with a lot of people who I respect and like, and I’d like to keep it that way.
In an earlier interview, he said it even more succinctly:
I want to keep the assholes in my life to an absolute minimum, if not zero.” That’s worth real, real money — to not have assholes in your life.
Real wealth = no assholes.
How to answer the phone
I don’t answer my phone without knowing who’s calling, but from now on I’ll think of Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns every time I open my inbox.
The artistic recluse
Granted, it was published in The New York Times Style Magazine, so one doesn’t expect any deep Marxist analysis or whatever, but nowhere in Megan O’Grady’s essay “Is the Age of the Artistic Recluse Over?” does she suggest that maybe, just maybe, the reason there aren’t so many “artistic recluses” these days is that it’s actually pretty expensive to be a recluse, and people like Thomas Pynchon, who O’Grady calls “the last of our great literary recluses,” are able to retreat into a private life, shut off from the public, because they can actually afford to.
You could step back for a minute and question whether some of the artists O’Grady calls out in the essay are (or were), by definition, actual recluses. Over at Vice there’s the subhead for “Thomas Pynchon and the Myth of the Reclusive Author” saying “it’s not as if the man is some kind of ghost.” I don’t personally know a whole lot about Pynchon, but Thoreau, the author in the batch whose life I can claim to be solidly familiar with, only lived at Walden for two years, and even then, he entertained guests, attended family dinners, etc. He spent most of his life deeply involved in Concord life, teaching children, surveying land, and lecturing around New England. (O’Grady claims Thoreau’s form of civil disobedience was “to withdraw instead of to Tweet,” but I wouldn’t call publicly speaking out in support for John Brown and abolition and spending a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government waging an unholy war withdrawing.)
Heck, even Emily Dickinson, who starts the piece, has had her reclusive myth re-examined. Check out “The Networked Recluse,” an exhibit and catalog dedicated to capturing “the fullness and vitality of Dickinson’s life, most notably her many connections—to family, to friends, to correspondents, to the literary tastemakers of her day.”
But setting aside the question of whether “the age of the artistic recluse” ever actually existed, the essay really seems to be lamenting how this generation of authors not only embrace social media, but also engage in self-promotion and self-publicity, cultivating “a cyclical relationship with the spotlight, intermittently stepping into and receding from it.” While O’Grady seems to see self-promotion as an artistic or personal decision (she calls herself one of a group of “technological Bartlebys who would prefer not to post the contents of our closets/bookshelves/hearts on social media”), I see it more and more as a market-driven one: if there’s a mythical age that’s disappearing, it’s the one in which the author didn’t have to self-promote their work or build their own audience. (O’Grady says, “No one wants to imagine Virginia Woolf on book tour, or Joseph Cornell submitting to a magazine profile” — do people want to remember Hemingway doing booze ads?)
My agent gives book proposal workshops, and his first piece of advice for people who want to publish a book is: “Get famous first.” (He also says to remember that “all publishing is self-publishing.”) The state of the publishing industry is such that if a young writer today wants her book published by a major publisher, chances are she will need to bring along a pre-built platform and a previously gathered audience for her work. A major part of putting together a book proposal today is gathering up Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and newsletter subscriber counts.
It’s not as if it’s any different in other industries, such as music. (Heck, it’s probably worse.) In Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days, he quotes Taylor Swift’s 2014 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.” Harris points out that older Americans “like to complain about the way many young people obsessively track our own social media metrics, but it’s a complaint that’s totally detached from the behavior’s historical, material causes.”
Even if you’re already famous, social media and self-promotion is part of the job and a necessity for sales. With magazines and other major news outlets declining, there are fewer and fewer places in which advertisements or publicity for books would even make a dent in the reading public’s consciousness, even if publishers were inclined to spend the money. (They are not.) Like all workers, artists have to take on more and more of a workload with less compensation.
The tension for the artist in contemporary life is the same that it has always been: How do you secure a living for yourself while maximizing your art-making time and energy? Some would say, “Well, forget about social media, then. Forget about self-promotion. Forget about sales. Keep your overhead low, get a day job, and just write.” That can be good advice, depending on the writer, and it’s advice I have given in the past. The problem is that it’s increasingly impossible for any American worker to secure a living, let alone keep one of the steady jobs that previously sustained artists, allowing them the free time, mental space, and chance for disconnection that much writing requires. (I think of Harvey Pekar, author of American Splendor, working at the V.A. hospital in Cleveland, and the words of Jack Donaghy: “Lemon, we’d all like to flee to the Cleve.”) But “keep your day job” only works if there are actually decent day jobs.
No, it takes money and a room, so the working artist is going to have to hustle, one way or the other. O’Grady praises Kazuo Ishiguro for his “resistance against the role of artist-as-performer” in his “quietly myth-demolishing” article in The Guardian about how he wrote The Remains of The Day during a “four-week period of seclusion in 1987 he and his wife called the ‘crash.’” Good for him, but he already had two prize-winning novels on his resume. (And “The Crash” was made possible by his wife’s willingness and ability to keep all things domestic going, and, one presumes, a cache of saved money.) It’s admirable to see an artist pulling back from the techno-hustle, but it’s also admirable to see a working artist able to artfully balance their creative process and self-promotion without becoming a hollow shell or a piece of human spam.
Which brings us back to “the artistic recluse.” Yes, the best way to drop out and become an “artistic recluse,” even if it’s temporary, is to already be famous, and, more importantly, flush with cash. If you can’t live with your family, like a Thoreau or a Dickinson, you’re gonna need money, honey. Dave Chappelle, who spends most of his days on a farm in Yellow Springs, summed it up in a joke on one of his recent comedy tours: “I’m just back out here to make enough money to disappear again.”
A room of one’s own (and money)
In 1928, Virginia Woolf was invited to give a talk at a couple of women’s colleges at Cambridge University on the subject of “Women and Fiction.” Her long essay, A Room of One’s Own, is an extended version of those talks, published in 1929.
It’s a remarkable essay that reads like it could’ve been written yesterday. Woolf’s thesis is very simple, outlined within the first couple of paragraphs: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” A writer needs money to provide her with the time, and she needs room to provide her with the space. (Not just physical, but also mental, emotional, spiritual, etc.)
Woolf emphasizes how books don’t come out of thin air, that they “are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” You cannot detach art-making from the context of the condition of the lives of the artists. “Intellectual freedom,” she says, “depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.”
Woolf herself was freed up to write when her aunt died suddenly and left her an inheritance:
The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.
She lists all the “odd jobs” she had to do, and how they bred in her “fear and bitterness” from always “doing work that one did not wish to do.” She says working was soul-killing, like “rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart.” But when her aunt died, things changed:
[W]henever I change a ten-shilling note a little of that rust and corrosion is rubbed off, fear and bitterness go. Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine forever.
It is curious to me how often, when people quote Woolf, they quote the room part and leave out the money part — especially when you consider that money buys you both the time and the space. (Ian Svenonius points out that The Clash sang, “We’re a garage band!” but, he asks, “Who can afford a garage anymore?”) A room of one’s own is nice, but if you can’t buy the time to sit in it, what good does it do you?
How will I pay the bills?
This mini-rant was originally posted on Twitter, but people really responded to it, so I’m archiving it here.
“How will I pay the bills?” is a perfectly reasonable question from a young person, worth a thoughtful answer.
“How will I pay the bills?” is not a question of the scared or cowardly, it’s a question of the sane and responsible.
1. Make a budget. Start a spreadsheet and figure out exactly how much you’ll need to live on. It might be more or less than you think.
2. Figure out how to get ahold of that money. For many, it will be a day job, or doing things that aren’t sexy and/or fun. (You know, work.)
3. Budget your time. Find every free second you have that you can devote to what you really want to be doing. Use that time best you can.
* * *
Write the following quotes on index cards and stick them above where you work:
“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”
—Lynda Barry
“If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.”
—Bill Cunningham
* * *
The next time someone tells you to “do what you love no matter what,” ask to see their tax return.
Anybody who tells people to “do what you love no matter what” should also have to teach a money management course.
Low overhead + “do what you love” = a good life.
“I deserve nice things” + “do what you love” = a time bomb.
* * *
In summary: Live below your means. Don’t go into debt. Jam econo. Do the best you can with what you have.
Interview with Scratch Magazine
I had a nice conversation with Manjula Martin for the latest issue of Scratch, a digital magazine about writing and money. (They also used a blackout for the cover.) We talked about several topics, including self-promotion, selling out, and, of course, money:
Look, I do not have it figured out. I feel really good about my output up until this point. It’s been my dream to be able to stay at home and have a family and go out to my studio and do whatever I want. But I think the whiplash of it has been so quick that I’m still catching up with it.
It’s the imposter syndrome thing, where you think someone’s gonna knock on the door and take it all back.
So for me it always comes back to the daily practice. Having that bliss station set up and going to it and making your thing happen. Making sure you do that every day no matter what. Do the thing that feeds you, first. Then do the crazy business stuff.
Read the rest of the interview→
You can read the rest of the interview in the forthcoming book, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living.
Keep your overhead low
“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”
—Lynda Barry
Anybody who tells people to “do what you love no matter what” should also have to teach a money management course.
Low overhead + “do what you love” = a good life.
“I deserve nice things” + “do what you love” = a time bomb.
A good life is not about living within your means, it’s about living below your means.
When Instapaper creator Marco Arment was asked about his business model, he said, “I sell an app for money, then I spend less than I make.” Sell something for money, spend less than you make. Is there a better model?
“The trick is,” film executive Tom Rothman says, “from the business side, to try to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless.”
The 80s underground band The Minutemen used to call this “jamming econo.” They knew the music they wanted to make would probably never be mainstream, so they kept their day jobs, made their records for cheap, learned how to fix their own tour van, and hauled their own equipment.
Live frugally so you can do the work you want to do. Save up some “screw you” money, so you can quit a job you hate to take a job you like better. Turn away venture capital money and bootstrap so you can keep control over your business.
To “jam econo” might not be the flashiest way of life, but it’s the best way to stay free.
[I cut this post from Show Your Work! because it felt too much like the “Keep Your Day Job” section of Steal Like An Artist.]