Category: Leisure and Work
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My Grunt Jobs
Furniture-mover in Santa Barbara; exterminator in West Los Angeles; grave-digger in Culver City; factory worker in Venice, California; letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; logger in Forks, Washington; tree-planter in Oregon; taxi-driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. One thing's for sure:…
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Lower and Higher Ways of Wasting Time
A Bukowski binge appears to be in the offing, following hard on the heels of Beat October, all part of ongoing ruminations on styles of life and modes of muddling along the via dolorosa of this vale of samsara enroute to points unknown. Here is something that came out of my pen early in the predawn:…
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‘He’s Only Reading’
This just over the transom from Londiniensis: Your last post puts me in mind of the hoary old story of the timid student hovering outside his tutor’s door not knowing whether to knock and disturb the great man. At that moment one of the college servants walks past: “Oh, it’s all right dear, you can…
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In Praise of the Useless
Morris R. Cohen, A Preface to Logic (Dover, 1977, originally published in 1944), p. 186, emphasis added: It would certainly be absurd to suppose that the appreciation of art should justify itself by practical applications. If the vision of beauty is its own excuse for being, why should not the vision of truth be so…
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The Professional Activist
Ralph Nader, for example. Does he ever enjoy life, rest in contemplation, put aside for a time all his views and projects and schemes for improving the world? Does he consider consuming less jet fuel in his zeal to improve the unimprovable? Chalk it up to my contemplative, quietistic bias, but activism as a way…
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Work, Money, Living and Livelihood
Prevalent attitudes toward work and money are curious. People tend to value work in terms of money: an occupation has value if and only if it makes money, and the measure of its value is how much money it makes. If what you do makes money, then it has value regardless of what it is…
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Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing
I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying: Dolce Far Niente Sweet To…