“[. . .] for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.”
—Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story, although I find the subhead rather hard to believe for most values of “true.”
Tag Archives: Life
Life: Rabbit edition
“You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.”
—John Updike, Run, Rabbit
Life: What cancer is like edition
“One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling—that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world. We learned no lessons worth learning; we acquired no experience that could benefit anyone. And Isabel most certainly did not earn ascension to a better place, as there was no better place for her than at home with her family.”
—Aleksandar Hemon, in his astonishing, powerful, gripping, depressing New Yorker essay “The Aquarium: A tale of two daughters.” It’s only available in print. Don’t read it unless you feel you must.
Life: Writing edition
“Part of the goal of reading is to make what’s unconscious, conscious.”
—Me, in class earlier today and trying to describe how to write better be a better writer.
Why we need the third way: “What Are You Going to Do With That” and the need for imagination
In “What Are You Going to Do With That?,” William Deresiewicz tells the freshmen class at Stanford:
In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements.
But he goes on to point out why and how these kinds of defined professional paths—the ones high school and college students students are so often told constitute “success”—might not be optimal, for either the person on the path or society in general. If you “simply go with the flow,” you can end up merely being defined by what someone else has laid out. Perhaps not surprisingly, Deresiewicz goes on to say, “There is an alternative.” He calls it “moral imagination” and defines it this way: “Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.” I would call it something else: the “third way.”
Deresiewicz’s essay shows why we need more talk about the third way: there are more options out there than further advanced schooling. Stanford in particular is a good place to be reminded of this. Obviously, Deresiewicz doesn’t say you must choose grad school or the professions, but the absence of any acknowledgement about starting your own company implies that those are the two primary choices.
I’ve had similar talk. In my interview with him, Tucker Max describes the primary speech he gives at colleges:
[. . . W]hen you’re an undergrad, generally you think you can do two things. You’re gonna have to get a job after you graduate or you gotta go do more school. Because everyone who’s giving you advice or telling you how to live your life are people who’ve done one of those two things.
He describes a “third way,” with his two normal paths defined a lot like Deresiewicz’s, but in a lower register:
You don’t generally have anyone in your life who has gone out on their own and done something entrepreneurial or done something artistic or truly risky or truly taken the path less traveled, because those people [. . .] don’t work in academics. And don’t become cubicle monkeys. So what I try and explain in my speeches is that there’s a third way. Because a lot of people—I think most people—want to do something besides those two things.
A lot of people want to do something else, but that something else is, in some ways, harder to do than the normal path. Yet the people who go the third way often talk about it as being more satisfying, and the people who go the “two paths” often speak wistfully of the third—despite the difficulty one is likely to encounter. A friend wrote this to me: “I know for a fact that I’d hate [Tucker] Max’s writing, but he’s dead right about how few students are aware that they can do something artistic or creative or entrepreneurial.” Too few students are aware of this—and too few people in general are. You can consider this post a very small step in the direction of increasing awareness.
So far I’ve noted two examples. Paul Graham talks about the problem of standard paths too, in “A Student’s Guide to Startups:” “Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup.” His answer is more defined than Deresiewicz’s or Max’s, but the very language he uses is similar. But he’s also got a way of generating the “third way” by funding startups. Instead of merely telling people to find one, he’s creating a third way for people to flow, which might be the most valuable contribution of all, at least for the technically inclined.
I think all three of these disparate writers—Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham—are pointing to a more fundamental need for the imagination necessary to exit the obvious paths that so often end up going nowhere. Of the three, Graham has done the most to institutionalize this process and make it available for others by starting Y Combinator. Max has probably done the most to be a living embodiment of an unusual third way. Deresiewicz is pointing to the possibility from within the way of a well-defined path (and the same one I’m one) from undergrad to graduate school to being a professor. Taken together, they diagnose and offer treatment for the same malady that can’t quite be identified yet comes from so many sources and has so many symptoms: Dilbert, cubicles, malaise, ennui, florescent lights, midlife crises, 20-somethings with advanced degrees working as baristas, waiters, or bartenders, essay writers.
Artistic or creative activities don’t usually come prepackaged in convenient jobs that get handed to college graduates. They get created by people who are artistic and creative, who find a way to turn what they want to do, or their inchoate ideas, into something greater than the idea itself. The “inchoate idea” is important: I suspect most people don’t entirely know what they’re doing when they find a third way. Steven Berlin Johnson has a term for this in his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: the slow hunch. This happens when something that you’ve been gnawing on slowly develops over time. Johnson describes it much more fully, of course, but a lot of my ideas in writing novels or academic work comes from slow hunches. Writing fiction isn’t an activity that really comes packaged in convenient job form: it is made by each practitioner individually. People who succeed as writers sometimes do so not through conventional publishing, but through alternate ways—as Max did with his website, or as J.A. Konrath apparently does with his blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.”
Like Deresiewicz and Max, I don’t really have a solution to the problem other than to encourage you to think imaginatively. But who’s against thinking imaginatively? Partners are probably telling their third-year associates the same thing, even as the associates put in soul-killing seventy hours weeks under those menacing florescent lights. The other part of my solution is to be aware of the problem. I’ll also channel Graham in “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” and encourage you to stay upwind:
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.
Suppose you’re a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn’t have an engine, you can’t fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind.
“Work on things that interest you and increase your options:” the target of Graham’s essay is nominally high school students, but it’s applicable to a much broader swath of people. Maybe you’re one. If so, however, you’ll probably read this and then go back to filling out those TPS reports. Or maybe you’ll be one of the very rare people who realize there is no speed limit and react appropriately. At least you can’t say that no one told you. At least three people have: Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham. Four if you count me, writing a meta essay.
Why we need the third way: "What Are You Going to Do With That" and the need for imagination
In “What Are You Going to Do With That?,” William Deresiewicz tells the freshmen class at Stanford:
In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements.
But he goes on to point out why and how these kinds of defined professional paths—the ones high school and college students students are so often told constitute “success”—might not be optimal, for either the person on the path or society in general. If you “simply go with the flow,” you can end up merely being defined by what someone else has laid out. Perhaps not surprisingly, Deresiewicz goes on to say, “There is an alternative.” He calls it “moral imagination” and defines it this way: “Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.” I would call it something else: the “third way.”
Deresiewicz’s essay shows why we need more talk about the third way: there are more options out there than further advanced schooling. Stanford in particular is a good place to be reminded of this. Obviously, Deresiewicz doesn’t say you must choose grad school or the professions, but the absence of any acknowledgement about starting your own company implies that those are the two primary choices.
I’ve similar talk. In my interview with him, Tucker Max describes the primary speech he gives at colleges:
[. . . W]hen you’re an undergrad, generally you think you can do two things. You’re gonna have to get a job after you graduate or you gotta go do more school. Because everyone who’s giving you advice or telling you how to live your life are people who’ve done one of those two things.
He describes a “third way,” with his two normal paths defined a lot like Deresiewicz’s, but in a lower register:
You don’t generally have anyone in your life who has gone out on their own and done something entrepreneurial or done something artistic or truly risky or truly taken the path less traveled, because those people [. . .] don’t work in academics. And don’t become cubicle monkeys. So what I try and explain in my speeches is that there’s a third way. Because a lot of people—I think most people—want to do something besides those two things.
A lot of people want to do something else, but that something else is, in some ways, harder to do than the normal path. Yet the people who go the third way often talk about it as being more satisfying, and the people who go the “two paths” often speak wistfully of the third—despite the difficulty one is likely to encounter. A friend wrote this to me: “I know for a fact that I’d hate [Tucker] Max’s writing, but he’s dead right about how few students are aware that they can do something artistic or creative or entrepreneurial.” Too few students are aware of this—and too few people in general are. You can consider this post a very small step in the direction of increasing awareness.
So far I’ve noted two examples. Paul Graham talks about the problem of standard paths too, in “A Student’s Guide to Startups:” “Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup.” His answer is more defined than Deresiewicz’s or Max’s, but the very language he uses is similar. But he’s also got a way of generating the “third way” by funding startups. Instead of merely telling people to find one, he’s creating a third way for people to flow, which might be the most valuable contribution of all, at least for the technically inclined.
I think all three of these disparate writers—Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham—are pointing to a more fundamental need for the imagination necessary to exit the obvious paths that so often end up going nowhere. Of the three, Graham has done the most to institutionalize this process and make it available for others by starting Y Combinator. Max has probably done the most to be a living embodiment of an unusual third way. Deresiewicz is pointing to the possibility from within the way of a well-defined path (and the same one I’m one) from undergrad to graduate school to being a professor. Taken together, they diagnose and offer treatment for the same malady that can’t quite be identified yet comes from so many sources and has so many symptoms: Dilbert, cubicles, malaise, ennui, florescent lights, midlife crises, 20-somethings with advanced degrees working as baristas, waiters, or bartenders, essay writers.
Artistic or creative activities don’t usually come prepackaged in convenient jobs that get handed to college graduates. They get created by people who are artistic and creative, who find a way to turn what they want to do, or their inchoate ideas, into something greater than the idea itself. The “inchoate idea” is important: I suspect most people don’t entirely know what they’re doing when they find a third way. Steven Berlin Johnson has a term for this in his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: the slow hunch. This happens when something that you’ve been gnawing on slowly develops over time. Johnson describes it much more fully, of course, but a lot of my ideas in writing novels or academic work comes from slow hunches. Writing fiction isn’t an activity that really comes packaged in convenient job form: it is made by each practitioner individually. People who succeed as writers sometimes do so not through conventional publishing, but through alternate ways—as Max did with his website, or as J.A. Konrath apparently does with his blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.”
Like Deresiewicz and Max, I don’t really have a solution to the problem other than to encourage you to think imaginatively. But who’s against thinking imaginatively? Partners are probably telling their third-year associates the same thing, even as the associates put in soul-killing seventy hours weeks under those menacing florescent lights. The other part of my solution is to be aware of the problem. I’ll also channel Graham in “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” and encourage you to stay upwind:
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.
Suppose you’re a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn’t have an engine, you can’t fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind.
“Work on things that interest you and increase your options:” the target of Graham’s essay is nominally high school students, but it’s applicable to a much broader swath of people. Maybe you’re one. If so, however, you’ll probably read this and then go back to filling out those TPS reports. Or maybe you’ll be one of the very rare people who realize there is no speed limit and react appropriately. At least you can’t say that no one told you. At least three people have: Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham. Four if you count me, writing a meta essay.
Quote of the Day: Hemingway and Fitzgerald in The Sun Also Rises
“[Robert] Cohn, the sad, ineffectual woman-haunted Princetonian, is most debilitated by being a Scott Fitzgerald hero in an Ernest Hemingway novel.”
That’s Patrick Morrow in his essay “The Bought Generation: Another Look at Money in The Sun Also Rises,” proving that not all academic articles must be humorless. I’m paying particular attention to humor, too, since I’m writing about humor as a response to conditions in The Sun Also Rises and The Dud Avocado. This is a more exciting topic than it may sound!
Keith Richards’ Life and what the world used to look like
I skimmed Keith Richards’ memoir Life, which might be of interest to virulent Rolling Stones fans and people interested in how to live despite ingesting massive quantities of poisonous substances in search of altered states (answer: luck). Although most of the memoir is forgettable, this passage stands out because it describes a kind of insanity that feels completely foreign and bizarre to me:
It was 1975, a time of brutality and confrontation. Open season on the Stones had been declared since our last tour, the tour of ’72, known as the STP. The State Department had noted riots (true), civil disobedience (also true), illicit sex (whatever that is), and violence across the United States. All the fault of us, mere minstrels. We had been inciting youth to rebellion, we were corrupting America, and they had ruled never to let us travel in the United States again. It had become, in the time of Nixon, a serious political matter. He had personally deployed his dogs and dirty tricks against John Lennon, who he thought might cost him an election. We, in turn, they told our lawyer officially, were the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world.
Must be gratifying to be the most dangerous rock band in the world. It’s also astonishing to imagine that a rock-and-roll band could marshall this kind of attention; these days, the youth who were rebelling in the 1970s have grown up and assumed the reins of power, such that rock-and-roll has grown up with them, becoming rock-and-roll instead of rock ‘n’ roll.
Now it’s no longer subversive, so we have to turn our attention to other topics, like rap, but even that doesn’t inspire so much fear as Richards says the Stones did; rap is regularly reviewed in the New Yorker. Today, nothing is worse than being square. Almost anything goes. 1975 looks bizarre from the perspective of someone born after it: what was all the fuss about? The real question is what subjects generate all the fuss today that will be the same way in the future. I could generate a list of them but choose not to, per Paul Graham’s “What You Can’t Say,” but I bet regular readers could imagine a few things that might end up on the list.
There are other moments of bizarre provincialism too:
When I was growing up, the idea of leaving England was pretty much remote. My dad did it once, but that was in the army to go to Normandy and get his leg blown off. The idea was totally impossible. You just read about other countries and looked at them on TV, and in National Geographic, the black chicks with their tits hanging out and their long necks. But you never expected to see it. Scraping up the money to get out of England would have been way beyond my capabilities.
Although many people today no doubt feel the same, the rise of deregulated air service makes leaving virtually any industrialized country within the reach of a large proportion of the population. Not everyone, to be sure, but it’s much more normal now than it once was. Many fewer find the idea “totally impossible.” It’s easy, at least for me, to forget what the past was like. I think we all have a tendency to assume that the present is “normal,” along with whatever our situation is, and the past different. Then I read about someone who “never expected to see” a foreign country and remember that the time and place I live in is very different from those others have lived in. Such moments are the most revealing part of Life. The book made it on the New York Times bestseller list. Prediction: a large number of copies hit the used book market within six months. If you want to read the book, wait and snag a used copy cheap, or get it from the library.
Tucker Max Interview — Assholes Finish First and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Tucker Max wrote I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell and, most recently, Assholes Finish First , both of which chronicle his experiences drinking, hooking up, and behaving like a self-proclaimed asshole. Think of the stories your friends tell the morning after, except edited (to maximize hilarity) and in book form.
Here’s an example from “Fucked-Up Pillow Talk, Part 2,” which is like the famous Abbott and Costello “Who’s On First?” routine, except for the subject matter:
—With some random girl who was really annoying:
Girl “Why don’t you last longer during sex? Ten minutes is not long enough for me.”
Tucker “I don’t understand. I lasted long enough for me to cum. Why would I go any longer?”
Girl “I want to cum too. What about me?”
Tucker “Who?”
Girl “Me.”
Tucker “Who are we talking about here?”
Girl “ME!”
Tucker “Who?”
Girl “I HATE YOU!”
Tucker “Who hates me?”
You can read other stories at TuckerMax.com. During the interview, Tucker’s friend, “Bunny” in Assholes Finish First, was present, along with Murph, his dog, and a bunch of law students from Arizona State University.
Jake Seliger: How’s your tour so far?
Tucker Max: Long and tiring but good.
JS: In another interview, you said that when you give speeches at colleges, you don’t tell stories and instead talk about what it is to live your dreams and take the path less traveled. So what is it to live your dreams, and what do you do, especially if you don’t know what your dreams are?
TM: Well you have to find out, don’t you? What I usually do in this speech—how old are you, dude?
JS: Twenty-six. I’m a grad student in English at the University of Arizona.
TM: All right, so—I need to get in interview mode.
JS: You don’t have to—it’s better to just do it like a conversation.
TM: I know, I’ve done this once or twice. So what I try to explain, when you’re an undergrad, generally you think you can do two things. You’re gonna have to get a job after you graduate or you gotta go do more school. Because everyone who’s giving you advice or telling you how to live your life are people who’ve done one of those two things. You don’t generally have anyone in your life who has gone out on their own and done something entrepreneurial or done something artistic or truly risky or truly taken the path less traveled, because those people—
JS: Aren’t in schools?
TM: —don’t work in academics. And don’t become cubicle monkeys. So what I try and explain in my speeches is that there’s a third way. Because a lot of people—I think most people—want to do something besides those two things. But they don’t really know how. They don’t know how to start, they don’t know how to get there, they don’t even know where to go. Unfortunately, there’s a map—if you want to stay in academia, it’s real fucking simple. There’s a map if you want to become a cubicle monkey. There’s no map for finding your dreams. There’s a process to it, and generally speaking, what you want to do, especially when you’re young, in college or right out of college when you have no debt, no responsibilities, no one relying on you, you’ve got all the freedom in the world. What you want to is experience as much as possible, see as much as possible, do as much as possible, hit as much as you can in the world. What you’re going to find are a whole list of things that you’re passionate about. And a whole list of things that you’re good at. And where those two circles overlap is where your life should fall. At least in terms of what you do for a living. And what you love and what creates value for other people. When you can find something that does both, that’s what you should focus on. That’s the sort of thing that people like me, people like Bunny, Tim Ferris, that’s what we did. We found a way to connect those two things. Taking that path is like a vision quest, so I can’t tell you, well, you need to be a surf coach in Brazil. What the fuck do I know, dude? I don’t know what your passion is, I don’t know what you’re good at, I don’t know what gets you up in the morning. I know generally how to approach that idea, and I know how hard it is, and I know the general things you’re going to have to overcome. But there is no map to that. And that’s what I try to explain in the speech.
JS: Your talk reminds me of Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, who observed that he’s not the funniest man in the world, and he’s not the best artist in the world, but he’s funnier than most people, and he’s a better artist than most people. And he combined those two things into Dilbert, and it worked really well for him.
TM: If I understand it correctly, it was a hard path. I don’t know his story real well, but if I remember correctly—I mean, here’s the problem. A lot of people who’ve succeeded either don’t remember or don’t understand how they got from where everyone else is to where they are.
JS: Or they make a narrative out of it, that takes out the ambiguity.
TM: They make the ex-post narrative, that simplifies it, and makes it look like it was inevitable. That’s not the way it works.
JS: Do you find that people who’re responding to your books create this kind of ex-post narrative?
TM: About me? Yeah, absolutely. Usually guys in their mid-twenties, 27 to 29, 30, whatever—
JS: That’s right where I am!
TM: Well, guys like that who read my stuff, there’s a certain type who—I’m not better looking, I’m not smarter, I’m not a better writer, but they’re stuck in a cubicle and I’m a star. And they get fuckin’ pissed off and can’t understand why—”Well, if I had a trust fund, I’d be able to do this.” I didn’t have a trust fund. I couldn’t eat for a couple years when I first started. I mean, you can ask [Bunny], who was my friend before anyone knew who I was in the world. There were times I was basically stealing food. And they’ll say—
JS: Hence the story about looking in the girl’s wallet?
[Laughter.]
TM: There were times, people are like, “Oh, well you already did it, if I had written my stories down—” dude, there is an unlimited market for funny stuff.
JS: It also helps to have a really strong sense of dialogue and pacing.
TM: My book agent, Byrd Leavell, estimates that he has seen 20,000 submissions since I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell came out in January of 2006. Twenty thousand submissions saying, “I’m the next Tucker Max, I’m the drunk Tucker Max, I’m the girl Tucker Max, I’m the monk Tucker Max, whatever.” Twenty thousand!
JS: Wait, I want to talk about the monk Tucker Max.
TM: But he hasn’t signed any of them, because they all suck as writers, or they’re not emotionally authentic, or it’s not funny, or whatever. People create all these narratives explaining away why they haven’t had the courage to take their personal path, or explaining away my success, or anyone else. Anyone who succeeds in anything, there’s always going to be people who don’t have the courage to do that. They get upset about it, either explain it away, or dismiss it away.
JS: It sounds like you almost found out by accident. In Assholes Finish First you say that when you and your friends graduated from law school, “We were slowly realizing that the ‘real life’ we’d chosen really fucking sucked. A lot.” Sounds like you’re trying to tell people how not to do that.
TM: As much as I’d like to sit here and be like, “Yeah, I had the courage to do all this stuff, and I had the vision to see where I was gonna go and I knew I would get there.” That’s fuckin’ bullshit. That’s not true. That’s the narrative I might tell when I’m 70, and I can’t remember all this stuff.
JS: Trying to inspire your grandkids?
TM: Right. The true, true story is it’s a combination of some determination and some talent on my part. Some talent, a lot of determination, a lot of luck, and a lot of serendipity. And a lot of failure. I was fired—
JS: There’s a section about failure in the book.
TM: I was fired from the legal profession, basically. I wasn’t just fired from Fenwick and West—you read the first book, the story’s in there. I got fired in such a public way that there was almost no way I was going to get back into law. I would have to go back and be a public defender or something if I wanted to be a lawyer. Seriously.
JS: Which these days, a lot of people would be happy with, because lawyers can’t find jobs—
TM: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I was fired from the legal profession. I went to work for my father, he has a restaurant company in Florida. I went to work for him. A long, intricate story, it basically ends with me getting fired by my father.
JS: Didn’t you say the employees were more politically savvy than you were?
TM: My dad’s employees knew how to manipulate the situation better than I did. There was an internal battle, I wanted to take the company in one way, they wanted to maintain their job. They understood corporate politics, I didn’t. I thought because my name was on the door I was right, I would win. I was 25 years old, I was very naive, very naive. If either of those things had succeeded, I’m not sure I would have ever taken this path, because without that jolt of failure, you won’t ever stop and think. You know, if you’re on a train, you keep going on the train. You don’t stop to think, am I going to the right place. But failure forces you, failure crystalizes it. Failure forces you to think about it, about where you are, what your mistakes were, and where you’re going. And after those two failures, for me, it was like—I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, it’s this book—I don’t know if any of you read it—when it came out—
JS: Yeah.
TM: Well you’re an English major, I’m sure you’ve read it. When it came out, it was like—Eggers was like the hipster God. Everyone was like, “Oh, he’s the greatest writer of history, he’s funnier than Salinger, blah blah blah,” and I read this and I’m like, I can do better than this, I said it in a very arrogant, “I’m fuckin’ better than this” way. Now that I’ve done it, it sounds different. But at the time, it was totally posturing.
JS: Your friends were probably somewhat skeptical?
TM: Actually, my friends believed in me more than I did at the time. But that’s a different story. So instead of doing anything I just talked shit about them [the authors], whatever. And then I read Fight Club. I’d seen the movie, but I saw it when I was like 21, and I thought it was about fighting, I didn’t understand—like the way these 19-year-old idiots think my book is about drinking and fucking.
JS: Well, it is on one level. But it depends on how you wanna—
TM: Yeah, exactly. I read Fight Club, and it was like a slap in the face. The basic message of Fight Club is, “If you’re the man you think you are, then go out and be it. Go out and prove it.” And it was like, okay. All right. I’m going to go do this. At the same time—my buddy, who’s PWJ in the book. The first five stories or something like that of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell started as e-mails to my buddies. “Sushi Pants,” I drove from that parking lot to my office at the time. I was living in Florida. I wrote that e-mail to my buddies. Almost verbatim. And PWJ was like, “Dude, this is what you should be doing. This is really good. This is the funniest shit I’ve ever read. You need to put this stuff up on a website, write a book, whatever.”
JS: Get it out there?
TM: He’s like, “Clearly, you don’t have the personality to work in law, to work in business, you are too much of an anti-authoritarian ass.”
JS: You seem like the sort of person who might start his own firm, though, and eventually roll with it. I don’t know if you’d insult clients too often.
TM: You know, if I was the type—I’m definitely the type, “I want my own kingdom.” But I was so reckless, so outa control, so obstinate, even at 23, 24, and 25—
JS: It seems to work really well with women.
TM: It does. Being the bad boy helps. I couldn’t exist in the normal business / legal system, because it’s so conformist and so anti-contrarian. And I’m such a contrarian. I was like literally pushed out of the system. And I ended up turning it around and making it work for me. But there’s no doubt that had that not happened, had I not failed so catastrophically and so completely, I’m not sure I would have ever had the half courage and half necessity. It’s like, if you break your leg in the middle of the forest and you crawl out, how much of that is courage and how much of that is survival? It’s kind of the same thing.
JS: And how much of that is luck being near the edge of the forest.
TM: Right, right. That was kind of the thing for me. It was half determination and half necessity. What the fuck else was I going to do? For me, it was either go follow your path and find your destiny, or accept the fact—change your behavior and become a monk. Become a cubicle monkey. And I went the other way.
JS: It’s interesting that you mention Fight Club and materialism, because there’s that line, I think it’s in Assholes Finish First, where you say you’re at a friend’s place with 19-year-old twins, and he’s worried about the wood floor or something like that.
TM: She was there, man!
JS: Can you say more about that party?
Bunny: Oh, they sucked. It was such a bizarre night, because those twins were just so weird. And so young.
TM: I mean, they were 19, but they acted like—
Bunny: The one in the car, when we were listening to, what was it—The Little Mermaid, “Under the Sea.” Oh my God.
TM: And you were makin’ fun of me.
Bunny: Yeah, and they showed up and they were just wasted. Totally wasted. They could barely walk.
TM: Cause they were so nervous.
Bunny: They were really cute girls, but it was so weird to have twins come to you in that manner.
JS: If it was normal, I guess it wouldn’t make a good story.
TM: Right, right, exactly.
JS: The Fight Club and materialism thing, there’s this line in [Assholes Finish First] where you say he had all this stuff, and yet he’s not having any fun, so what’s the point of having the stuff? [Direct quote: “All that money, all that stuff, and no freedom to just have fun.”]
TM: Yeah.
JS: I’m trying to academic-ize the question, but is that part of your philosophy? It sounds like Fight Club contributed to that.
TM: Look dude, what does it matter? I don’t want to regurgitate Chuck Palahniuk’s book, but what does it matter if you have a perfect apartment but you hate your life? He said it better than I ever could. He’s a much better writer, and that book is so brilliant. I mean, I wish I could write like that. I can’t. But I figured out somewhere in my mid-twenties that what mattered to me were experiences and relationships and ultimately what mattered was this: “Do I wake up every morning and love my life? And am I excited to do what I have to do?” Or: Am I waking up and hating what I have to do? And if I’m hating it, why the fuck am I doing it? Why don’t I change?
JS: I think the best lawyers and the best academics, even the ones working within the system, still love what they do. Otherwise they wouldn’t be at the top of it.
TM: You can love being a lawyer. I don’t have some scathing indictment of the entire legal system.
JS: That’s good, because we’ve got a bunch of lawyers sitting here.
TM: It’s not that you can’t like being a lawyer. But almost every job in law is predicated ultimately on exploitation or stealing. And even the way you do it, you do this awful, mind-numbing, grinding work. You’re cleaning up other people’s messes. And it fuckin’ sucks. That’s just not who I am. I’m a creator. I want to make something. I don’t want to clean up someone else’s shit. I would be a fuckin’ garbage man if that’s what I wanted, because at least I’d get exercise. It’s just like, yeah, what’s the point?
JS: If you start asking, “What’s the point?”, you can go very deep.
TM: When I moved to Austin, I got a bunch of royalty checks right in a row and I got a ton of money. I was trying to figure out what car—I’m not a huge material guy, but I wanted a nice car. I thought about getting a Maserati, a whatever. But I’ve got her [points to Murph]. And she’s a dog. And she doesn’t give a fuck if I buy a $200,000 car, she’s going to treat it the same as if I buy a $2,000 car. So if I buy a Maserati, I drop $150,000 on it, and it’s got some ridiculously expensive interior. If I’m yelling at her to keep her paws off, or I can’t bring her along, what the fuck good is that car? So I just bought a basic Range Rover and she fucks up the back, and it’s like, “I don’t care.” It’s a $60,000 car. It’s nice enough that I like driving it around, but it’s not so nice that I can’t use it. I can’t live in it. There’s no point in life if you can’t live it.
JS: Another interviewer said that you’re “one of those 21st-century media figures who has been interviewed so often it’s impossible to learn anything new.” To which I say—
TM: Depends on how good of an interviewer you are. I had a girl—I was hanging out with a girl a few nights ago, in San Francisco, and she asked me a question that I’d never been asked before. Stumped me. I was like, “Wow. I don’t ever get interviews like this.” No. I don’t give a fuck how many times someone’s been interviewed. You can always have a great interview if you—I tell interviewers this all the time. Don’t talk about what you want to talk about. If you want a great interview, talked about what the interviewee wants to talk about. And then you’ll get life out of them. You’ll get substance out of them. You’ll get unrehearsed answers out of them. And you might not get what your editor wants, but it’ll be a good interviewer.
JS: Nice. What do you want to talk about, besides, following your dreams?
TM: I mean, I don’t know. That’s part of your job, isn’t it, is to figure that out?
JS: That’s true, but sometimes the meta questions yield interesting answers too. The other part of my question was, is there anything new I should be asking about, or that others should be asking about?
TM: I’ll tell you, the question she asked me, was “What do you like best about yourself.” Seems like a simple question, right. But then when you think about it—it kinda threw me for a loop. I stuttered for a while, gave a bunch of start and stop answers. I eventually settled on—the thing I ultimately like about myself the most—about myself, not like, “I wrote this book.” I mean, that’s cool but—
JS: For writers, though, I think that often is the thing they like best about themselves—their work.
TM: Then they’re shallow, idiot pieces of shit. If you like the experiences that led to the book, or you like what the book creates, that’s one thing, but if you like just the object, that seems weird. The thing I ultimately rested on is, what I like best about myself is the fact that everything I’ve been through in my life, good, bad, almost every mistake you can make I’ve made—I’ve done so much stupid shit. All this stuff.
JS: Which become your books.
TM: Right. I turn it around. Or I turn it into something good. One of my defining characteristics, I guess, is my refusal to live someone else’s life. To let someone else put their boot on my neck. And everything I’ve ever done in my life, conscious or unconscious, has always been with this underlying desire to create my own path. And forge my own place in the world. And sometimes it’s been bad. Sometimes that’s led to me being arrogant, having too much hubris. I’ve had to climb a much harder path than I might’ve had to if I wasn’t such an arrogant know-it-all asshole when I was in my early twenties. But at the end of the day, because I refused to get off that path and refused to live someone else’s reality, I was able to create something out of nothing. Something good and valuable. Something I value, something other people value.
JS: Are you talking about life experience? Or are you talking about the writing.
TM: Both. I’ve taken the life experiences and made them into something. I’ve taken the failures and struggles and the successes, and I’ve made them into something tangible. Something valuable. I’ve created value for other people.
JS: Otherwise they wouldn’t buy the book, if it wasn’t valuable to them. So why do you think people are afraid of having fun, which seems like an underlying theme?
TM: I think some people are. I think the people who are, are so worried about what other people think of them, are so worried about—they have so much guilt over whatever sort of shit their parents have dumped on them, or other people, or friends, that they are afraid. They are afraid to be who they are, because they think that’s not okay. I’ve had a lot of issues in my life, that’s never been one of mine. I’ve always been willing to say, “Fuck you guys, I’m going to do what I want to do.” And I think that’s ultimately why people connect emotionally to my stuff. Because I’m honest and because I’m not afraid. And that other stuff, the funny, the drinking, whatever, that’s fun and cool and that’s there. But the people who emotionally connect—I mean, some people read it and laugh and that’s it—but the people who emotionally connect to it, that’s I think what they’re connected to.
JS: Maybe regarding the people who’ve emotionally connected to your work, what do you think is the most interesting thing a male fan has ever done in response to your work?
TM: Oh dude. It just happened in Denver. I gotta show you the picture, because this is not believable shit.
JS: It must have been something more than tattoos, then—
TM: Oh no. It’s a tattoo. This guy comes to the line in Denver. And he’s like totally tatted out, flaming homosexual. A dude you would never think would be a fan of my stuff. Huge fan. You know, super nice guy, he’s like, I want you to sign my chest. I’m like, “Signing a dude’s skin is a little weird.” He’s like, no, no, this is a little different. So he takes his shirt off, and he has a tattoo of a bra. A brassiere. A lacy fucking bra tattooed on him. It was fucking crazy. Not a henna tattoo—a fuckin’ tattoo. I was speechless. I was shocked. I didn’t know what the fuck to say, or how to think about this. I was so shocked.
JS: How often do you find yourself speechless? I’m guess not very frequently.
TM: Not very frequently, dude. It happens, but not often. I mean, I was able to render fuckin’ Dr. Drew speechless. So my bar is pretty fuckin’ high. But this dude bolted over it. He skipped over it. I’d never signed a dude’s skin. That’s just weird. But this guy, that was just so out there that I was like, “You got to, right.” So I signed TM. He loves it, gets a picture. He sends me a picture three days later—he went to a tattoo shop that night, got the tattoo guy to fill in where I signed. A permanent tattoo. He now has my signature tattooed—it’s on his back, thank God, it’s not on his dick or ass or something weird. That fuckin’ rendered me pretty, I was like, wow dude.
JS: What’s the most interesting or unusual thing a female fan has ever done?
TM: In Portland, there was a guy who dressed as Jesus. There’s this. A note that a girl passed me last night. I get phone numbers and shit from girls all the time, but she drew me a little cartoon. [Shows a pictured depicting fornicating stick figures.]
JS: Did it work?
TM: No. I hooked up with a different girl. It’s got me saying “Yay!” And we’re all cheering. And my penis is about 18 times larger than it is real life.
[Someone else suggests a woman who brought a condom bouquet of flowers. Or a bag with “whore trinkets” in it.]
JS: If you used to think you were legitimately a hyper-genius, as you said, what do you think now?
TM: Being a genius is overrated. However smart I am or am not, the amount of shit that I don’t know is vastly, infinitely larger than the amount of shit I do know.
JS: Which is true of everyone, because there’s more knowledge than there is time to learn.
TM: Exactly. So, even if I’m the smartest motherfucker on earth, I still don’t know shit.
JS: How old were you when you realized that, or came to that conclusion?
TM: That I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was? It was college. There was a lot that sucked about the University of Chicago, one of the good things was, there’s a lot of smart motherfuckers there. You go in there, and I thought I was the smartest person on earth when I walked in there. And then I was like, maybe I’m not. I can compete, but I’m not an all star there.
JS: I see the same kind of things in my students, since I’m teaching English Comp at the University of Arizona.
TM: Yeah, you get a kid like I was—the smartest kid in my high school. They’re like, great.
JS: The University of Chicago has a reputation for being very good at beating that out of you.
TM: It does. No doubt. I think, my first class or second class was David Bevington teaching The History of the Peloponnesian War. Bevington’s like the world’s premier Shakespeare scholar. And he was teaching a book that wasn’t even in his specialty, but he knows Thucydides really well. The first fuckin’ day, I walked out of that class and my brain fuckin’ hurt. This dude, he was so nuanced and so brilliantly subtle, it was like, “Fuck this guy is smart. Fuck!” I could keep up, but I had to run at a dead sprint to keep up with him going backwards. So I’m like, “All right, maybe I’m not as smart as I think.”
JS: How often do you think the stuff you’ve learned in school has been useful in, say, picking up girls at bars and what not?
TM: Being smart never hurts, at least for me. I’m not the type that being smart’s ever gotten in my way. A lot of people over-think stuff, whatever. That’s never been my issue. I’ve always been able to sort of cut the Gordian knot, to go in when it’s time to go in. Being smart, though, never hurts.
JS: You also said somewhere that you have a 100% discount rate, which I find somewhat hard to believe. If you do—
TM: You understand what that means?
JS: Yeah, yeah. I think anyone who would proclaim that doesn’t have one by default.
TM: Of course, of course.
JS: You ever read Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd’s The Time Paradox?
TM: No, I know the book, but I’ve never read it.
JS: It might be useful for you because it sounds like you’re a very present-oriented person—
TM: Definitely my point.
JS: —which might be an artifact of your writing.
TM: It’s also an artifact of my emotionally stressful childhood. Anytime you go through stress like that, you discount the future. Because it’s uncertain.
JS: Do you have any stories involving the University of Arizona or ASU that you haven’t told before, or that you’d like to share?
TM: SlingBlade used to live in Tucson—
JS: My apologies.
TM: Yeah, right. He works for the government. And his first posting was in Tucson, so I’ve been there a couple times, but not really. Who hangs out in Arizona?
JS: People who go to school in Arizona!
TM: Right, and I’m not at school in Arizona.
JS: You mentioned in Assholes Finish First, “I don’t have any legitimate excuse—”which is a funny phrase, because maybe you had an illegitimate excuse”—for what I did. I was stupid in my twenties, so what do you want from me?” Stories, evidently. But how about now? How do you think your 45-year-old self is going to look back on what you’re doing now?
TM: What I did at 25, or—
JS: What you’re doing now.
TM: Right now, dude, I think I’m kinda in a transitionary phase. When I was 25, five, six nights a week, I would’ve gone through a brick wall at the smell of pussy, I was an unguided missile of debauchery, dude. Now I’m much more measured. Also—it’s so easy for me now. It’s like, I’ve played this game, I’ve won it so well, it’s not even—it’s not fun anymore.
JS: Transcended the game?
TM: You played with GI Joes when you were 10, you play with yourself when you’re 20. GI Joes aren’t interesting anymore.
JS: Interesting comparing girls to GI Joes.
TM: I’m not comparing girls to GI Joes, I’m saying stages of life. This time, I’m on to other things. I’m still like one foot—I still like girls a lot, I still like hooking up, I still like drinking up, I like hanging out with my friends. I’m still coming out of one stage and coming into another, and I’m not fully out of one or fully into the other.
JS: I almost got to this earlier, but I’ll ask it to you explicitly because I ask it to every writer I interview: is there anything you wish interviewers would ask you that they don’t?
TM: The big thing with my interviewers, a lot of them, I think they take the wrong narrative from me. You get stupid questions, like “How long can you keep this up?” Do you ask that shit to Kid Rock? That motherfucker’s like 45, he’s drunk backstage at the CMTs last night, the afterparty started in eighth grade. Why doesn’t anyone ask him that?
JS: They probably do.
TM: They don’t.
JS: Really?
TM: They don’t. Because the narrative about rock stars is that they can do it. They can do all this stuff, it’s okay for them. But for some reason it’s not okay for me. I don’t know. It’s almost like—your interview is actually pretty good, if it sucked, I’d probably tell you, trust me.
JS: Thanks, I think.
TM: Most interviewers don’t get that there’s other stuff going on. And so they ask stupid questions like, “What do you think about inventing Fratire?” I don’t know, I didn’t even fuckin’ name it, go ask a literary critic. I get stupid questions like that, that don’t have anything to do with the substance. But this is actually not that type of interview, you covered most shit that I’d like to cover.
JS: Anything else you’d like to add or say?
TM: I think you got it man.
What Tucker said often resonated with what others said, but in very different contexts. For example, his comment about undergrad echoes Paul Graham’s third option mentioned in “A Student’s Guide to Startups:” “Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup.” He’s also telling undergrads (and people in general) that there are more options than they imagine (“You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss” is also on point).
Tucker is discussing work and one’s life, but one can see the same idea underlying his stories about sex: your own sex life doesn’t have to do what your parents, teachers, or friends think it should be. If you’re strong enough, you can go your own way. And his own way is funnier than most people’s.
Tucker also said regarding Fight Club, “I’d seen the movie, but I saw it when I was like 21, and I thought it was about fighting, I didn’t understand—like the way these 19-year-old idiots think my book is about drinking and fucking.” I teach English composition. Each semester is divided into three major units: the first is called “Questioning Authority and Assumptions,” the second is on novels, and the third is called “Rereading Romance.” The first is nominally about what the title implies, but it’s really about understanding how school and cultural systems are set up to create beliefs. We read a few Paul Graham essays, a few short stories, and some poems. The third is nominally about romance and love stories, but it’s really about how people respond to incentives, structures, and social situations. Most students don’t pick those things up until, on the last day of the third unit, I give a little speech about what they’re really about versus what they’re supposedly about. I don’t think very many of my students get the deeper point, which is okay because they’re 18 and 19. Maybe they eventually will.
In addition, the Fight Club section—along with the comments about the friend with the nice stuff—reminds me of this New York Times article on “minimalism,” or the practice of not caring about having a lot of shit.
This advice for interviewers is good: “Don’t talk about what you want to talk about. If you want a great interview, talked about what the interviewee wants to talk about,” but harder to implement in practice than it sounds. A lot of interviewees don’t know what they want to talk about, or they want to give the standard party line, and it’s a challenge to find what they want to talk about beyond that. Dating is often the same way: getting substance out of someone is hard immediately after you meet them. Hard, but doable. Ditto for interviews, which is what Tucker says: “That’s part of your job, isn’t it, is to figure that out?”
One other note from me: this was an unusual experience because I mostly interview writers who aren’t sufficiently famous that if you walked into a room and asked 20 people who they are, most wouldn’t know. But Tucker was the opposite, and I’ve never been in an environment that was more like interviewing a celebrity: dozens of people milling around; long lines; nervous expectation; and an obvious interview script that I probably didn’t really knock him off.
How Universities Work, or: What I Wish I’d Known Freshman Year: A Guide to American University Life for the Uninitiated
Note that you can also read this essay as a .pdf.
Introduction
Fellow graduate students sometimes express shock at how little many undergraduates know about the structure and purpose of universities. It’s not astonishing to me: I didn’t understand the basic facts of academic life or the hierarchies and incentives universities present to faculty and students when I walked into Clark University at age 18. I learned most of what’s expressed here through osmosis, implication, inference, discussion with professors, and random reading over seven years.
Although most of it seems obvious now, as a freshman I was like a medieval peasant who conceived of the earth as the center of the universe; Copernicus’ heliocentric[1] revolution hadn’t reached me, and the much more accurate view of the universe discovered by later thinkers wasn’t even a glimmer to me. Consequently, I’m writing this document to explain, as clearly and concisely as I can, how universities work and how you, a freshman or sophomore, can thrive in them.
The biggest difference between a university and a high school is that universities are designed to create new knowledge, while high schools are designed to disseminate existing knowledge. That means universities give you far greater autonomy and in turn expect far more from you in terms of intellectual curiosity, personal interest, and maturity.
Universities are also supposed to help students help themselves. That is, you, the student, are or should be most responsible for your own learning.
Degrees
This section might make your eyes glaze over, but it’s important for understanding how universities work. If you’re a freshman in college, you’ve probably just received your high school diploma. Congratulations: you’re now probably working toward your B.A. (bachelor of arts) or B.S. (bachelor of science), which will probably take four years. If you earn that, you’ll have received your undergraduate degree.
From your B.A./B.S., if you wish to, you’ll be able to go on to professional degrees like law (J.D.), medicine (M.D.), or business (M.B.A.), or to further academic degrees, which usually come in the form of an M.A., or Master’s Degree. An M.A. usually takes one to two years after a B.A. After or concurrently with an M.A., one can pursue a Ph.D., or Doctor of Philosophy degree, which usually takes four to ten years after a B.A.
The M.A. and Ph.D. are known as research degrees, meaning that they are conferred for performing original research on a specific topic (remember: universities exist to create new knowledge). Professional degrees are designed to give their holder the knowledge necessary to be a professional: a lawyer, a doctor, or a business administrator.
Many if not most people who earn Ph.D.s ultimately hope to become a professor, as described in the next section. The goal of someone earning a Ph.D. is essentially to become the foremost expert in a particular and narrow subject.
Professors, Adjuncts, and Graduate Students
There are two to three main groups—one could even call them species—you’ll interact with in a university: professors, adjunct professors, and graduate students.
Professors almost always have a Ph.D. Many will have written important books and articles in their field of expertise. They can be divided into two important classes: those with tenure—a word you’ll increasingly hear as you move through the university system—and those without. “Tenure,” as defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary that comes with Mac OS X 10.6, is “guaranteed permanent employment, esp. as a teacher or professor, after a probationary period.” It means that the university can’t fire the professor, who in turn has proven him or herself through the publication of those aforementioned books and papers along with a commitment to teaching. This professor will probably spend her career at the university she’s presently at.
Those without tenure but hoping to achieve it are on the “tenure track,” which means that, sometime between three and six years after they’re hired, a committee composed of their peers in the department will, along with university administrators and others, decide whether to offer tenure. Many professors on the tenure track are working feverishly on books and articles meant for publication. Without those publications, they will be denied tenure and fired from their position.
Adjuncts, sometimes called adjunct professors, usually have at least an M.A. and often have a Ph.D. They do not have tenure and are not on the “tenure track” that could lead to tenure. They usually teach more classes than tenured or tenure-track professors, and they also have less job security. Usually, but not always, adjuncts teach lower-level classes. They are not expected to do research as a condition of staying at the university.
Graduate Students (like me, as of this writing) have earned a B.A. or equivalent and are working towards either an M.A. or a Ph.D. From the time they begin, most graduate students will spend another two to eight years in school. They take a set number of small, advanced classes followed by tests and/or the writing of a dissertation, which is an article- or book-length project designed to show mastery in their field.
Many—also like me—teach or help teach classes as part of their contract with the university. In my case, I teach two classes most semesters, usually consisting of English 101, 102, or 109 for the University of Arizona. As such, I take and teach classes. In return, the university doesn’t charge me tuition and pays me a small stipend. Most graduate students who teach you ultimately want to become professors. To get a job as a professor, they need to show excellence in research—usually by writing articles and/or books—as well as in teaching.
For all three groups, much of their professional lives revolve around tenure, which brings additional job security, income, and prestige.
Two Masters
Most graduate students and non-tenured professors serve two masters: teaching and research. As an undergraduate, you primarily see their teaching side, and your instructors might seem like another version of high school teachers. For some if not most instructors, however, teaching is not their primary duty and interest; rather, they primarily want to conduct original research, which usually takes the form of writing articles (also sometimes called “papers”) and books. The papers you are assigned for many classes are supposed to help you prepare for more advanced writing and research.
Graduate students and professors feel constant tension between their teaching and their research / writing responsibilities. Good ones try to balance the two. For most graduate students and professors, however, published research leads to career advancement, better jobs, and, ultimately, tenure.
Many of your instructors will have stronger incentives to work on research than teaching. This doesn’t mean they will shirk teaching, but many do. Some teach creatively and diligently, as they should. But it’s nonetheless wise to understand the two masters most of your instructors face; they are usually rewarded much more for research than teaching.
In graduate school multiple professors told me to minimize my time spent teaching and maximize my time spent researching. This isn’t unusual advice. Grad students and non-tenured professors are often explicitly told not to waste time on teaching, since that doesn’t lead to advancement, and often imbibe a cultural atmosphere that denigrates teaching. This is important if you’re wondering why your professors seem distracted or uninterested in the classroom. Professors are often incentivized not to focus on teaching. Professional academics understand these facts well, but they’re surprisingly poorly understood by everyone else:
There is only one problem with telling students to seek out good teaching in college. They’re going to have some trouble finding it, because academic institutions usually don’t care about it. Oh, they’ll tell you otherwise, in their promotional material. But I advise you to be skeptical. The profession’s whole incentive structure is biased against teaching, and the more prestigious the school, the stronger the bias is likely to be. (Deresiewicz 180-1)
I personally think teaching is of great importance and that schools ought to reward teaching, but “what I personally think” and “what is true” are different in this situation.
Interacting with Professors, Adjuncts, and Graduate Students
To earn tenure (or work towards a PhD, or earning tenure), many professors and grad students spend long periods of time intensely studying a subject, most often but not exclusively through reading. They expect you to read the assigned material and have some background in reading more generally; if you don’t, expect a difficult time in universities.
Professors and other instructors have devoted or are devoting much of their lives to their subjects. As you might imagine, having someone say that they find a subject boring, worthless, or irrelevant often irritates professors, since if professors found their subject boring, worthless, or irrelevant, they wouldn’t have spent or be planning to spend their lives studying it.
Most make their subject their lives and vice-versa. They could in theory earn more money in other professions but choose not to pursue those professions, but they are often excited by knowledge itself and want to find others who share that excitement. If you say or imply their classes are worthless, you’ve said or implied that their entire lives are worthless. Most people do not like to think that their lives are worthless.
Professors can sometimes seem aloof or demanding. This is partially due to the demands placed on them (see “Two Masters,” above). Being aloof or demanding doesn’t mean a professor doesn’t like you. Most professors are interested in their students to the extent that students are interested in the subject being taught. Engaged professors often try to stir students’ interest in a subject, but actively hostile/ uninterested students will often find their instructors uninterested in them. Motivated and interested students often inspire the same in their professors.[2] It’s a virtuous cycle.
To be sure, there are exceptions: some professors will be hostile or uninterested regardless of how much effort a student shows, and some will be martyrs who try to reach even the most distant, disgruntled student. But most professors are in the middle, looking for students who are engaged and focusing on those students.
Nearly all your instructors have passed through the trials and tests they’re giving you: if they hadn’t done so, and excelled, they wouldn’t be teaching you. Thus, few are impressed when you allocate time poorly, try to cram before tests, appear hungover in class, and show up late to or miss class repeatedly. On the other hand, many will cut slack for diligent students who show promise.
One reason professors don’t think much of student excuses is because many students have different priorities than professors. As undergraduates, most professors were part of the “academic culture” on campus, to use Murray Sperber’s term (5); in contrast, many undergraduates are part of the collegiate (interested in the Greek system, parties, and football games) or vocational (interested in job training) cultures. The academic culture, according to Sperber, “[has a] minimal understanding of, and sympathy for, the majority of their undergraduate students” (7) at big public schools.
I think Sperber is too harsh, but the principle is accurate: if you aren’t in school to learn and develop your intellect—and most students in most schools aren’t, as Sperber shows—you probably won’t understand your professors and their motivations. But they will understand yours. Academics are a disproportionately small percentage of the student population at most schools but an extraordinary large proportion of grad students and professors.
Another book, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, describes how many universities have evolved two or more tracks, but those tracks are mostly concealed from the students. One track is primarily academic, with hard, usually technical, majors that are highly demanding and that usually lead to developing important skills. The other track is primarily social and leaves students with fewer skills but lots of time to party. The latter track works reasonably well, or is at least not catastrophic, for students from wealthy and/or well-connected families that can get intellectually weak, low-skill students jobs upon graduation—even graduation with a dubious degree and four years of intense partying. The party/social track doesn’t work well for students with poorer or disconnected families. The more time I spend in the system the more apparent the two tracks become—and the more I wish students were explicitly told about them.
Requirements for Undergraduates
You can only graduate from a university if you pick a major and fulfill its requirements. Clark called its undergraduate requirements “Perspectives,” while the University of Arizona calls them “Gen Eds” or “General Education Requirements.” There is no way to avoid filling requirements, and most requirements demand that you spend a certain amount of time with your rear end in a seat at a certain number of classes. Fulfill as many requirements as possible as soon as you realize those requirements exist, assuming you want to graduate on time.
You’ll often be assigned an “academic advisor,” whose job it is to help keep you on track to graduate and to help you pick courses. Don’t be afraid of this person: he or she will often help you or point you to people who can help you. At bigger schools, your advisor will often seem harried or uninterested, but even if that person is, remember that he or she is still a valuable resource. And if you can’t get help from your counselor, find the requirements of potential majors or all majors and work toward checking them off, because you won’t be able to get out of them.
As an undergrad, I tried and found that there is virtually no negotiating with requirements, even if some are or seem silly. For example, Clark required that students take “science perspective.” In studying my schedule and options, I figured that astronomy was the easiest way out. Considering how useless astronomy looked, I decided to petition the Dean of Students to be excused from it so I could take better classes, arguing that I’d taken real science classes in high school and that I could be more productively engaged elsewhere. The answer came quickly: “no.”
Astronomy, as it was taught to me, consisted of tasks like memorizing the lengths of planets from the sun, what the Kuiper Belt is[3], and the like. Tests asked things like the size of each planet—in other words, to regurgitate facts that one can find in two seconds on Google, which is how I found out what the Kuiper Belt is again. The professor teaching it no longer appeared to have a firm grasp of his mental faculties; I think he was in his 80s. At least it was relatively easy: the only worse thing would’ve been having to take, say, chemistry, or a real science class.
That astronomy class was probably the most useless I took, and Clark’s tuition at that time was something like $22,000. I received a scholarship toward tuition, room, and board, so my tuition was probably closer to $16,000, or $8,000 per semester. Undergrads took four classes, so the useless astronomy class cost around $2,000. Would I have rather taken another English class, or computer science class, or a myriad of other subjects? You bet. But I couldn’t, and if I didn’t take some kind of science class, I wouldn’t have been able to graduate, no matter the uselessness of the class.
What should I major in?
I have a theory that virtually everything you learn in universities (and maybe life) is the substance or application of two (or three, depending on how you wish to count) abilities: math and reading/writing. Regardless of what you major in, work on building those two skills.
In the liberal arts, that most often means philosophy, English, and history; other majors vary by university, but those requiring a lot of reading and writing are almost always better than those that don’t. In the hard sciences and economics you’ll be left to develop your reading and writing skills on your own. And this does apply to you, whether you realize it or not. As software company founder and rich guy Joel Spolsky wrote:
Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can’t do anything about that.
The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it’s not whether they prefer Python or Java. It’s whether they can communicate their ideas. By persuading other people, they get leverage.
So if you want leverage, learn how to write. And if liberal arts majors don’t want to be bamboozled by statistics, they better learn some math.
In short, I have no idea what you should major in. But you probably shouldn’t major in business, communication, sociology, or criminal justice, all of which are worthy subjects that, for most undergraduates, are sufficiently watered down that you’re unlikely to challenge yourself much. Odds are that you’ll even make more money as a philosophy major than a business management major (“Salary Increase by Major”).
Paul Graham wrote:
Thomas Huxley said “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” Most universities aim at this ideal.
But what’s everything? To me it means, all that people learn in the course of working honestly on hard problems. All such work tends to be related, in that ideas and techniques from one field can often be transplanted successfully to others. Even others that seem quite distant. For example, I write essays the same way I write software: I sit down and blow out a lame version 1 as fast as I can type, then spend several weeks rewriting it.
The reality is that your specific major probably doesn’t matter nearly as much as your tenacity, ability to learn, and the consistent application of that ability to learn to specific problems. One way people—friends, employers, graduate schools, colleagues, etc.—measure this is by measuring the way you speak and write, which together are a proxy for how much and how deeply you’ve read.
A great deal of college is about teaching you how to learn, and reading is probably the fastest way to learn. Once you’ve mastered the art of reading, you’ll be set for life, provided you keep exercising the skills you develop at a university. Keep that in mind as you search for majors: those that assign more reading, more writing, and more math are probably more worthwhile than those that don’t.
Many people have many opinions about what you should major in, and most of them are probably wrong. This one included. As I said previously, it probably doesn’t matter in the long run, so don’t worry much about what to major in—worry about finding something you’re passionate about and something you love. In Prelude to Mathematics, W.W. Sawyer wrote: “An activity engaged in purely for its consequences, without any pleasure for the activity itself, is likely to be poorly executed” (16 – 17). If possible, find something to major in which you enjoy for itself, or which you can learn to enjoy for itself.
Regardless of what you major in, let me reiterate something I wrote in the introduction: you are or should be most responsible for your own learning. This is true not only in school but in your entire life. You will get some bad teachers, some bad bosses, some bad clients, and some bad situations in your life. Nonetheless it is your responsibility to keep learning, to overcome obstacles, and to help yourself.
Students often want to be spoon-fed everything, but that’s not how the world works. People generally pay other people to solve their problems. Your goal is to develop the skills it takes to solve the problems other people have, so that they pay you. Let’s look at some professions and how, in an ideal world, each profession solves a problem:
- Cop: Solves the need for public safety.
- Scientist: Solves the need for learning how things actually work, and, tangentially to that, how to turn ideas and facts into products.
- Petroleum Engineer: Solves the need for energy, which people require to get from point A to B via car, plane, or train, and for electricity.
- Teacher: Solves the need for education, and helps turn economically useless children into productive adults (Senior).
- Social Media Analyst: Solves the need to advertise through numerous electronic platforms.
You can occasionally find situations in which it’s possible to get paid without solving someone’s problem, but they’re rare. There are also important jobs that are nonetheless illegal but can be analyzed through the same method as the bullet above (for example, prostitutes solve the need for sex, and drug dealers solve the need for different experiences). People on the cutting edge of technology and social change often solve needs for themselves—Mark Zuckerberg needed a way to communicate with others online before most people really noticed that need.
Your teachers and professors, including me, are often not that good at identifying such needs.
Finally, note that you often can’t predict what will be useful and what won’t be. It’s also possible that the people designing your curriculum know more about the subject than you do.
How do I get an A?
One thing you shouldn’t do is say that all you want to do is get an A: as stated above, most professors are completely and utterly invested in their subject. When you ask how you get an “A,” they’re likely to be annoyed because you’re indicating you don’t care about learning, which is the best way to earn an A. Instead, you care about the badge. It’s like asking how you become poet laureate, as Ebenezer Cooke does in The Sot-Weed Factor: the question itself is wrong, because the right question is how you become a poet, and the laureateship will follow (Barth 73). If you ask professors how to get an A, they’ll also tell you what you already know: work hard at the class, show up, read the book(s) and related materials, form study groups, etc.
Another grad student in English said that she’s almost relieved when students say they just want to get an A, because it means she doesn’t have to worry about them or their grade. Paradoxically, when you say that you just want an A/B/C, you lower the probability that you’ll actually get it.
To get that A/B/C, demonstrate that you’re interested in the material, do all the reading, and show up to class every day. Go to the professor’s office hours to ask intelligent questions—like whether you’re on the right track regarding a paper—or what you could’ve done better on a quiz. By doing so, you’re showing that you’re interested in doing better, rather than saying you are. Novelists have a saying: “show, don’t tell,” which means that you should show what a character is thinking and why they are acting in a certain way rather than telling the reader. Readers are smart and will figure it out for themselves. Your professors will be able to figure out in a million ways whether you’re interested in a subject, and when you ask how you get an A, they’ll know you aren’t.
Oh, and don’t fear the library—it’s the big place with the books. If you conduct research with books, your professors will be impressed. And learn to use the online journals. If you don’t know what this means, ask a librarian, who will assist you. They very seldom bite and are there to help, and most schools also conduct library help sessions at the beginning of each year. Indeed, almost everyone at a university is there to help you learn; you just need to a) want to learn and b) ask. Many students never get to point a, and of those who do, more should get to point b.
Reflection
I wrote this now because I’m old enough to, I think, have some perspective on universities while still being young enough to remember the shock and bewilderment of the first semester of my freshman year. This document reflects my academic training and preoccupation: it contains allusions and references to other work and is structured in such a way that you can skip easily from section to section. As a trade-off for its detail, however, weaker or uninterested students might lose interest in it before they come to the end, which is unfortunate because it describes the world they will largely be inhabiting for somewhere between one week and six if not more years.
Anecdotes from my own academic experience are included because discovering facts about the incentives in university life didn’t occur all at once for me. No one gave me a document like this; I was expected to either already know or understand most of what you just read, and as a result, I spent years drawing a mental map of universities. The professors and graduate students had spent long enough in the university atmosphere that they knew how universities were structured with the thoroughness you know your native language. I’ve written this in the hope that it will better explain to you (in the plural sense) what I’ve explained to many individuals.
My natural impetus is to remember when I have to repeat the same things over and over again, consider how I might convey all the things I’ve said to a large number of people, and then write those things down so that they might be read, which is a vastly more efficient information transfer mechanism than speech. Nonetheless, I realize that this document and my explanations are probably not perfect, so if you’ve read this to the best of your ability and still have questions, don’t be afraid to ask them. One thing universities should inculcate is inquisitiveness, and I hope I do so as a teacher and as a person.
Notice that this document has a version number in the upper-right corner: as time goes on and I receive questions or comments, I’ll probably change this document to reflect new concerns. When you ask questions, you’re not only helping yourself discover something: you’re helping the person you’re asking better understand the subject at hand and the nature of what they’re trying to say. By asking me questions about this document, you might help me ultimately improve it, and ultimately help those who read it in the future. If there is one cultural advantage universities should impart more than any other, it is the ability to ask questions about even the most fundamental things; confusion and uncertainty are often the sources of new knowledge.
As Paul Krugman, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics, said of his own research (which led him to the prize):
The models I wrote down that winter and spring were incomplete, if one demanded of them that they specify exactly who produced what. And yet they told meaningful stories. It took me a long time to express clearly what I was doing, but eventually I realized that one way to deal with a difficult problem is to change the question — in particular by shifting levels.
He also has a section called “question the question,” in which he recursively asks himself whether the question he has asked is the right one. For him, as for many people, questions are at the center of the learning universe, and if you learn to ask them promiscuously and then seek the answers, whether from me, your other professors, or from books, you’ll be better equipped to find the answers, do well in college, and do well in life. One challenge is often learning enough to be able to formulate the right questions, and with this in mind, I hope you know how to ask important questions about the institution you’re attending.
As noted previously, you can also download this essay in .pdf form.
Works Cited [4]
Barth, John. The Sot-Weed Factor. New York: Anchor Books, 1987.
Graham, Paul. “Undergraduation.” Personal website. March 2005. Accessed 7 December 2008. <http://paulgraham.com/college.html>
Deresiewicz, William. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Free Press, 2014.
Krugman, Paul. “How I Work.” Personal website. Accessed 11 November 2008. <http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html>
“Salary Increase by Major.” The Wall Street Journal. Undated. Accessed 7 December 2008. <http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html?mod=googlenews_wsj>
Sawyer, W.W. Prelude to Mathematics. New York: Dover Publications, 1982.
Sperber, Murray. Beer and Circus: How Big Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001.
Spolsky, Joel. “Advice for Computer Science College Students.” Personal website. 2 January 2005. Accessed 7 December 2008. <http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html>
“tenure.” The New Oxford American Dictionary. 2010. Mac OS X 10.6 Operating System.
[1] One useful study tip: if you read or hear a word you don’t know, look it up. You’ll expand your vocabulary and, concomitantly, the range of your thinking.
[2] In the hard sciences, for example, it’s often wise to ask professors if you can join their research labs, where you’ll gain valuable experience and make important connections. But most undergraduates don’t seem to realize that the first thing they have to do is ask. The second thing they need to do is show their professors that they won’t be a waste of time.
[3] A bunch of rocks near Neptune’s orbit, for those of you wondering.
[4] Writers include works cited pages so others can draw on the sources used to construct an argument. Contrary to popular belief among freshmen, they’re not just pointless hoops teachers set up, and they become progressively more important as you matriculate.
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