Little bits

As you might have guessed from my reduced posting schedule here, I've been pretty busy as of late. Or maybe you read the last post, which kinda spelled it out. Either way, recent developments have considerably limited my leisure time. But it hasn't gone away completely. My girlfriend and I have been plowing through HBO's dramady (yes, I used that word) Six Feet Under. And I've been reading Don DeLillo's big book Underworld.

White Noise, DeLillo's most famous book, is probably the best novel I've read during the last couple of years. It quite literally changed the way that I look at the world. So I expected a lot from Underworld, which is fitting, because Underworld expects a lot from me. It's a long, dense book that features many characters, alludes frequently to 20th-century American history, and changes narrative focus and perspective at well. On top of that, it tells its fractured story mostly in reverse chronological order.

DeLillo is much beloved among American literary scholars, and Underworld is a case study of his academic appeal. It's the kind of book that's best read alone in a quiet room, with a pen in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other (and a browser window open to Wikipedia, if you know what's good for you). It begs for interpretation, elucidation, illumination.

HW

It's been an eventful couple of weeks for me. After extensive interviewing (seriously, five friggin' rounds of interviews), I finally bagged a job as an SAT tutor. Evidently the vetting process for SAT tutors is as more or intensive than the vetting process for most finance jobs.

Three of the interviews for this gig doubled as training sessions. I was given a lengthy curriculum less than a week before the first training sesh and told to prepare all three hundred-odd pages of it for a classroom environment in time for that first session. The five-day span in question was an exceptionally busy one in the first place. I thus ended up dealing with an academic time crunch of a sort that I haven't seen since I was actually, y'know, in school. By the time the third training session rolled around this past Wednesday, I'd put in dozens of hours of unpaid preparatory labor, and was so stressed by the weeks of evaluation that I was shaking noticeably during training. Fortunately, my performance wasn't as shaky as my limbs, and they hired me.

So now it's time for me to stop worrying about getting the job and start worrying about doing the job.

I stand corrected, sorta

Boo.

I have a lot of fashion-inclined friends. Given that I despise fashion myself, this state of affairs is a little strange. Maybe it's because I have a lot of female friends, or because I travel in circles where aesthetics are a big deal. Maybe it's both.

Since I like to antagonize those closest to me, I've found myself in a lot of arguments about the value of fashion as an art. Usually these discussions go something like this:

Me: I hate it when people talk about fashion as though it's some sort of high-art form. It's just clothing!
Friend/relative: Well, fashion has produced countless beautiful objects, and the way it plays with the human body's shape is definitely an art form. It's also a method of communication; the clothes we wear signify certain facts about our—
Me: NO FASHION IS STUPID SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

And really, I haven't changed my mind. Most fashion is pretty dumb, and while it definitely involves some artistic elements, it doesn't deserve to be mentioned alongside the traditional 'fine' arts, literature, music, and so on.

Clothing really is an effective means of communication, though. Ordinarily I'm a dedicated T-shirt and jeans guy. But yesterday I had a job interview, so I dressed myself to the nines—in my case, a button-down shirt, khakis and non-sneaker shoes qualify as "the nines."

At least they're fucking tryiiiiiiiiiiiiing

It's really hard for bands to make money these days. Necessity is the mother of invention, and some groups have come up with novel ways of driving up revenue. Here's one example:

This little guy is called Juke-Bot, and he's an album. Specifically, he's a compilation of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist's demo recordings called Hard Sell. Juke-Bot's got a built-in USB drive that comes with the demos on board. If you buy him, you can pop the music on your hard drive and then use Juke-Bot as a jump drive.