Brief review: Bait and Switch

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. $24.00

Like Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich's new book bears a title in which the word in parenthesis makes all the difference. Between the hope and its fulfillment falls the futility.

Bait and Switch takes us into a world of people living in parenthesis, white-collar people who are "in transition," the corporate newspeak substitute for "unemployed." As in Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich goes undercover, this time seeking a corporate position, presenting herself as a long-time freelancer (better make that consultant) looking for a position in public relations. Her job-search becomes a job in itself, a miserable one, with episode after episode in a surreal world of life-coaches, image consultants, and résumé rewriters, whose fees total several thousand dollars. Her recommended reading includes The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want, which declares that "you alone are the source of all the conditions and situations in your life." (If you're unemployed, it's not the economy, stupid; it's you.) "Networking" events bring her into impersonal contact with other jobseekers, all trying to be upbeat in chain restaurants and windowless hotel conference rooms. I won't reveal how Ehrenreich's search turns out, except to say that the offers that finally come her way are a very far cry from what she was looking for. Bait and Switch closes by looking at white-collar people who have taken what are called "survival jobs" as "associates" in big-box stores and such: sad to say, their failed searches have ended in the world of Nickel and Dimed.

Many colleges are using Nickel and Dimed in "one book, one campus" programs. I greatly admire that book, but its campus use has, for me, always smacked of piousness--an intention to make students feel a vague compassion for poor people. A college community with reckless courage might ask its students to follow up with Bait and Switch. The two books would give business majors (and everyone else) a chance to rethink the ethics of the brave new corporate world awaiting them.

"Cómo enviarles correos electrónicos a los profesores"

David Acosta, who teaches at the Corporación Universitaria Unitec in Bogotá, Colombia, has translated "How to e-mail a professor" for his students (with my okay, natch). I'm grateful to David for disseminating these guidelines en español.

Click on the link below to download a .pdf file of the translation. Or follow the link in this post from David's blog, Estudio Hacks.

LINK: "Cómo enviarles correos electrónicos a los profesores," por Michael Leddy

Invisible Man and the yam

I took a bite, finding it as sweet and hot as any I'd ever had, and was overcome with such a surge of homesickness that I turned away to keep my control. I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom--simply because I was eating while walking along the street.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

3009 students, here are some useful links to learn about yams. All are interesting; the first, third, fourth, and fifth have the most helpful background for the novel. Thanks to Danny and Lara for these links.

"Home Cooking: Sweet Potatoes or Yams" [from about.com]

"How have yams changed medicine?" [from killerplants.com]

"Supercrop: the yam bean" [from Natural History via zinkle.com]

"What are yams?" [from HungryMonster.com]

"The world's healthiest foods: Yam" [from whfoods.com]

Catachresis

From Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day service:

catachresis \kat-uh-KREE-sis\ noun
*1 : use of the wrong word for the context
2 : use of a forced and especially paradoxical figure of speech

Example sentence:
The paper printed a correction for the previous day's catachresis: dubbing a local artist-philanthropist a "socialist" when they meant "socialite."

And here's an example from an opinion column in a local newspaper:

Prohibition proved a tremendous dud; many of the same people who hailed it spent a great deal of time and effort flaunting it.

That should be flouting, not flaunting.

Shopping with Rev Run

"Who said that a man of God is supposed to drive a Pinto?"

"I'm very Kenny G, slow music CD-101."

"I'm going to stay in my pool and eat fat-free hot dogs for the rest of my life."

From a "shopping with" profile of Rev Run (as in Run-D.M.C.). Rev Run drives a Rolls-Royce. CD-101 is a "smooth jazz" radio station in New York. And fat-free hot dogs are available at your local supermarket.

LINK: "A Rap Minister Works the Aisles" [from the New York Times]

[To read the Times online, visit BugMeNot for a name and password, or create an account of your own.]

Not a test

My wife Elaine and I had a wonderful time last night doing the "open mic" at Jackson Avenue Coffee. With her violin and my guitar, we did two songs from the 1930s--"Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "On a Little Street in Singapore." (Two's the limit.)

As a musician, I'm mostly in the closet, so to speak, and sitting down to play in public has given me great angst (though I've played in public anyway). This time was different: my angst went on all afternoon, and while playing at JAC I felt amazingly relaxed. Elaine's a professional musician, so she understands what it's taken me a long time to figure out--that playing in public is not a test.

Elaine has written about the JAC audience on her blog, and I'll second what she says there: that it's a pleasure to play for people who are really listening, whether the music is familiar or not, whether the performers are vets or novices. And it's a pleasure to play and listen in a place that's designed on a human scale. We didn't even need microphones. Thank you, Jackson Avenue Coffee.

My version of Amish computing

Paul Ford's notion of "Amish computing" appeals strongly to me, especially in its emphasis on distraction-free writing. But I can't imagine going Amish exactly as Ford has. Using WordPerfect for DOS or getting an AlphaSmart device would only bring a new set of complications into my life.

My own modest attempt at "Amish computing" is focused on a simple alternative to Microsoft Word. Most of my writing begins with a legal pad or a pocket Moleskine and a fountain pen. But I do some composing at the keyboard, and always find the bells and whistles of Word annoying. I know that I can remove toolbars and rulers, and I long ago removed smart tags, automatic capitalization, and other doodads, but I prefer to get away from Word. For me, the program is just not conducive to writing. I object even to Word's black background for selected text, which leaves small-sized text looking ugly and pixelated.

So I worked out a distraction-free writing tool for Windows. I use Notepad2, Florian Balmer's free Notepad alternative. I like Alexander Davidson's metapad too, but the Notepad2 interface looks brighter and more in keeping with Windows XP. I also prefer Notepad2 because line height is adjustable, and I can avoid the cramped look of single-spaced text. Either of these programs is superior to the Notepad included with Windows. There are many free text editors available; you might prefer another.

To turn Notepad2 into my writing tool of choice, I added a free spellchecking script from PC911. This tiny script -- spell.vbs -- sends any text copied to the clipboard to the Microsoft Word spellchecker. I found spell.vbs mentioned in the LangaList, Fred Langa's excellent computing newsletter.

The Notepad2/spell.vbs writing tool appeals to me in much the same way that writing on a Palm with a portable keyboard once did--it's simple and free of complications. If I'm writing a blog post, I can do everything with this simple tool. And if I'm writing for print, I can open what I've written in Microsoft Word and make everything look pretty. For me, separating the work of composition from the work of layout makes it possible to write with far less distraction.

"[Y]ou just need to look more hard-working"

The e-mail exchanges between FEMA's Michael Brown and associates as New Orleans lay underwater make for fascinating, appalling reading. I've seen the following bit reproduced on-line only with the spelling and punctuation cleaned up. Here's what Sharon Worthy, Brown's press secretary, wrote to him on September 4:

Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt...all shirts. Even the President rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow.

In this crises [sic] and on TV you just need to look more hard-working...ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!

Ah, the culture of images: "you just need to look more hard-working." Now that this e-mail is out, will politicians and bureaucrats have to find some new way to look hard-working?

LINK: "'Can I quit now?' FEMA chief wrote as Katrina raged" (from CNN.com)

LINK: Katrina e-mails (a .pdf file from CNN.com)

"The Politics of Penguins"

From Andrew Sullivan's essay on The March of the Penguins, "The Politics of Penguins":

One of the chief campaigners against gay marriage, Maggie Gallagher, also hailed the film. "It is hard not to see the theological overtones in the movie," she wrote. "Beauty, goodness, love and devotion are all part of nature, built into the DNA of the universe. Even in the harshest place on the Earth (like 21st-century America?), love will not only endure, it will triumph." Love? Maybe it's because these beautiful creatures have the shape of Middle Americans, waddle amusingly, fall over occasionally and have heads on top of their bodies that we project our own needs and anxieties onto them. But we do so at our peril. Love, it turns out, has very little to do with the mating habits of the Emperor Penguin.

Sullivan's essay is useful reading for anyone tempted to find models for human conduct in the animal world. LINK: "The Politics of Penguins: A March to Nowhere" (from AndrewSullivan.com)

"This is your brain on e-mail"

A new twist on the now-familiar theme that multitasking makes you stupid:

Researchers asked two sets of subjects to take IQ tests. One group had to check e-mail and respond to instant messages while taking the test. The second group just sat down and did the test without distractions. Surprise, surprise, the distracted group didn’t do as well on the test--10 points worse than the control group. In similar testing conditions, people intoxicated by marijuana had scores 8 points lower. So researchers drew attention to their study by noting that multitasking is worse for your ability to concentrate than getting stoned.

LINK: "E-mail Making You Crazy?" from Discover (via Lifehacker)