Blagojevich sentencing poll

It’s not every state whose news organizations get to poll audiences on appropriate prison time for an ex-governor.

This poll is from WCIA in Champaign.

Update, 12:44 p.m.: He got fourteen years. U.S. District Judge James Zagel: “When it is the governor who goes bad, the fabric of Illinois is torn and disfigured and not easily repaired.”

Review: The Wage Slave’s Glossary

Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell. The Wage Slave’s Glossary. Designed and decorated by Seth. Emeryville, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2011. 173 pages. $11.95 US / $12.95 CA.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

William Faulkner, in a 1956 Paris Review interview

The work of a writer and editor (Glenn), a philosopher (Kingwell), and artist and designer (Seth), The Wage Slave’s Glossary is a sequel to the trio’s The Idler’s Glossary (2008), whose entries explored a world free from the imperatives of getting and spending. (Sample entries: skylarking, sleep, slouch, stroll.) This new book is both well and oddly timed. In an era of economic collapse, it makes good sense to examine the language of work and the ways in which such language naturalizes perspectives and practices that might otherwise seem repellent. (Consider downtime, which identifies the worker at rest with an out-of-service machine.) Yet when so many are desperate to find a job, any job, the authors’ anarcho-revolutionary suspicion of “the work idea” itself seems strangely detached from human circumstance and urgency. It’s nice to envision the world “as a site not of work but of play,” but one still has to eat.

Suspicion of “the work idea” aside, The Wage Slave’s Glossary is a grand and saddening tour of language past and present. So many of the terms herein suggest weariness as the necessary consequence of work: boreout (“a syndrome of exhaustion and disillusionment caused by office work that is underwhelming and unsatisfying”), burnout (“long-term mental and emotional exhaustion and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment”), grinding house (slang for a house of correction, then for a place of work), guolaosi (“Mandarin neologism meaning ‘overwork death’”), karoshi (Japanese for “death from overwork”). Euphemisms abound: downsizing, for instance, which seems to have euphemisms of its own:

Also known as: recruitment, delayering, early retirement, force shaping, headcount adjustment, offshoring (or bestshoring), rightsizing or smartsizing, operational simplification, personnel realignment, rationalizing the workforce, recession, reduction in force (RIF), skill mix adjustment, workforce optimization, and workforce reduction (WFR).

I’m struck too by the metaphors of modern working life: the many ceilings that impede ascent (bamboo, brass, concrete, glass, and stained-glass), the transformation of the human being into machine (bandwidth, multitasking) or obedient drudge. Busy as a bee?

Bees works tirelessly, without ever taking orders or varying their routines, only to be unceremoniously shoved out of the hive when they become useless to the collective.

The Wage Slave’s Glossary is beautifully designed and made — small (4" x 6"), with a glossy embossed cover, cartooned endpapers, and numerous illustrations (each about ¾" square). It’s the kind of book that represents, I think, the future of print — the book as desirable object. (Decidedly not better on a Kindle.) The Wage Slave’s Glossary is — I’ll say it — a labor of love, and worth your money and time.

Related reading
William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12 (Paris Review)

[Thanks to Biblioasis for a review copy of this book.]

On the dash

Merrill Perlman:

Garner’s Modern American Usage calls the dash “perhaps the most underused punctuation mark in American writing.”

But — and this is this columnist’s opinion — it’s frequently overused.

On, Dasher! (Columbia Journalism Review)

[This post is for my advanced writing students, who have made the dash — and its potential for overuse — a frequent occasion of fun in the last weeks of a wonderful semester.]

Another random number

A random number between 1 and 1,000, generated by a journey on the New York subway system this summer.

As Elaine in Arkansas has helped me understand, there’s more to 42 than meets the eye.

A related post
Random number (108)

Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac

The 2012 edition of the Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac is available for download as a PDF. Mark Hurst offers single buying recommendations in various categories, along with useful and sometimes surprising tips and tricks. His computer advice this year: “Get the right Mac, or iPad, depending on your needs.” I second.

Salinger due-date slip at auction

A library due-date slip with J.D. Salinger’s signature is at auction. At least it’s smaller than a toilet (and you probably have one of those already).

Telephone exchange names on screen: Naked City

[Barney Sonners (Robert Duvall) walks from the bar where he works, before robbers and cops show up. “Torment Him Much and Hold Him Long.” Naked City. November 7, 1962. Click for a larger view.]

The Social Security Death Index lists just one Bernard R. Jankoff, 1913–1994. Items in the New York Times have some of the facts of his life. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1935. In 1938 he completed a law degree from Columbia Law School and passed the bar. He married Edith Ragovin (d. 1998) in 1940. They had three children. Mr. Jankoff’s name appears in a number of Times items as representing parties in real-estate transactions. I hope that the Jankoffs’ descendants know about this fleeting moment of television fame.

Update, 10:42 a.m.: I e-mailed family members, and now they do.

[MUrray Hill 7–3933.]

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Murder, My Sweet : Naked City : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

Panhandling and handshakes

Dan Ariely’s account of experiments in panhandling reminded me of the following passage in Infinite Jest (from one of my favorite sections in the novel). Barry Loach’s spiritually despondent brother is in danger of leaving the seminary. That would leave Barry to fulfill his mother’s wish that one of her children enter religious life. But Barry’s dream is to be an athletic trainer. What can he do to restore his brother’s faith in humanity?

After a few suggestions and rejections of bets too way-out even for Barry Loach’s desperation, the brothers finally settle on a, like, experimental challenge. The spiritually despondent brother basically challenges Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes for a while and make himself look homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity, and to stand out in front of the Park Street T-station on the edge of the Boston Common, right alongside the rest of the downtown community’s lumpen dregs, who all usually stood there outside the T-station stemming change, and for Barry Loach to hold out his unclean hand and instead of stemming change simply ask passersby to touch him. Just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth and contact. And this Barry does. And does. Days go by.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Ariely found that passers-by were surprisingly willing to shake a panhandler’s hand. In Wallace’s novel, Loach makes plenty of money, but it’s only saintly Mario Incandenza — with no one “to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted” — who’s willing to shake Barry Loach’s outstretched, fuliginous hand.

Reader, has a panhandler ever offered to shake your hand? What did you do? I’d answer too, but it’s never happened to me. I can’t imagine that the handshake-offer is a technique in wide use.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts

[Fuliginous: sooty. A Wallace word.]

The Los Angeles Times on Mitt Romney and job creation

The Los Angeles Times examines “Mitt Romney’s job creation record“:

The Republican presidential contender says he learned about expanding employment during his time heading a private equity firm. But under his leadership, Bain Capital often maximized profits in part by firing workers.

That’s no surprise to anyone who knows something of the firm’s history. My wife Elaine worked at Bain & Company (pre-Bain Capital) in the 1980s, processing other people’s words, including Mitt Romney’s. Read her take on life at Bain.

A related post
Mitt Romney at Bain

[If Romney becomes the nominee, look for Bain to become a familiar name in political discourse. I think though that it’ll be Gingrich, and that Obama v. Gingrich will resemble Clinton v. Dole. Gingrich seems well suited to play a cranky old guy.]

Random number

Above, a random number between 1 and 1,000, which I obtained from random.org, offering “true random numbers to anyone on the Internet.” Get your own random number today!

[For the record: I know that random numbers are not a joke.]