Month: May 2014

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #6: The Mugs

~ jackewilson ~ 7 Comments

As lawyers we sold our time. We made no other product, we had no other purpose. My day was carved up into tiny slices—tenths of an hour. Want a piece of me? You can have it in six-minute increments, rounded up.

And at the end of each day, I tallied it up. Client number 1: three point eight hours. Client number two: four point one. Client number three: zero point two. And so on. It all added up to one thing: me. My job. My day. My life.

Dehumanizing? I tried not to think about it. If I had, I might have felt like this guy:

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Dreaming the Impossible Dream: Weirdness and the University of Chicago

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Rebecca Schuman, education columnist for Slate, takes a look at kids these days. “The helicopter generation has gone to college,” she wails, “and the results might be tragic for us all.”

I confess I started skimming at this point. But this certainly caught my eye:

I do not want to live in a world where the University of Chicago is considered “weird,” and nobody else should either.

I hear you, Rebecca Schuman!

Except, well… this.

And this.

And of course this.

So maybe we just wallow in the weirdness for a while?

Onward. Weirdly upward.

Stephen King, Great Guy

~ jackewilson ~ 5 Comments

First things first: I’ve never finished a Stephen King novel. I’ve started a few, but in the end I’ve never really enjoyed the genre enough to submerge myself for hundreds of pages. I’m not trying to be hoity-toity about it (I’ll leave that to Harold Bloom), I”m just letting you know: I’m more or less a neutral observer when it comes to Stephen King. I’m not a fanboy.

But I can see why he’s sold a zillion books! I find his prose compelling, and when I’ve encountered the odd essay or short story, I’ve gotten pulled in. I like reading his introductions to his books, and I like reading his accounts of things that have happened to him. I’ve read his book On Writing twice. I didn’t take too many writerly lessons from it, but for sheer enthusiasm about sitting down and the typewriter and opening a vein, it’s hard to beat.

You learn along the way, even through this cursory reading, that King has deep blue-collar roots and a real decency toward the people around him. He’s wrestled with some demons. But he also seems like a genuinely nice guy. I wouldn’t mind having him as a neighbor, which is not something I’d have thought before reading the book.

And then there’s this gem from the recent Vanity Fair article on the Rushdie fatwa: Continue reading →

H.G. Wells and the Bumbling Interview

~ jackewilson ~ 1 Comment


God bless H.G. Wells. He seems like kind of a decent guy, and as a kid I loved his books (The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, etc.). My parents had a set of a History of the World he’d written, which I tried to read about a million times but could never get beyond five pages. I don’t think they had either; it had the classic feel of “Oh, that was that year that everyone bought that one book that nobody actually read.”

Something about him always made me think he was kind of a bumbler. Why? Because I realized that other respected writers didn’t take him seriously? I’m not sure. It may have been the cover of my copy of The Time Machine, which had a desperate looking man on it. I always thought that was him. Earnest. Forthright. A Serious Person in capital letters. And…sort of buffoonish. Maybe this is unfair. But it stuck with me.

And then yesterday I ran across an interview he did…of Joseph Stalin.
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A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #5 – The Motorcycle

~ jackewilson ~ 8 Comments

I signed the document I could not read and handed my life savings to the stranger. He grunted and held out a silver case.

My cousin didn’t smile.

“Take one,” he said.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll insult him if you don’t. He’ll lose face.”

I took a cigarette from the case and stuck it behind my ear. The man’s mouth formed something between a sneer and smile, his teeth stained reddish-brown from betel nut. Outside the window, traffic poured by, noisy and chaotic.

I was now the proud owner of a motorcycle. There was only one problem.

I had no idea how to drive it.

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