I have several friends who were punk rockers (vocationally rather than avocationally) who have subsequently gone on to excellent careers, though I suppose most of them were at least middle class kids -- defined as broadly as you'd like, okay? -- and so had access to the help that heebie mentions.
Horrifying how one person ended up a chiropractor, though. You'd think drummer for The Clash would lead to a more respectable career later in life.
1: I'm not calling you old, but I'm also assuming you're not talking about millenials.
You can call me old. And you can assume that I never say a word about the generation that shall not be named.
I like that the guy from Crass is now involved with the local lifeboat. It's very British.
There's a charming documentary short about Steve Ignorant and the life boat. I bet at this point in his life he would prefer people to think of him that way than this way.
1. Joe Strummer was the son of a Foreign Office diplomat, but most of the British punks were prosperous working class, in those far off days when such a thing was possible. I don't think many of them would have had the sort of contacts you envisage, that being the key distinction between prosperous working class and lower middle class.
I've commented on this elsewhere, but fast forward to 1989 and hop down to Oxford to see one of my favorite bands, Heavenly. Here are their their post-Heavenly careers: Matthew Fletcher: committed suicide; Amelia Fletcher: economist, high-ranking British trade official, OBE; Rob Pursey: television writer and producer ("Being Human", among others); Peter Momtchiloff: runs OUP's philosophy imprint; Cathy Rogers: former host of ITV's "Junkyard Wars". Look at lineup of the precursor to Heavenly, Tallulah Gosh, and you can throw in a literary critic for the Daily Mail and a winner of the Turner Prize.
Committing suicide isn't really a career.
Some of it is just that British people seem bizarrely capable of combining full-blown professional careers with full-blown artsy side interests. Like you're a leading barrister but somehow also write a 4 volume history of the hundred years war or a civil servant who knows the most about 18th century flower arrangements or whatever. That doesn't seem to happen here. I dunno if the professional jobs here are harder or we're just stupider or less willing to be amateurs or what. I mean I'm no more than a mediocre lawyer and at the end if the day the only thing I have energy for is yelling at people on the internet.
We had Wallace Stevens, famously, but that's not a very recent example.
This guy is a surgeon and makes medical devices and designs and makes men's clothes by hand.
There's a pathologist at the U of C hospital who also teaches Mann and Joyce.
Like you're a leading barrister but somehow also write a 4 volume history of the hundred years war
By the time the fourth volume was published he was a Justice of the Supreme Court and a member of the Privy Council. He's still working on the next one, I understand.
Trying to think if I know people like this. I don't think so - bad screenplays and wineries are all that come to mind.
Some of it is just that British people seem bizarrely capable of combining full-blown professional careers with full-blown artsy side interests.
Working off broad stereotypes, I wonder if this is a side-effect of the British class system -- that once somebody is in a professional career there's less obligation to constantly be a striver?
Wasn't there some doctor in the 90s who was also producing operas?
He qualified as a doctor, but he only practiced briefly, following alternative careers first as a comedy scriptwriter, then as a theatre and opera producer.
There's a US fellow I've heard of who's a real estate developer and TV star who's been pretty good at politics this year....
Some of it is just that British people seem bizarrely capable of combining full-blown professional careers with full-blown artsy side interests.
This seems, even still, common enough in Austin (if we're talking artistic side projects or hobbies, rather than full-blown artistic careers). Part of it seems to be that there are a lot of professional offices where it's not unheard of to wander in closer to 10 than 9 (let alone 8) and wander out some time between 5 and 6 (with an hour lunch), as long as you are diligently doing your chores while there.
I've been trying to combin[e] full-blown professional careers with full-blown artsy side interests for the last several years now, and this particular Saturday morning my bad-tempered take is that it's really slow and tiring. It's been almost six years since I left grad school and switched to software as a know-nothing. At this point I'm a pretty good developer but a reluctant one; I don't look at code unless someone is paying me to do it, which means I'm not capable of doing hip things like writing a parser in Rust. Compared to something like being a lawyer, I both expend less effort and earn less (but sufficient) money.
That so, having a day job means that it's taken six years to finish a novel that, absent the job, I probably could have wrapped up in two. In the meantime my few connections in the book world are attenuated, I've become late-thirties and haggard instead of early-thirties and photogenic, etc.; so who ever knows what the chances are of finding a publisher, but these are factors. Being stuck for six years on a single project that you can't show anyone (because half-finished novels are not good to share) induces a particular feeling of entrapment in molasses and makes it hard to give a good account of yourself at parties. It also means much less time to actually read anything, which is probably my biggest single regret. But the manuscript should be done in the next couple of weeks, and I'll be glad to have done it even assuming it goes nowhere, and will probably go ahead and start another one, because I've been in the habit too long not to. Maybe the lesson is that you have to assume failure in advance?
lourdes, that's great that you're nearing the end! Some days I don't even have the energy to yell at people on the internet. The things I'm writing will probably never get really written.
As for American lawyers with sidelines in the ink-stained and blurb-begging industry, there are also Louis Auchincloss and Louis Begley (for whose novels I do not care as much as a lawyer or a novel-reader is supposed to, I think).
Well, think of it this way, LK, I'd much rather be writing essays than parsers, but feel myself too terminally incompetent at the former to do much, and terminally unconnected to anyone who might aid.
"Think of it this way: [complaints that can't possibly be of interest]."
Didn't you just get something published in an actual book?
Thanks, Thorn! And really, hope all round: these projects don't have inherent expiration dates, and despite my complaining it's most certainly easier to write with a four-year-old in a house than it was with an infant.
She's four already?!? I bought the girls swimsuits and was able to bypass swim diapers for the first time since Selah joined the family and that was an awfully pleasing It Gets Better reminder.
Didn't you just get something published in an actual book?
I just got something published in an actual journal and an actual book with a contribution from me is forthcoming, but I meant essays for the snootier end of the popular press (LARB, that kind of thing).
makes it hard to give a good account of yourself at parties
Wait, isn't "I'm working on a novel" a classic? Or perhaps that's the problem.
I meant essays for the snootier end of the popular press (LARB, that kind of thing).
Ah. That does seem like a much harder thing to break into.
She's four already?!?
Five in August! lourdes is wrapping up reading Order of the Phoenix aloud to her in the other room now that his weekend daytime writing shift is over.
(Incidentally, we're heading out to this tonight. Should be good and loud and worth the presumptive forfeiture of Saturday evening writing shift.)
37: Right, yes, that's much of the problem, especially when people remember that you were giving the same answer years ago.
I doubt my set of connections in the LARBWelt is actually any broader than yours, but lately I've done a bit of writing for snooty unremunerated online outlets, which has led to a bit of writing for snooty un- or badly-remunerated print outlets, and could always pass on my few credentials offblog.
Also I sure am glad to see Lesley Woods in the OP link. I had read somewhere else that she was a barrister these days, and I think about her fairly often because she reminds of me of a friend who fronted a somewhat-known Portland riot grrl band in the nineties, and these days is a high-powered lawyer in Seattle. In both cases it seems like going into the law let them continue the activism/civic engagement that was so bound up with the music, and that part is a happy story.
(Incidentally, we're heading out to this tonight. Should be good and loud and worth the presumptive forfeiture of Saturday evening writing shift.)
Me too!
18.1 Doesn't sound like a very fast worker if the 4th volume didn't come out till so late in his legal career.
My brother went to law school thinking that a legal career would give more time for writing unpublished novels. I think he's ended up doing an unpublished epic poem and a couple of unmade screenplays instead.
that was me. my computer obviously thought it too indiscreet and refused to acknowledge my role in the comment
41: Mara still can't handle suspense or danger, so we haven't even made it through the first yet. I'm pushing my luck a little with Princess Academy now but after that it's on to some wholesome romp about four adopted brothers and their gay dads because representation. I guess since I know nothing else about it I shouldn't assume it won't be wonderful.
I'm working on a babysitter so I can go to my favorite neighbors' going-away party. I know I've had my parents watch the girls so I could get various things done like this stupid adoption support group I run that uses up my allocated monthly babysitting, but beyond that the last time I went it was actually only the end of March, so not as long as it feels. That doesn't do much to gear me up to watch Mary Poppins and figure out how to realize Selah's request for Rastamouse hair.
If anyone has an excess of self-esteem at the moment, the dude mentioned in 18 is quite something.
He's also a horrible bullying arsehole best known for defending the government when it's done something atrocious, and apparently a white supremacist:
"The supreme court has 12 judges. Ten are privately educated; 11 are white men. For Sumption this is lamentable, but the way of things. The law is a rigorous profession that is bound to produce an elite at its summit. "Any group of the most talented people of their generation is going to be unrepresentative.""
Sumption's views are unremarkable in fact. Pretty typical upper class Tory (i.e. first against the wall). I assume there are parallels across the water.
.
To the snootier end of the popular press,
Nosflow aspired, with little success.
Clad in his rigorous scholarly garb,
He lined the birdcage with old copies of LARB
To the OP, they really should have gone to Dial House and interviewed Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher. They are still pretty punk rock, but in a different way.
For millennials, the OP is like(*) saying Rotten.com was the original Upworthy,
'Rotten didn't beat you over the head with "You'll never believe what happens next.'
via Kernelmag.
* if you assume Rotten.com = Rotten TV
A few years back I ran into Amelia Fletcher: non-executive director of the UK Financial Conduct Authority, professor of competition policy at the University of East Anglia, previously chief economist at the Office of Fair Trading, and lead singer of the pop-punk indie band Tender Trap.
http://www.last.fm/music/Amelia+Fletcher/+wiki
I know we're not supposed to read the archives or the links, but what about the comments? (E.g. number 9.)