My hero Bessie Doenges didn’t live long enough to witness the cultural sanctification of Steve Jobs, the wizard god of gadgets (See previous post, “Running for Your Life: Jobs, Revisited”). The sole misgiving of that fact being that she didn’t weigh in on Jobs’ contribution to the affairs of women. And, baby, when it came to weighing cultural contributions, Bessie delivered the goods.
Bessie Doenges penned Bessie Writes. Well, actually, no. Bessie typed on an ancient manual Olympia her 250-word Bessie Writes columns that she then mailed (with a stamp and envelope that she bought with her writer’s wages, $20 per column) to me, her editor at The Westsider and Chelsea Clinton News, two Manhattan-based weekly newspapers that I ran in the early to mid-1990s. Here’s a sample. Not a column, but a letter to me, typed on that Olympia. I keep it in a place of honor at my desk:
Dear Larry: 10/17/94
These true stories of mine are 400 words, not 200 which you seem to prefer. I got my guts in them. I don’t write easily. I hope you’ll give them space. In our Senior Center they will be on a bulletin board with my picture next week. I love you.
Bessie
P.S. I managed to get it on one page after all.
Running for Your Life: Jobs, Revisited
In the clear light of 2012, let’s return to the Jobs Front. Steve Jobs, that is. Where even today, almost three months since he died on Oct. 5 (my birthday), he is making headlines. As in, the next big buzz-busting day in the Apple universe, rumored to be Feb. 24th (he would’ve been 57 that day), the firm (today at 2:15 p.m. [Jan. 3], the first trading day in 2012, up 1.4 percent, $410.76 a share) will launch its iPad 3.
Perhaps it’s time for sober rethinking about just what the tao of Jobs has wrought. There have been pockets of other voices. Consider, the London Review of Books, “Amazing or Shit,” a piece by Mattathias Schwartz on “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson http://bit.ly/tkQcQE. In the sea of panegyrics, it is a welcome correction:
“A talented hustler, he (Jobs as a young man) marked up junked components and impersonated a manufacturer over the phone to get free parts.”
“He tried to deny paternity of the daughter he fathered at the age of 23, and was careful to settle with her mother before Apple’s IPO.”
And in conclusion, drawing upon a comparison between Apple products and Zen gardens: “In 2020, making a video call on an iPad will feel about as sublime as booting up an Apple II does now, while a walk through the gardens of Kyoto will feel much as it did in 1920, 1820 and 1720. Jobs’s achievement was to make ephemeral machines and make them seem permanent.”
Not to mention, addictive – as the following post-holiday gift link from BuzzFeed makes abundantly (and distressingly obnoxiously) clear: http://bit.ly/vdX2w4
Perhaps it’s time for sober rethinking about just what the tao of Jobs has wrought. There have been pockets of other voices. Consider, the London Review of Books, “Amazing or Shit,” a piece by Mattathias Schwartz on “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson http://bit.ly/tkQcQE. In the sea of panegyrics, it is a welcome correction:
“A talented hustler, he (Jobs as a young man) marked up junked components and impersonated a manufacturer over the phone to get free parts.”
“He tried to deny paternity of the daughter he fathered at the age of 23, and was careful to settle with her mother before Apple’s IPO.”
And in conclusion, drawing upon a comparison between Apple products and Zen gardens: “In 2020, making a video call on an iPad will feel about as sublime as booting up an Apple II does now, while a walk through the gardens of Kyoto will feel much as it did in 1920, 1820 and 1720. Jobs’s achievement was to make ephemeral machines and make them seem permanent.”
Not to mention, addictive – as the following post-holiday gift link from BuzzFeed makes abundantly (and distressingly obnoxiously) clear: http://bit.ly/vdX2w4
Running for Your Life: A Look Back at 2011
Is it just me or did we tire in finding an agreeable term to describe the decade(s) since 2000? A lot can be put down to synchronicity, as in 10-10-10, 11-11-11 and 12-12-12, and, yeah, that according to the Mayan calendar all will snuff out next year, in 2012, anyway (12-21-12, for the record). As if the past twelve years have all been part of a Beckett-inspired inside joke – with the important caveat that Beckett is all about going on: “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
Running for Your Life: Christmas Week
“Who are those guys?”
K hadn’t seen “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” So on Christmas Day, after a delicious late brunch of K&M-dreamed-up heuvos rancheros, modest gift-giving, a He Is Risen romp at the dogrun for Thurb, every day is present day for T-Bone, and for us we went light is right, as in an anytime Escape to New York plane ticket for K, the middle years Sam Beckett letters for me, and last and certainly not least, USB Fridge for M, good for one 8-ounce soda can (read: Diet Coke), designed in American West rustic, the surprise unanimous choice as gift of the season, what M fairly soon decided would be on its way to her Sarah Lawrence College office after the holiday break, sure to attract conversation and giggles and guffaws, and, “Ah, what a perfect husband you have who would think of such a gift,” because M loves her DC in midafternoon so I can live with the pleasure of knowing that she would be the first prof on her block to have one, although given the certain positive reaction, not for long.
K hadn’t seen “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” So on Christmas Day, after a delicious late brunch of K&M-dreamed-up heuvos rancheros, modest gift-giving, a He Is Risen romp at the dogrun for Thurb, every day is present day for T-Bone, and for us we went light is right, as in an anytime Escape to New York plane ticket for K, the middle years Sam Beckett letters for me, and last and certainly not least, USB Fridge for M, good for one 8-ounce soda can (read: Diet Coke), designed in American West rustic, the surprise unanimous choice as gift of the season, what M fairly soon decided would be on its way to her Sarah Lawrence College office after the holiday break, sure to attract conversation and giggles and guffaws, and, “Ah, what a perfect husband you have who would think of such a gift,” because M loves her DC in midafternoon so I can live with the pleasure of knowing that she would be the first prof on her block to have one, although given the certain positive reaction, not for long.
Running for Your Life: Repetition Rant
“I’d run, but .¤.¤. it’s so boring.”
If I’ve heard that line once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a point of view I’m not unsympathetic to. In the spirit of the voices that come to me on the road, it’s one I claim as my own. Honestly, I don’t know if I didn’t have my DVT health scare in the mid-1970s, whether I’d be a runner today. Word to the wise: A blessing lies in all.
If I’ve heard that line once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a point of view I’m not unsympathetic to. In the spirit of the voices that come to me on the road, it’s one I claim as my own. Honestly, I don’t know if I didn’t have my DVT health scare in the mid-1970s, whether I’d be a runner today. Word to the wise: A blessing lies in all.
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