Good morning. Hello. How are you? #909
RIP Robert Gottlieb, the egg carton bat signal, against job interview follow-up messages, turtle crossings, a call for help identifying hi fi components
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Issue 909. I should make a Beatles joke. Or, I guess rather I should make a Beatles joke tomorrow, being the one after 909. Har har har. Let it Be is probably my second favorite Beatles album. I’d say it’s underrated but how can any Beatles album be underrated.
Robert Gottlieb died. This is very sad. He was a giant. Perhaps the most renowned literary editor of the 20th century. And, most relevant to our interests, Robert Caro’s editor, editor not just of the masterpiece The Power Broker but also of the four thus-far released volumes of Caro’s LBJ Biography and, more pressingly, the currently-underway fifth volume, that we are all hoping is released before, well, Robert Gottlieb and Robert Caro die. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Robert Gottlieb cut 400,000 words from Caro’s Power Broker manuscript. The words covered the fight over the SoHo expressway, that would have cut SoHo in half, divided on Delancey, cutting through ti Broome and the tunnel. You can see it on a map and how much sense it makes on a map. The plan was killed in thanks part to Jane Jacobs, and there are few things I dream about reading more than these 400,000 meticulously researched words. I asked Caro about this once. He doesn’t seem to mind the cuts Gottlieb made at all. He was indifferent to “what happened to them,” and implausibly stated that the famed packrat didn’t have a copy of them. Maybe Gottlieb did. Maybe time will tell. I’ve always assumed there might be a chance we see them when Caro passes and his wife Ina has to deal with his archive (though Caro has already donated it), but… Maybe Gottlieb has a copy. I am unaware of his packrat tendencies.
CORA, the local food bank, has put out a call for more egg cartons and this is my moment people. Oh my god I have been waiting for this moment for months, since the last time they put out the hallowed call. Tomorrow (a day off at our fair company) I will be making the drive into Pittsboro and donating a good 100 or so egg cartons to the food bank. I am so excited. My god I love donating things to the food bank so much it really is a neurotic manifestation of my love of my father and someday I am going to be a grunt volunteer there and it is going to make me so happy.
Lotta business for me in Pittsboro this weekend, actually. Gotta go buy some taller T-Posts. And there is an estate sale with a bunch of high-end audio gear in it. I’ve been thinking lately I need a giant pair of speakers and an amp and turntable so I can listen to records really loud in the new house in the attic once it’s done. I used to have these amazing Klipsch KG4.2 speakers I loved and I lugged them around everywhere but I think they disappeared sometime around the SoHo move which is sad. I wonder what happened to them. Anyway, the Facebook event for this estate sale has this picture and I want to get my hands on one of these pairs of speakers. But I can’t identify any of them enough to get a rough sense of value. Are any of you audiophiles? Any of you able to tell me what these speakers are? I think the far left pair is McIntosh, and I think the ones with the big white cone are Klipsch, but I’m not sure. The McIntosh audio unit is a pre-amp, so I also can’t figure out what the actual Amp is.
I don’t really know how estate sales work. I mean, that is not entirely true, I even read a whole book about how to run estate sales — I highly recommend Annie Smidt’s book on the topic — but rather I don’t have a sense of whether there are going to be a bunch of high-paying sharks at 8 AM or if I can walk in and be the only ones and the prices are cheap. We will see.
Yesterday I was driving home from the other house (don’t judge me. I haul things. and it’s solar electric) and I was blocked driving into my own driveway by a turtle. I had to stop and wait for this turtle to cross the road. I couldn't really see it on the ground in front of my truck so I turned on the 360° cameras and just watched this not-small turtle money on past. It was very heartwarming. Hello turtle. I hope you made it back to the creek okay.
Here’s a thing. I don’t like it when employee interview candidates write follow-up letters. It makes me really uncomfortable. First off, I don’t like that I have to answer them, more work for me, secondly, what do I answer them with? I have, in the past, been so enamored with a candidate that I’ve written something really encouraging or even semi-concrete like “I hear an offer might be coming soon!” only for that to turn out to not be true for various reasons. And, of course, then if I didn’t like a candidate, I have to be utterly neutral. It’s just all so much work. And I also eschew form-letter/copy&paste/macros with my written communication, as I am a writer dammit, so I have to write each and every one of these freakin things individually. I wish people would not write them. And then when some candidate I love doesn’t write them, like I never bothered to write them in my job interviewing life, then some coworker decides that’s a ding against them. If I had my druthers I would bin the whole practice.
Similarly, I do not care about typos in the job application process. I don’t care. I just don’t. You can’t make me. I will never care about typos. Unless they’re funny and make a boob or fart joke or something.
Semi-related Jane called her breast a “breast” the the other day and it was really weird. I mean I guess she is right! It is already a breast. I had never really thought about this topic in this way before. In my head breasts “appeared” later, but of course a woman with very small breasts is not that different and very small breasts are still breasts. So I guess Jane is right and I have learned something linguistically from my daughter.
Daddy Jane Dance Party yesterday did some deep cuts. I was in a mood and Jane was in a mood and we did Gilla Band and Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs — she really loved the name. Then Slift, which she endured for far longer than I thought she would — then Wolf Alice. I pushed my luck trying for a Victory at Sea live at Green Street Grill in 1997 because Mo Elliot is amazing but that was a bridge too far, and we backtracked to Haim, Taylor and ended, as ever, with Madonna. I cannot fathom how many times I’ve seen the Hung Up video. I could write a dissertation. I want a spinoff of the cab driver’s life. That guy has a lot on his mind.
Moody and quiet mix for you. Mostly new here. Well, you know the drill. New-ish. Down to 11 hours on this re-listen of the whole “To Investigate” queue. The “new investigate” queue has 23 hours of new stuff to check out. This is exhausting. Listening to new music is exhausting I just want to put on a vinyl copy of Drive Like Jehu and crank it on “Do You Compute” or something (thank you, Nick, for reminding me of this band).
Also I do not know what’s up with Substack not letting me add links to pictures anymore. I’m 100% sure it’s Safari and/or one of the like five script-blocking extensions I have. This sort of tedious little fix takes so long to fix, and I had it all set on my old computer, but I probably solved it like two years ago and I have no recollection how and now I have to figure it out all over again. Ugh.
In the meantime, here is the link for this playlist.
Talk tomorrow!
Does the need for interview follow up letters come from the fact that most companies do a terrible job of letting candidates know where they are in the process? In the old days, you'd do an interview and in exactly 14 days, you'd get that thin envelope in the mail that you knew was a form letter rejection. That was impersonal but gave a form of closure. Today, it's much more common to just be ghosted. I think if more companies would set clear expectations and follow up (even with automated form letters), candidates would not feel the need to check in so much.
As for typos, I often don't care, but if someone says they were a "Principle Engineer" instead of a "Principal Engineer", I judge them horribly. But I've still worked with some great engineers who get that wrong, so clearly I'm kind of a dick there.