krozruch

An errant draft of a cover letter

Found Text

It must have been around a year ago I wrote a draft of the following text. It was written towards a job application I did not submit, the deadline being in the middle of the winter term of my second year teaching Medical English and Czech for foreigners at Charles University. It was hectic, but also rewarding at times, and the material was stimulating enough: I was learning a lot, and fast. I got engaged in March and the whole notion of making steps to move away from where I was and what I was doing got deprioritised for a while at least.

The job opened again a while ago, which means I am walking around thinking of taking regular trains to Berlin, and eventually moving away from Prague, learning German (and French) properly, and making a few long-overdue changes. In a way, critically, that would permit me to set up somewhere else with my fiancée.

I have little enough time for my own writing that the demands of writing cover letters and the like can feel dispiriting. Especially I typically arrive at the final version by writing several drafts. Which is why I periodically repurpose these, for shits and giggles but also as a kind of diary post.

The inevitable Hrabal draft

(I was reading a lot of Bohumil Hrabal at this point as I was due to attend a conference in April, a month or so after I likely wrote the following.)

Zeroes and ones: I am passionate about something or it doesn't move the dial. It has nothing whatever to do with external incentives: there is very little pragmatic reason to learn enough Czech to read practically everything Bohumil Hrabal has written and still less, once you get there, to categorically refuse to take any step that would regularly require you to read anything by Milan Kundera (as any academic position encompassing Hrabal would likely require). The criteria which thereby determine every decision I make in my life are coherent and precise but not invariably easy to explain to people who permit influencers or the algorithmic mainstream to breech their firewall.

For ten years or so, I was driven by two adjacent obsessions: broadly-speaking, Bohumil Hrabal and free and open source software. Once you ground the both in philosophy (and also throw in samizdat and broaden FOSS into free culture), the commonalities become a little clearer but a mind more conventionally conditioned (“edumucated”) would have rejected one or the other.

My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20. Being British, and my father being a self-employed television repairman who was keen for us to educate ourselves, we then had a string of Acorns. It was on these that my brother and I learned to mess around with BASIC. Later, I lost myself to typewriters, inherited my brother’s ugly DELL 486, which ran on Windows, and was led to sign up for my first email: misterluddite@lexcorp.com. Apple being prettier and slicker than the utilitarian Windows ecosystem, I was prevented from “coming home” to an Acorn-like community for longer than might have been the case: computers were unfulfilling but no longer clunky, drab, and infused with the kind of spirit that designs office blocks with fibreglass ceiling tiles. My first Linux distro was TAILS. Once I discovered “vanilla” Debian, I mainly stuck with it excepting a spell with Qubes. I don’t even “run it hot” anymore now that I am not “developing” in Python (it’s enough to bring Emacs up to date with backports and install pyenv).

My obsession had three outputs: a dystopian fictional world called Call Them Soldiers, a non-fiction exploration of the corporate / tech bro fork of cybernetics whose consequences were visible all around us called The Pwned Mind (or Kafka was a Realist) and a publishing project called DandyLion. I worked on the last of these until Covid using Python: Flask, SQLAlchemy, yada yada yada. I learned a lot.

None of this makes life easy. Why, I ask myself, am I switching from i3 windows manager to EXWM in the middle of the semester when I can strand myself in the middle of presentation to a class full of med students because, say, the Emacs minibuffer is cropped by the presenter or switching to the Czech keyboard has thrown my key bindings? Why, for that matter, are my presentations written in html because I chose, in September, to learn reveal.js under pressure rather than settling for Libre Office Impress? But, since the criteria my choices are driven by are coherent and precise and the technologies they lead me to are interoperable, I have typically found myself at home following such a shift, and glancing at the workflows of my colleagues is unlikely to prompt me to regret, learning, say, org-mode or extending it with org-roam, or working with Cryptpad or similar.

I could do the job you describe. As I am sure you know, many people have some subset of one of the two halves of the skills you require. Few have both. I have a deep and a broad understanding of the current state of technology. I also have a profound grasp of the societal and political contexts in which software operates, meaning that I can quickly formulate and communicate insights into the likely benefits, and risks, of almost any given project.

It must be over 20 years ago I first had the idea for The Journal of Anger Management Studies. It was the Bush years. The Bush and Blair years. Those planes had gone into the towers in the September of my final year studying politics at Nottingham. What was I doing when I heard about it? That might be the obvious question, though nobody has asked about it in the way that people once asked about the assassination of JFK (my Dad was in a cinema — in Britain by then, I suppose, though I’m far from certain he was not still in Donegal — where they put up a stencil with the news in front of the projector). Had they asked, I might or might not have told them I had been writing an email to a friend, Beatnick, who was perhaps by then already in California where he would enjoy a year out from his American Studies course, attending lectures by Noam Chomsky (where he would draw caricatures of him) and doing internships at punk and hip hop record labels. The email, written in that inimitable style I was known for — hifalutin, sardonic, near-psychedelic free association — described an idea for a Great American Novel: a successful, rich white guy goes in for an operation to have his penis extended; it turns out the penises have been harvested from death row inmates and he has a black cock; having watched a documentary on people whose personalities changed after heart transplants, he convinced himself he is different since the operation and he goes on an American Psycho-style rampage (I never read it, never wanted to read it, but heard plenty about it that first couple of years of uni); it then transpires that the unwitting donor turns out to have been innocent. University was the only place I spoke about my writing, though “ADHD” would mean I didn’t finish a thing for years, and haven’t ever since. Still, I wasn’t serious about this idea. Perhaps I should have been. I deleted the draft, I suppose, when my dad came in and told me to come and watch the news.

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