How to Be a Person (6 page)

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT COMPUTER SCIENCE

In the olden days (the 1980s), computers were for green-on-black word processing and Zork. Then someone plugged some computers into each other, and there was the internet and Zork Online. Now we have fast internet, but very little Zork at all. Things change. This is known as Moore’s law—the internet is twice as fast and has half as much Zork every 18 months. At some point, you will have to decide if you want to be a computer geek or just a regular computer user. There is no third option. It’s not acceptable to not know how to use computers. This is like bragging that you can’t read, walk, or see. You don’t have to know anything about how computers work, but you do have to know about the internet. Learn some basic HTML. Get a Mac. If you can’t or won’t get a Mac, for the love of god, don’t use Internet Explorer. If you’re paying to look at porn, you’re doing it wrong.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THEATER

Oedipus accidentally fucked his mom and Sophocles got famous writing about it. Aeschylus was killed by a large bird that mistook his bald head for a stone and dropped a turtle on him from a great height. William Shakespeare was the passionate, poetic one; Ben Jonson was the cerebral, cranky one. Samuel Beckett is their poetic, cerebral, cranky heir. Bertolt Brecht was a Marxist and the exception to the following rule: Political theater is bad. Everyone talks about Antonin Artaud but nobody reads him. (Read Susan
Sontag’s essay on him instead.) Constantin Stanislavsky thought actors had to “live the part,” so Dustin Hoffman stayed up for two nights so he could look exhausted for
Marathon Man
. (Laurence Olivier, his costar, suggested: “Try acting—it’s much easier.”) David Mamet wrote about men, Caryl Churchill wrote about women, and Sarah Kane wrote about herself—in a poetic, cerebral, cranky way. (She is Beckett’s heir.) Then she committed suicide. Don’t ever, ever disparage new work by saying it’s “derivative.” Fucking
everything
is derivative. That’s a cowardly criticism for people who don’t have anything intelligent to say.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BIOLOGY

Evolution is everything. Don’t worry about RNA, DNA, cells, phylogenies, and the rest; Mendelian genetics and evolution, combined together, are the essence of biology. Briefly: New ways of doing things (Mendel’s alleles) are constantly being invented by accident—when mistakes are made during the copying of the instructions. Living things with better versions of these instructions tend to overwhelm those with poorer versions. Mendel figured out anything with more than one cell working together gets two copies of instructions for any given task. One copy can be a total loss—a scratch pad where crappy instructions can reside and not harm chances of success. Sex is about sharing alleles; if two organisms can have sex and have kids that can have sex and have kids of their own, they’re a species. Species evolve, not individuals. Combine these ideas together and you have the beauty of the living world in your hands.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CHEMISTRY

Stuff is made up of different arrangements of atoms; atoms are made up of a nucleus surrounded by buzzing electrons. The outer shell always wants to be filled with eight electrons. So, any arrangement that gets you there—sodium with chloride, oxygen with two hydrogens, carbon with four chlorides—will work. This is why the periodic table has eight columns and helium (with eight outer electrons of its own) doesn’t explode. Some arrangements adding up to eight shared electrons are happier than others. Chemical reactions rearrange from less stable to more stable arrangements on their own, giving off energy in the process. To make a less stable arrangement, you have to put in energy as payment. Chemistry is simply accounting: You must not gain or lose atoms at any point. Ignore the nuclear physicists on this point.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CLASSICAL MUSIC

Think of it as one note that breaks into two, and then multiplies into a universe of sound and possible instruments. Start with the monks. Their chants. Very monotone. Bach is the baroque: He turns music into an argument, lines fighting with lines. Mozart is next, using a strict form that has roots in world exploration—introduce a theme in one key, wander it around and develop it in other keys for a while, and then return home with the musical spoils of all that wandering. Then comes Beethoven and Wagner: everything bigger, louder, and longer. In the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with Stravinsky, all
rules are suspended. Even the do-re-mi scale that’s the basis of Western music is broken into microtones, and the system of keys gives way to other equations and algorithms (even though 12-tone music sounds impossible, it’s simple: All 12 tones of an octave must be used before any can be repeated). Mozart’s period is the classical period, and thus the correct meaning of the term “classical music” is music made from about 1750 to 1820 (Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791). Therefore, saying “classical music” when you simply mean nonpopular music is the equivalent of saying “modern art” when you mean new art.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LITERATURE

English literature as it is taught in college is the story of power and class struggle. Keep that in mind and your grades will never sink below a B+. The oldest known poem in English is Caedmon’s “Hymn.” It’s about the rise of Christianity (power) and its domination/extermination of pagan beliefs (the poor). Moving on. William Shakespeare’s best play is
The Tempest
because it’s about the birth of the colonial era and of great importance to postcolonial theory. (Who is Caliban? The colonial subject. Who is Prospero? The colonial master. Memorize that.) The metaphysical poets—what were their poems about? An obsession with Platonic beauty? No. The birth of existentialism in an increasingly skeptical world? No. The decline of the court as the center of political and economic power and the transition to bourgeois cosmopolitanism? That’s it. See how this works? We’re already at John Milton. Good guy or
bad guy? Good guy—opposed censorship and absolutism. Charles Dickens wrote about the oppression of the emerging industrial proletariat. And fog. Lots of fog. The boat in Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
is a symbol for the madness of colonial greed. Then we’re in the 20th century, when realism falls out of vogue because Virginia Woolf wanted to write about her feelings. High modernism has two camps: one led by Gertrude Stein (progressive) and the other led by T. S. Eliot (reactionary). There was also Ezra Pound—but Pound leads to fascism. Postmodernism is good because it marks the death of master narratives.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ECONOMICS

Economics is a social science based on the way humans behave given limited resources. There are some simple rules: A recession is fairly bad but a depression is very bad; inflation is like cholesterol—there’s normal and there’s bad. Economics is a very soft science. Nobody, for instance, is sure when a recession becomes a depression. It may have happened while you were reading this sentence. Also, economists issue strong statements, but those strong statements are often followed shortly by statements of surprise. There is one thing you must know: If you want to be an economist, you must be able to read and draw graphs. You should, in fact, be graphilic. Any shortcomings having to do with graphs will disqualify you from the profession, which is based entirely on graphs.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT JOURNALISM

Gatekeepers have tried to erect all kinds of academic barriers to
entry into the journalism world. They say you need undergraduate journalism training, that you need graduate journalism schooling, that you need to have been editor of your school newspaper. But really, the job is not a whole lot more complicated than being able to think, write, and ask pointed questions. If you can do all of that already, and if you have something better to do than enroll in Journalism 101 or communications or whatever your school calls it, do it. Spend your college years immersing yourself in something that could actually help inform your perspective as a journalist later on. Take a couple languages. Read the great American writers—Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway began their careers as journalists. Drink with the campus politicos. Learn about economics and statistics (the realms in which journalists are constantly being bamboozled). Learn about history. And while you’re at it, start a blog and do some good writing for a school publication, preferably the campus newspaper. That way you’ll be able to convince the gatekeepers that you know what you’re doing when you apply for your first summer internship.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HISTORY

History is a very tricky matter these days. In the olden days, you began history with ancient Egypt and ended with post–World War II America. Not anymore. History is now fluid and complex. It’s not about one group/society/state and one development, but many movements over many periods of time. There is a history for women, a people’s history, a history for Asians, Africans, South Americans, Europeans, Indians, and so on. And one history is not better than
the others. Even Western history has become a complicated matter. For example, we no longer think about ancient Greeks and their highest achievement, democracy, without thinking about the huge slave population that supported that society. As for the Dark Ages, whose Dark Ages do you mean? It certainly was not the Dark Ages for the Arabs, whose civilization was thriving at the time—from Baghdad to Spain. So, when you study history at the college level, expect lots of diversity and no teleology. The history taught in the 21st century has no goal or meaning. Keep that in your head, and your grades will not sink.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PHILOSOPHY

Western philosophy begins around 500 BCE with Thales, who believed water was everything; Heracleitus, who believed change was everything; and Parmenides, who believed nothing changed. Athens’ golden age came around 400 BCE, with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as its primary figures. What you need to know: Socrates was killed by the city of Athens because he asked too many bothersome questions and seduced too many young men; Plato, Socrates’ student, hated Athens for killing his teacher (his philosophy is nothing but an expression of this hate); and Aristotle, a student of Plato, was almost killed by Athens but got out of town just in time (“I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy,” Aristotle said as he ran from the city with his belongings). As for the Romans, they did not philosophize. The next important period for philosophy is the 13th century with the
scholastics—all they could think about was Aristotle. After the scholastics, we leap to the end of the 18th century and enter what we now call German idealism (from Kant to Marx). After German idealism, there’s Heidegger—he became a Nazi. After Heidegger, there are the French Nietzscheans. After their work (mostly produced around 1968), the story of speculative philosophy comes to an end. That’s all, folks.

What No One Else Will Tell You About Dropping Out

The American university system is the best in the world, and it’s in crisis. The economy is squeezing foundations, enrollments are increasingly difficult to predict, and the universities are responding by doing what all big, clunky institutions do when faced with a crisis: forgetting their true function and doing whatever they can to stay alive with tuition hikes, program cuts, etc. (Note to universities, newspapers, and other institutions that are having trouble keeping up with the times: Sometimes the biggest favor you can do your discipline is to disband. It hurts, yes, but you exist to further human potential and knowledge, not vice versa.)

Also, because of a demographic trend that began with the GI Bill in 1944, universities are flooded with middle-class kids who don’t belong there. They don’t care about learning—they’re just taking up space for four to six years, waiting for a diploma, deluded into thinking it will guarantee them lives much like their parents’. If you
are one of these people, DROP OUT NOW. For two reasons: First, according to a great many economists, you will be the first of several coming generations that will be poorer than the generations that preceded you. The old models of college/work/retirement-at-65 are dead. You’ll have to find a new way. Second, you’re fucking it up for all the poor kids (or just-poor-enough kids who can’t afford tuition but don’t qualify for free rides) who deserve to be where you are.

Your hanging around college like a cow waiting for the slaughter isn’t doing you any favors, it isn’t doing your peers any favors, and it’s not doing the university system any favors (because you’re helping it keep up a false delusion about its role and relationship to society and economy). Instead, figure out what you want to do with your life and get an internship (if it’s in a political or creative field) or an apprenticeship (if it’s in a mechanical field). The secret to life is merely to cultivate a passion for something—anything—and follow it. That will serve you much better in the coming years.

And now, the obligatory list of famous and successful dropouts: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Maya Angelou, Harry Truman, Albert Einstein, Lady Gaga, David Geffen, George Orwell, Patti Smith, Wolfgang Puck, Mark Twain, William Safire, and, um, Britney Spears.

2. A GUIDE TO AMERICA