Beyond the Underground

VONNEGUT . . . In the Nation, William Deresiewicz examines Kurt Vonnegut through the lens of the Library of America.

APPS . . . For future reference, the Lifehacker App Directory, a "constantly maintained and updated directory of the best applications and tools for computers (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and smartphones (Android and iPhone)."

FRYE . . . Here's a good appreciation of Northrop Frye, the author of Anatomy of Criticism: "Frye’s Anatomy," by Alec Scott in the U of T Magazine (link from Arts & Letters Daily).

Scott writes that "[d]uring the postmodernist wave that began to wash over North America in the 1980s, ... Anatomy fell out of style, and many hip, young literature profs took it off their reading lists."

That's when I was an English major. I read Anatomy of Criticism anyway, not for credit. I still consult the notes I took while reading it, mostly for its discussion of genre. Maybe I'll read it again . . .

CRITIC . . . "Pauline Kael and the Paulettes," by Elaine Showalter at the Times Literary Supplement.

MEMORIES . . . "The Book That Drove Them Crazy: Allan Bloom’s ‘Closing of the American Mind’ 25 years later," by Andrew Ferguson at the Weekly Standard.

END OF THE LINE . . . Does this news make you sad? Encyclopedia Britannica ends print edition.

Long, long ago, when I didn't have room in my apartment for a set of encyclopedias, I set up an in-home appointment with one of the company's salesmen. I looked over the pricing schedules and mulled it over and decided to wait.

I waited twenty-three years . . . I guess I waited too long.

BEGINNING ANOTHER TRIP TO ARGENTINA . . . In honor of this event, I'm linking to a post I did at the end of another long trip, "If You're Going to Spend a Month in Buenos Aires, the 'Paris of South America.'"

 

 

STRING THEORY . . . "[S]tring theory, while dazzling, has outrun any conceivable experiment that could verify it—-there’s zero proof that it describes how nature works." At American Scholar, link from Arts & Letters Daily.

USEFUL GADGETS . . . Two I can endorse: "This year's killer app — pen and paper," at USA Today.

TRILLING . . . The one writer whom Hemingway envied, and why he matters. [The Times Literary Supplement]

The Sixteen Types of Lawyers, and Other Observations from a Lawyer with a Weblog

I always wondered what my more whimsical blog posts would look like if they were organized less like a weblog and more like a book. They'd look something like this . . .

(Note: This post originally appeared on this weblog in June, 2009.)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. The Sixteen Types of Lawyers

• The Big Firm Summer Associate
• The Lawyer Who Advertises on TV 
• The Lawyer Who Carries Another Lawyer’s Briefcase 
• The Lawyer Who Brings Her Breast Pump to the Office 
• The Mafia Lawyer 
• The Modest Lawyer 
• The Partner Who Talks Too Fast 
• The Partner Who Golfs 
• The Lawyer on the Run 
• The Lawyer Who's in the Wrong Profession 
• The Lawyer from the Planet Og 
• The Lawyer Who's Writing a Legal Thriller 
• The Stereotypical Lawyer 
• The Associate Who Knows Where the Bodies Are Buried 
• The Lawyer with the Shiny New Gadget 
• The Associate Who Finally Gets a Chance to Meet the Senior Partner

II. An Introduction to Lawyers for Those Who Have Not Yet Had the Pleasure of Being Introduced

An Introduction to the Typical Lawyer

How to Feed a Lawyer

How to Dress a Lawyer

Living with a Lawyer

III. Four Things That Are Important to Every Lawyer

The Lawyer's Briefcase

The Circle of Advisors

A Giant Brain

A Satisfying Hobby

IV. Bling Bling for Wealthy Lawyers

Watches

Big-Ass Yachts

High Class Call Girls

V. The Advice Section

Advice to Clients of Lawyers

• "Last night in a fit of rage . . ."

Advice to Young Lawyers

 

• "I am a young female attorney . . ."
• "I have been assigned to work on a large project . . ."
• "Sometimes when things get particularly stressful . . . "
• "I’m a third-year associate in a firm of 2,500 lawyers . . ."
• "I am a lawyer who recently became engaged to a woman . . ."
• "This week on Legal Underground, you said you doubted . . ."
• "I’m a young male associate who’s wondering if . . ."
• "I love literature of all kinds . . ."
• "I hope you think this is a problem . . ."
• "As a second-year associate at a large law firm . . ."
• "Back when my new girlfriend Kristen . . ."
• "I should have thought twice about . . ."
• "Two hours ago I was sitting . . ."
• "Many months ago, I was assigned to . . ."
• "I’m in a terrible bind . . ."

Advice to Families of Lawyers

• "I’m a 15-year-old high school freshman . . ."
• "I’ve never doubted that I’m much . . ."
• "With only minor exceptions, I am a perfect husband . . ."

Advice to Law Professors

• "I am having a major dispute . . ."
• "I've lost faith in our country’s system . . ."

Advice to Federal Judges

• "By way of introduction, I am one of the hardest-working . . ."
• "On the way into work this morning . . ."
• "I am a federal judge who has a weblog . . ."

Advice to Law Firm Partners

• "For years, I have never had any problem . . ."
• "Not long ago, I introduced my fairly ordinary wife . . ."
• "I’m writing using a pseudonym . . ."

VI. Debates Between the Experienced Lawyer and the Law Student

Overlawyered.com

Class Actions

Willie Gary and Dickie Scruggs

Point of Law

VII. Some Personal Reminiscences

When I Was Just a Little Boy, or How I Became a Lawyer

A Few of My Favorite Things

Computers
The Fender Jaguar Electric Guitar
Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing

A Detour for Shameless Name-Dropping: Christopher Hitchens

Are You Open-Minded Enough for Norman Mailer on Iraq?

Some Travel Writing

Prague Blog #5: A Guided Tour of Prague
How to Spend a Month in Buenos Aires
Mexico City, Trip 1
Mexico City, Trip 2

The Horror of One Lawyer's First Deposition

Life on the Mississippi, or One Lawyer's Gambling Confession

Blawg Review #38: Secrets of the Legal Underground, Revealed

VIII. The Best of the Rest

The Trial Lawyer’s Prayer

A Layman’s Glossary to the Terminology of Tort Reform

Partnership, a Story

The Epic Battle of the Law Firms and the Legal Recruiters: A Recounting of the Way the Pogrom Began

Fun Comments about the McDonald's Coffee Case

Tragedy Strikes the Blawging World: Fifty of the Best Perish

Is TheBarAfterWork a Valuable Networking Tool or Just for the Drunks?

How I Became A Famous Weblogger and Achieved Rock Star Status as a Lawyer

THE APOCALYPTICAL ORGASM . . . Reviewed by James M. Murphy at the Times Literary Supplement: Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the invention of sex, by Christopher Turner.

CAUTION . . . "Seven Ways to Get Yourself Hacked," by Simson Garfinkel at technology review.

ESSAYS . . . "The American magazine essay, both the long feature piece and the critical essay, is flourishing, in unlikely circumstances," says James Wood in the New Yorker.

FROM THE ARCHIVES . . . "Types of Lawyers #9: The Lawyer on the Run."

SELF-EDITING TIPS FOR WRITERS . . . At my weblog Trial Practice Tips, I wrote a post a few years ago with editing tips for legal writers: "Self-Editing Tips for Legal Writers."

Most of these tips apply to any sort of academic writing. If you find the tips helpful, there are hundreds more in the legal writing category at Trial Practice Tips.

FROM THE ARCHIVES . . . "Law-Related Things That Suck: Having to Hire a Lawyer From the Yellow Pages," a short podcast from the old days, when weblogs were still a new idea and this one was titled The Legal Underground.

ZONE ONE . . . From Salon: "This year’s must-read zombie epic Colson Whitehead's funny and frightening new novel revitalizes the horror genre," by Jeff VanderMeer.

FROM THE ARCHIVES . . . Advice to Young Lawyers #17, which begins, "As a second-year associate at a large law firm in New York City . . ."

For more like this, there's a guide to the archives here.

SOMETHING I WROTE ONCE . . . "The Virtues of Eccentricity" was originally published in 1997 as an Op-Ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Its heroes: Saul Bellow, Kurt Cobain, "subversive" artists. Its villains: the religious right, corporate advertisers, Hollywood movie producers.

The essay's final line: "At a time when there’s too much sameness in our corner of the world, we should encourage our fellow eccentrics and nurture the eccentricities in ourselves."

More of my published writing can be found here.

GONZO . . . An interesting review of a new Hunter S. Thompson compilation at the WSJ: "Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride Hunter S. Thompson's wildness should not be mistaken for carelessness," by Matt Labash.

The new compilation is called Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson.

According to Labash, "Thompson was a musician in prose, his words his rhythm section. He was Buddy Rich and Tito Puente and John Bonham rolled into one. His paragraphs kept perfect time—never laying a false beat."

As with yesterday's post, I got the link from Arts & Letters Daily.

ELECTRIC . . . How does Steve Jobs measure up to Thomas Edison?

Some 130 years after Edison’s remarkable creation of the electricity system, there still remains no doubt about the fundamental and truly epochal nature of his contributions: the world without electricity has become unimaginable. I bet that 130 years from now our successors will not be able to say the same about Apple’s sleek electronic devices assembled from somebody else’s components and providing services that are not fundamentally different from those offered by competitors. I have no doubt that the world without iPhone or iPad would be perfectly fine.

From "Why Job Is No Edison," by Vaclav Smil in The American. Link from Arts & Letters Daily.

 

WRITE THIS POST . . . On Engadget, Ross Rubin weighs in on Siri, the "the standout feature of iOS 5 on the iPhone 4S."

CONSIDERING JACKIE O. . . ."People, like music, can be a matter of taste." [The Smart Set] (link from Arts & Letters Daily).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THIS WEBSITE . . . You can find biographical information about me, Evan Schaeffer, the author of the Trial Practice Tips Weblog, by following the link my personal website. 

My personal website, EvanSchaeffer.com, contains a brief overview of my career as a lawyer and a writer. It also includes many of my publications, both law-related writing and fiction, satire, and commentary.

FROM THE ARCHIVES . . . "The Collected Four-Part Examination of the Lawyer's Briefcase, One of an Ongoing Series of Essays on 'Things Important to Every Lawyer.'"

WHY YOU GET FAT . . . A review of Gary Taubes latest book, Why We Get Fat, from the American Conservative.

OR IS IT MADE OF ICE? . . . The sun is hell, and other things people believed about the sun not very long ago, from browbeat.

VARIETY . . . Find out why "there are currently about a thousand different brands of vodka in existence." See Vodka Nation, by Victorino Matus in the Weekly Standard (link from Arts & Letters Daily).

A DUPLEX COMES ACROSS THE SKY . . . See the house where Thomas Pynchon wrote Gravity's Rainbow: "Thomas Pynchon slept here," from Jacket Copy.

HELLER . . . From Vanity Fair: "The War for Catch-22," an excerpt from Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, by Tracy Daugherty.

PODCASTING, REPRISED . . . Here's a look back at Episode #41 of the Legal Underground Podcast, titled "Law-Related Things that Suck: The 18th Amendment." Enjoy!

FROM THE ARCHIVES . . . "An Introduction to Lawyers for Those Who Have Not Yet Had the Pleasure of Being Introduced: An Essay in Four Parts."

HAMLET . . . Franco Moretti and a "new, more quantitative kind of literary study." (Link from Arts & Letters Daily.)

MFA . . . Read about university creative-writing programs in "The MFA Octopus: Four Questions about Creative Writing," by Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.