Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

Female Clerks

The Supreme Court needs more of them, according to the Times.  Seems like the whole article is about how it's a statistical blip though, and not really anything to worry about.

Unrelated: I went to the Yankees game this afternoon (the make-up for yesterday's rainout), got bleacher seats, the weather held out, it was pretty fun.  I've been to a handful of Mets games, but this is the first Yankees game I've been to since last summer sometime.  I guess it's bad to say this, because of the history involved with Yankee Stadium, but I'm glad the Yankees are getting a new one.  Yankee Stadium isn't that awesome.  Kinda dirty, food's not very good.  Easy subway access though.  Takes me less time to get there from Park Slope in Brooklyn than it takes to get to a Mets game, which doesn't make good sense given the geography, but the 4 train is pretty quick through Manhattan and into the Bronx.

Wings & Vodka

Aw, man.  He even does the sign-off pretty much pitch-perfectly.  Wings and Vodka has a farewell post up,  and, really, if you haven't been reading him all along, you ought to go devour his "best of" archives and skip whatever it is you were going to do to entertain yourself tonight, because this will be better.  If I'd kept count of the number of times he's written something I wished I'd thought of first, that number would be quite high.  For the past three years, there has been no one writing funnier law school-related humor pieces than Mike.  Not even close.  It's a shame we're losing him to the dark side.  If all is right in the world, he'll write the somethings that are living inside him and find a whole new audience of fans out there in the non-blogosphere.  This would be a good place to start, if for some inexcusable reason you haven't read it already.

Some links...

A cool interview with comedian Mike Birbiglia on Gothamist.

Read that Survivor is splitting its contestants up by race this year.  Seems to be causing some problems.  The link is to a councilman trying to get CBS to pull the show.  Another article here.  Concerns it will perpetuate stereotypes.  I think it's an effective ploy on the part of Mark Burnett to get some press for the 52nd season of Survivor, or whatever they're up to, since all the seasons are exactly the same no matter who's on the show anyway.  I'm finding it hard to get too worked up about the chances that Survivor will set off a race war.

Jeff Pearlman tells Barry Bonds To Come Clean

Well, he's also telling people to buy his book.  Check out his ESPN Page 2 column.  I read Pearlman's book about Bonds couple of months ago (and blogged about it).  It was a good read, I liked it.  He's a good writer, I liked his previous one about the 1986 Mets.  I don't fault Pearlman for finding an angle to get himself an ESPN Page 2 guest column so he can pimp his book, even though he says in the column that he's not writing it to sell books.

Re: Negative Images of Lawyers

After my post below about the Doug Litowitz book, "The Destruction of Young Lawyers," I got an e-mail from a reader.  I think he made a valid point, and I wanted to post his note and my response, because I think he made a fair point, and maybe this is worth opening up to other people's comments.  Short version if you don't want to read all this: I'm probably more negative than I should be when I write about firms, and I forget sometimes that there are lots of people out there who like their jobs and it doesn't mean they're blindly following the herd, uncreative, and evil if they decide to work at a firm, and even if I recognize that there really are good reasons to go to firms, I'm not very good about making it seem that way when I write about them.  Anyway, the e-mail exchange:

Jeremy --

I've been reading Anonymous Lawyer (the blog) for a few months now and occasionally reading your personal blog for less time.  I think AL is pretty genius.  My wife bought me the book a few weeks ago, and I'm looking forward to reading it soon.

 

That said, I am slightly troubled by an aspect of AL and an aspect of your personal writings, both having to do with the fact that you are not practicing law at a firm (and as far as I know, you have not done so, apart from summering somewhere).  I do work at a big firm, and for the most part I really like it.  So with respect to AL, I'm troubled by how savagely you satirize law firm work (and life), despite the fact that, apparently, you don't have the basis of knowledge to satirize it properly -- although, amazingly, you get a lot of things very right, which is attributable probably to the fact that you were quite perceptive as a summer (and unfortunately also to the fact that law firms probably tend to live up (or down) to the worst possible stereotypes).

 

With respect to your personal writings, you sometimes seem more than a little disdainful of those (like me) who are out there working at firms -- as though we've made an uncreative decision, falling into the default option presented to us.  To the extent that's your view, I'm troubled because it disregards the possibility that some of us might actually find the law intellectually engaging and that some of us might really appreciate (if not require) the financial security and rewards the job provides.  Which is to say that on a good day, I love my job, and I think that can be said for lots of lawyers out there (even associates in big law firms).  (But your blogging sometimes implies that anyone who chooses to work at a firm is a sucker and that no one really likes the work.)

 

I'm sure you must get these kinds of comments sometimes, and you appear to be self-reflective to have considered these issues (though it's not something I've read you discussing overtly).  Nonetheless, I felt compelled to share my view.  Thanks.

 

-- XXXX

And my reply:

XXXX,

Thanks for the note.  I actually don't get these kinds of comments as often as I expect I should, but I appreciate it because I think I sometimes do -- because I'm not at a firm -- forget that there really are people out there who do like the work.  I expect a lot of it is selection bias -- the people reading my stuff are probably more likely to be the unhappy ones at the firm than to be the happy ones.  But of course all of these are fair points.

As far as AL goes, you're right that I don't have the basis of knowledge to do this as well as I would if I'd been at a firm for ten years, or even one year.  I can't do anything about my lack of experience except acknowledge it and apologize for it.  When I started AL, it was just to play around with the thoughts in my head after the interview process, before I'd even summered, and then I kept it going because I found I liked writing in the character's voice, and that people were reading.  I didn't expect it would lead to a book deal, and I certainly didn't expect I'd keep it up this long.  To the extent I get the details right, that's great.  To the extent I don't, it's harder and harder the more distance grows between my summer experience and when I'm writing, and to some extent the character has turned into a caricature anyway.  I've been surprised throughout my time writing the blog how much people tell me it resonates.  But, honestly, I expect my better audience are people who've had relatively little experience at firms, or just want a glimpse inside the world, not people who've been there for years and know a lot more than I do.  I'm just trying to write an entertaining character that rings true to as much of an extent as I can do it, and where if the humor is competing against the reality, I'm inclined to let the humor win out.  I am as surprised as anyone that people feel like it resonates as much as they do. 

As far as my personal blog goes, I don't mean to seem disdainful, and I try really hard to make sure that I'm not just buying into my own writing and believing that it's really this bad, for everyone.  I'm not sure if your e-mail is in part a reaction to my post about Doug Litowitz's book last night.  Litowitz is angry.  And I read something like that and to some degree I can't help but get sucked in and feel like something like that validates AL and validates my own choices.  I don't mean to.  Honestly though, most of my friends at big firms don't like it.  Even the ones who thought they would don't, and are wishing they could get out.  I'm certain this is even more selection bias than my blog readers -- my friends at big firms, even the ones I perceive as being as likely to be happy there as anyone else, may not represent a fair sampling.  But I talk to them and they don't find the work all that engaging, and they're frustrated at the lack of ability to plan their days and know whether they're leaving the office at 7 or at midnight, and they feel handcuffed by the salary, and wrestle with the question of whether or not it's worth it.  And don't seem very happy.  I imagine these things resolve themselves after a few years, and as the work gets more interesting, for some people the tide turns and they realize it is worth it, and the job can actually be pretty good.  But even if I don't mean to be, I'm sure I'm influenced by the fact that even the people I talk to who are at firms don't like it, and so, really, it's easy for me to forget there's a whole class of people out there who do.

I probably shouldn't have gone to law school.  I got very lucky that all this stuff happened with the blog and the book deal, but, really, I didn't want to be a lawyer, and I did this because I wanted a safe backup plan, I'm risk averse, and I didn't know what else to do.  Those weren't good reasons.  It is absolutely easy for me to forget that there are people out there truly interested in this stuff, who don't see the law firm as a default option, are not merely there to pay off their loans, and actually enjoy it.  To the extent that my writing reflects that, it's a weakness and I don't always catch it, and I apologize for it.

Not sure if this answer satisfies, or just rationalizes.  Would love to get your thoughts on whether any of this makes sense.

Actually, if you're cool with it, I'd love to quote part of your e-mail and post some of this -- I really do take the feedback seriously, and don't want to come off as disdainful to people at firms, who like it there, and I know that to an extent I probably do, because I do forget that not everyone is living inside my head, and the kinds of things that drove me to law school are totally different from the kinds of things that drive most people to law school, and that lots of people are actually engaged by this stuff and like their jobs.

Best,
Jeremy

And his reply back:

Thanks for your response, which I think makes a lot of sense and isn't purely rationalizing (and even if it were, that would be fine).

 

You are correct that my email was prompted somewhat by your post on the Litowitz book, partly because I reject that his sweeping negative conclusions (at least as I recall your summary of them) necessarily hold true for all big-firm associates (and also because I question the extent to which you know whether he's right).  I'm also sensitive to negative stereotyping about law firm work, because I think the predominance of that sort of viewpoint (whether based in fact or not) is largely what makes it so bad sometimes -- e.g., I never feel so negative about what I do as when I leave a social event with the firm at which a number of my colleagues have been whining about various aspects of the job (along similar lines, I think most of the unpleasantness that often surrounds the issues of billable hours and the politics of advancing within the firm tends to be generated by associates rather than partners).

Just thought that was interesting enough to post in full...

School Lunches

There's a very long and pretty interesting article in the NY Times Magazine about school lunches and the quest to make them healthier, focusing on an effort going on down in Florida.  I find it bizarre and perhaps inexcusable that there's no mention of Jamie Oliver and his similar -- and successful! -- quest to do the same thing in the UK.  I blogged over a year ago about a British TV series on school lunches, featuring Oliver, that I watched and loved.  Oliver has a book about it too.  If the writer of the Times piece just doesn't know about Oliver and what he's been doing in England, someone should tell her.  If she knows and decided to leave it out of the piece, and keep the focus on Florida, I'm just surprised there's not at least a throwaway line about it, and not sure why a mention of Oliver wouldn't have made perfect sense.  Especially since the article opens with a story about showing a class a sweet potato and some of them have no idea what it is, and Oliver's documentary features a scene exactly the same but with other vegetables.  And, incidentally, the article says sweet potato fries are not a kid-friendly food.  Um, why the heck not?  Sweet potatoes are awesome.  How could anyone not love sweet potato fries?  Then again, I think beets are terrific and bought celeriac at the farmer's market today just because why not.

M. Night Shyamalan and the book he let someone write about him

I wrote about the new book, "The Man Who Heard Voices," on my Powells blog last Monday, and have been meaning to post about it over here too.  The context of the post over there was that the book gets you inside Shyamalan's head -- I mean, it seems like for much of the book Shyamalan pretty much told Bamberger what he was thinking and Bamberger wrote it -- and that's kind of what blogs let you do, at least the good ones.  But the point about blogs that I made over there isn't what I want to write about here, because I've written about it before (and because you can read that post if you want to).  I just want to write about the book, and why even though the negative reviews it's been getting are probably right, I really enjoyed it and I think it was totally worth reading.

From my Powell's post (and then I'll go from there):

The book got an overwhelmingly negative review in the New York Times last month — "not just a puff article but a full-length, unintentionally riotous puff book." Yet somehow the review made me want to read the book anyway. I've liked most of Shyamalan's movies, and the book seemed like a chance to get inside his head a little bit. Which it is, completely. The book is in a lot of ways autobiography dressed up as biography — for much of it, Bamberger is writing about the thoughts inside Shyamalan's head, and apparently got enough access and got Shyamalan to open up to him enough that the reader gets a real sense of the process behind making the movie and of Shyamalan's thoughts, at least the ones he wanted to let Bamberger communicate.

The book follows the life cycle of Shyamalan's new film, Lady In The Water, from an early script draft through submitting it to Disney, their negative reaction, Shyamalan jumping over to Warner Brothers, casting, shooting, and finally having a version of the film ready to be seen.  It's a fascinating look inside the process, mostly because -- rather than in spite of -- the one-sidedness of the presentation.  Sure, Bamberger writes about Shyamalan like he's a God among men.  But that's what makes the book so compelling.  It's this perspective we usually don't see in books -- it's not a distanced,unbiased outsider's view.  Instead it's the story from Shyamalan's point of view, but without the usual problems of autobiography where someone doesn't want to be too revealing, doesn't want to seem too immodest, or just doesn't have anything to say.  Bamberger puts you there, in Shyamalan's pocket, and it's a great perspective from which to learn about how the film was made, how Shyamalan's head works, and what the movie business is like from the point of view of a filmmaker.  So what if it's a puff piece?  It's interesting *because* it's a puff piece.  It's interesting *because* Bamberger is so close to his subject.  And Shyamalan doesn't come off without fault, even with Bamberger so close to him.  The Amazon reviews largely say that Shyamalan comes off looking badly -- I don't think he does.  I think Shyamalan comes off looking like a guy committed to his work, with a healthy opinion of himself.  I don't think that's so terrible.  He seems a little bit sensitive to things that probably don't matter so much, but that could also be how Bamberger saw him as opposed to the reality.  But my big point is that rarely does an author get so close his subject, and that makes this book a terribly addictive read, and I couldn't put it down.  Whether that makes it a good book, I don't know.  But I can't imagine a filmmaker or anyone who aspires to do work in the entertainment industry who wouldn't find the book a terrific read.

I wrote about Bamberger's previous book, Wonderland, two years ago.  Liked that one too, if I recall.

Radio Interview, Pt 2

That was kind of a disaster.  I mean, it won't hurt the book, and the segment was fine, but I think I was pretty terrible.  I just tried to listen back and can't listen for more than 30 seconds without wanting to punch the wall, so I shut it off.  I know I was much, much better toward the end of it, once I was a little more comfortable and wasn't totally freaked out by the whole thing.  I was surprised how they do it -- I assumed you get to meet the interviewer, talk for a few minutes, get a sense of what kinds of things they want you to talk about, maybe some practice in the microphone to check levels.  But it's much simpler than that -- they had me sit outside the studio until the break right before my segment, then they ushered me in, told me to put the headset on, where the volume control was, and I was on the air.  I guess that works if you've done this before.  The interviewer was really good, and they went to callers pretty quickly, which took the load off of me to talk, so I appreciated that.  The callers were good.  I thought that after all of the phone interview stuff I've done, and because the AOL podcast they haven't posted yet actually went really well, I would be less nervous and better at this, but I wasn't.  The one thing I wanted to try and do was take my time, take a deep breath and think about an answer before starting to talk, but in the moment I couldn't do it.  I kept jumping the gun and talking before I knew what I wanted to say, and then realizing mid-sentence that I had nowhere to go, and then I ended up getting flustered and that only feeds into itself and makes it worse.  I can't really beat myself up over it though.  The segment overall was fine, I'm sure it doesn't matter, and if it meant that the publicist didn't run back to her office eager to book me on some more of these, I'm not sure that's such a terrible thing.  With practice, I'm sure I'd be better at this, but, I don't know, before the next one I should have them do some mock ones and let me get a little comfortable with it.  Or at least I should try and find a way to have them let me meet the host first and chat for 5 or 10 minutes, just to get some sort of connection and make me a little more at ease in the chair.  No one's fault, except mine, but, shit, that wasn't very much fun.  Eh, I had a good lunch, I'm going to watch some TV and take a nap and do some writing.  I'm sure it's been fairly obvious here that the muse hasn't been terribly active in the past couple of months, but I kind of feel like I'm getting able to get past this Anonymous Lawyer stuff in my head and really start playing around with a bunch of things that are percolating.  More later.  Feeling something is good, even if it's frustration.  Good for writing.

Talking about talking

I just finished up my last post of the week for Powell's, where I've been guest-blogging since Monday.  As I was thinking about what to write, I realized I had the urge to share something over there that I don't think I've shared here yet, even though I've thought about it a bunch, and even started a few posts about it but never pushed them forward.  And it's not that big of a deal, but I kind of feel disingenuous writing about the radio interview I'm set to do tomorrow without being a little bit more forthcoming about what's actually making me anxious about it, instead of just talking in generalities.  (And I'm cribbing from the Powell's post a little bit, so if you're over here from there, bear with me and I'll get to some new places by the end of the post, I promise.)

I mean, all the generalities are appropriate here too -- I’ve never done any ive radio before, and I’m not entirely confident in my ability to be engaging and articulate on the fly. I trust my writing enough that I don't feel like I can truly hurt myself with an e-mail interview, to an extent that I don't trust my talking. I haven't really internalized the ability to stop and take a breath, and actually formulate an answer before I start talking, and so on a lot of my phone interviews I feel like I give them half a sentence of real answer and then I fumble my way to the end of the paragraph.

But that's all stuff that's normal and expected, and no big deal.  What makes me anxious about this stuff, and I'm really kind of annoyed that I haven't blogged about this before, but I have somewhat of a stutter when I’m not entirely comfortable -- I'd call it a slight stutter, but there are situations where I can be fairly dysfluent, if I'm having to make an appointment on the phone, or something like that, where there's no way around whatever words I need to say.   It’s probably noticeable to a small degree in regular conversation –- but probably a lot more noticeable to me, in my own head, than to whoever I'm talking to.  I've talked about it to some friends, at various points, and a few have said they never noticed it, but I'm not sure I totally believe that.  Once I’m comfortable with someone, it fades into the background pretty quickly and really isn't an issue at all -- I forget about it and it disappears. Certain dumb stuff, like having to introduce myself on command, or one of those orientation games where you need to go around the circle, that stuff is really where I find I have a noticeable problem.  Normal conversation, nothing really. 

In an interview setting, it ends up kind of up for grabs. I’ve had a bunch of phone interviews about the book, with newspapers and magazines. When I’ve been able to establish a rapport pretty quickly, when I’ve felt comfortable with the person, it’s been fine, and I’ve actually been pretty pleased with how I’ve done. But there have been a few where for whatever reason I couldn’t find that comfort level, and was struggling with it the entire time. I haven’t yet figured out how to make them all go as well as the ones that do, so I really don't know what to expect with the radio thing.  It's live, in studio, which is tons better for me than a phone thing -- it's usually not a problem in person, and I'm significantly more comfortable in person than on the phone.  But the added complication of a microphone and the knowledge that there's an audience out there makes me not entirely confident.

Yet I acted on stage in college (and a little bit in the law school parody shows, but I don't really count them) without a real problem.  Partly because when able to rehearse the lines, I could figure out where to breathe, and see where I kept stumbling over the words, and work to fix that.  On the fly it's more challenging.  And I've been taking improv comedy classes where, for the most part, I think I'm able to manage it in the scenes, certainly more than in the first-class-around-the-circle introduction stuff, where it's fairly obvious I have a stutter. 

I think why I haven't blogged about this is because, to some degree, writing about it makes it a bigger deal than it is.  It's not a big deal.  And I don't want this post to make it seem like it's more of thing than it is, or that it's really something real that's a problem in any significant way.  It's not.  I'd guess much of the time people I'm dealing with don't notice it, and even if they do, what's the difference and it hasn't really impacted anything that's gone on in my life.  I went to a hypnotist once, actually -- I read a book somewhere (I've read all the books about this stuff) that said that could help.  He said he didn't think it was nearly severe enough to want to treat me, and that I should think of it as an endearing quirk.  I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I certainly think it's part of the reason I write.  Maybe even a big part of the reason I write.  I write because I can type all the words in my head without worrying about whether I'll be able to say them.  I mean, I don't want to overstate it.  I also write because I'm introverted and kind of scared of people, and oftentimes have the courage to write things that I don't have the courage to say.  Or at least that I can write them more articulately than I could ever say them. Perhaps this post not included.

I've taped two podcast interviews so far, and neither has been posted.  One for AOL, which I actually thought went really well, and the stutter wasn't a problem much at all, and I'd be surprised if it's noticeable in the audio.  And the other for a site called Written Voices, where I wasn't really able to get into a groove, and I expect they'll have to edit the audio a fair bit, because I absolutely stumbled over stuff.

The other nice thing about it, and I touched on this in the Powell's post too.  It means I’m rarely polished enough to fake it. And I feel like maybe there's some sort of charm to that.  In others I feel like I like that characteristic.  There’s a genuineness about not being polished enough to fake it.   I like people who don’t sound like they’re reading from a set of talking points that they decided they wanted to communicate, and who never get beneath the surface.  But as I write that, I realize it's not the same thing as what I'm saying, and there's no reason why someone who speaks like a radio host can't be a warm and genuine person too.  But maybe you know what I mean.  Maybe not.  In any case, I need to get some sleep.

Listen to me Friday morning, if you like, on the Brian Lehrer show -- 10:40 on WNYC in New York, or the Internet feed is here.  Cross your fingers it's not a complete mess.  :)

2 quick links to stuff written by me

New Wall Street Journal Online article that just went online.  You can see it here.   And I've been blogging all week over at Powells, over here.  I know posts over here have been dismally lacking lately.  I'll rectify that soon, by the weekend for sure.  Blogging overload, without a ton to say.

Oh, and it looks like I'm going to be on the Brian Lehrer show on public radio this Friday at 10:40AM.  That's WNYC in New York.  More details if I find out any.  I've never done any sort of live radio thing, so it may be a complete disaster.  I promise I will admit it if it is, and write about it in excruciating detail.

UPDATE: I fixed the link to the piece

Cotton Candy

When did they start selling cotton candy as a bag with 4 balls of it inside?  When I was a kid, cotton candy came in an amount you can ball up in one hand and stuff into your mouth.  Now it's like 4 or 5 or 17 handfuls.  That's a lot of sugar.  I mean, it's pretty unappealing regardless, but in that quantity, it seems even more so.

In related news, how many Cracker Jacks can one person eat?

Baseball games are fun.

Hollywood Jock and Aces

Over the weekend I read "Hollywood Jock" by Rob Ryder.  It's a year-long journal by a screenwriter trying to sell a script for a basketball movie and get it into production, built off an ESPN.com column that he wrote.  I'd never read the ESPN column, but the book looked interesting on the library shelves and so I picked it up.  It was okay, but I'm not sure I can be more positive than that.  It felt pretty surface-level -- not a great sense of the process of selling a screenplay, and didn't really get inside the author's head at anything more than a superficial level.  The projects he was working on seemed interesting, and he had some cool stories about meeting basketball players and Hollywood executives, but I found myself skimming as the book proceeded.  Oh well, if you like basketball more than I do, this might be worth checking out.

I also read Aces by Mychael Urban, which is the story of A's pitchers Barry Zito, Mark Mulder, and Tim Hudson, following them throughout the 2004 baseball season, before Hudson and Mulder got traded.  Yeah, it's another baseball book, so most of you can skip the rest of this post without feeling like you're missing anything.  The book was solid, I really liked it, learned more about Mulder and Hudson and Zito and the A's than I knew before, and lots of cool stories about the job of a beat writer and how players deal with the press.  Impossible to read this and not feel like Barry Zito is one of the cooler people on the planet, and that all three of them are pretty good people.  That may just be what Urban wanted to portray, but I feel like this was a nice read and felt pretty true, whether or not it is.  Obviously you already know whether it's a book you'd want to read or not -- I'd had it on my "to read" list since it came out but it never made it to the library... but when I bought a book which I'll blog about later in the week, I needed something to get to $25 SuperSaver shipping on Amazon, and so this was perfect.  Worth the wait.

Quick link

I did a (long) interview with the New York Inquirer. It's posted here. Check it out.

"Lawyers are pathologically unhappy."

That's the first line of "The Destruction Of Young Lawyers," a relatively new (January 2006) book by Douglas Litowitz, a former law professor at Ohio Northern University.  He sent me a copy after reading about Anonymous Lawyer.  My grandma sometimes worries that my book is too harsh regarding law firms, and that people will be upset with me for satirizing them.  That may be true, but if I have her read Litowitz's book, she will never say that again.  This is an angry, angry -- and awesomely entertaining -- book.  It's the book I kept wishing I could find in law school, that would put together all of the negative law firm thoughts in one place, so that I would know I wasn't alone.  I have a review on my old blog of Thane Rosenbaum's The Myth of Moral Justice, which has a chapter about law firms, and says some of this same stuff but in different words, and in fewer pages, and when I found that, it was like someone had validated what I was thinking, but in an angrier and more coherent way.  Litowitz makes a whole book of it.  I don't know if I think it's this bad.  I mean, it's in my professional interest to think law firms are the worst things ever, and have no redeeming qualities, and that everyone who works at one deserves to be hung, because then I could have an agenda and make my writing more passionate and inspired and angry... but I'm not angry, personally.  I recognize that people go to law firms for real reasons, and that lots of jobs suck and at least at a law firm you get paid a lot, sometimes the work is interesting, sometimes the people aren't evil, and it's not like you have to carry heavy things too often.

Litowitz, on the other hand, is very angry.  He's a terrific writer, and probably a pretty good client advocate, since he's somehow able to stay on message for 150 densely packed pages without ever letting go of that anger and falling into more complacent, lazy, rambling prose.  I feel like most books, even when they're driven by a singular point of view, end up being a couple pages of quotable material, and then a hundred pages of support that never really rises to the level of the introduction.  This book does not do that.  This book is powerfully angry from cover to cover.  Just when you think you're done with the angry part, he starts comparing law firm partners to Nazis and skinheads.  It's terrific, filled with gems like this one: "Nobody commands lawyers to lose their ethical restraints  or their moral conscience -- they do it on their own to keep their jobs."

Okay, let me back up for a second.  Litowitz starts the book by presenting lots of evidence that lawyers are unhappy, hate their jobs, hate their lives, are only practicing law for the money, have alcohol and drug problems, depression, poor circulation, painful ingrown hairs, and so forth.  Like the Patrick Schlitz law review article that everyone ends up reading at some point in law school.  Then he identifies six causes of lawyer unhappiness: 

Law School ("One thing that we know with certainty about law school is that it breaks people, that it is experienced as a trauma, an assault."); The Bar Exam ("an expensive, arbitrary exam that serves no discernable educational or social purpose, and is a humiliating and boring ritual of subjugation."); The transformation of law into a business that pretends to be a profession ("the basic structure of a law firm is no different from a house of ill repute"); The pressure upon lawyers to practice in a law firm setting instead of as a solo practitioner who can set her own limits on acceptable behavior ("Like an assembly-line worker who welds rivets to car doors for ten hours every day, [the lawyer] has no relationship with the ultimate consumer, not does she have control of her own production."); Technology ("The law office has become an electronic sweatshop"); and mental dysfunction ("Like abused kids who develop multiple personalities as a coping mechanism, young lawyers...").

There's so much more where those quotes came from.  For each of those six causes, he rants for a chapter -- organized, coherent, persuasive ranting, but it's a rant nonetheless.  And it's great to read, even if just for the sheer force of the words.  I can't picture a book that could hate law firms, the bar exam, law school, any of this, more than this book does.  It is really quite refreshing to read something so raw and untempered but still really powerful and persuasive.

I sort of imagine anyone who reads this and works at a law firm either has to read it for comedic purposes, or it will seriously cause them mental distress.  So we're left with law students, and people like me, who are totally cool with people who want to write angry screeds about law firms.  I can think of a dozen people who I would love to send a copy of this book to, except I feel like they'd think it was like sending them a copy of some Jewish conversion booklet and that it was propaganda to try and get them to come over to the dark side.  All I mean to say, in this whole post, is that for a one-sided book against law firms and everything they're about, you can't do any better than this book.  If you're looking for that, read it.

Wait a second.  So at first, my post ended at the end of the previous paragraph.  And then I tried to write Prof. Litowitz an e-mail telling him I posted about his book.  And I started to apologize in the e-mail, for probably not hitting his talking points quite right, and for being overcautious to make sure it doesn't seem like I have an agenda against law firms.  But, actually, I want to blog about this instead.  Reading his book makes me wonder something.  I feel like while I was in law school, while I was actually having to make the decision about whether to go to a firm, I felt the way this book does.  But once I made the decision and knew I wasn't going to work at a firm, honestly, I lost a lot of that passion.  And what I told myself is that probably, to a great extent, I had convinced myself it was much more terrible than it really is, and I was exaggerating it in my head, and it couldn't be that bad.  And I really believe that.  I really believe it can't be as bad as I thought it was when I was deciding whether or not to do it, because then everyone is crazy and of course everyone isn't crazy, and of course there are tons of jobs that are much worse, and of course some of the work isn't that bad, and of course people work long hours in every job, and of course the pay is good, and of course there aren't that many other choices out there, and of course....  And then I read a book like this and that little voice inside my head starts to whisper, "wait, maybe you were right, maybe it really is that bad."  And the other voice says, "no, you're just telling yourself that to justify passing up the money and writing a book."  And that first voice says, "no, trust your instincts."  And that second voice says, "no, don't be an idiot, nothing is this black and white, things aren't *evil*, everything has tradeoffs, good parts and bad parts."  And then the third voice says, "stop worrying about it, you don't need to worry about this, at all, seriously."  And so I stop.  But that's why the rest of this post probably feels like I'm apologizing for the book and how angry it is and that I like it anyway, because I'm not sure whether or not to trust the strong feelings that I had, and really don't have anymore because whether or not law firms are *evil* or just *not that much fun* I'm not working at one so it doesn't have to matter.

Okay, that's all.

From Blog to Book

I've been getting a fair number of e-mails asking about the blog to book transition, so I've written a fairly long piece about it and posted it over at the anonymous law firm site, here.

I feel like part of this whole process has been about trying to learn a bit about the publishing industry and how to promote a book online, and how to get people interested.  In a way, that's as interesting as writing the book was.  This is possibly a bad question to ask, or the wrong audience to be asking, but: if you haven't bought the book, I'm sort of curious to be able to know the reason why.  Not in a bad way, but just the honest reason.  Like, you only buy paperback, you figure it'll be enough like the blog that why should you pay for it, you'll probably buy it but haven't yet, you borrowed someone else's copy, you think you won't like it, you just don't want to buy it, I don't know.  I'm curious if one of these, or something I'm not even thinking of, dominates over the others. 

Feel free to also add what would need to happen for you to be galvanized to buy it.  :)