January 27, 2021 Arts & Culture The Art of the Cover Letter By A-J Aronstein “If I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form. It is a form, an empty form—I shall never have readers.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground The muses don’t sing to cover letter writers—they’re busy with the poets. But me? I transact exclusively in unloved prose. No one loves cover letters, but everyone needs a job. So my business, editing them, always booms. My process may prove unorthodox, so let me offer a disclaimer before we begin. In the butchery of cover letter editing, one removes metaphors with chainsaws, cauterizes complexity with hot iron, and amputates anything more ambiguous than a grunt. I have no mercy for the saccharine cant of wild-eyed naïfs who write, “I would be thrilled to work as an entry-level associate.” Because you wouldn’t. A newborn’s barbaric yawp can thrill. Doing what spring does with the cherry trees can thrill. “Providing general administrative support in a fast-paced office” will never thrill you. I’ll say this: what I have done to language in the service of cover letters haunts me. At worst, cover letters strain one’s faith that words convey meaning at all, let alone that sentences can shimmer, steal breath, or gird spines. I spend each day climbing mountains of junky paragraphs, scavenging for hunks of usable scrap—like so much copper wire—my senses deadened by the incessant clang of multipart adjectives. “I am detail-oriented,” they write. “My skills are well-suited,” they aver. “I am a team player,” they fart onto the page. As if these injuries to the expressive purpose have no consequence for reader and writer. I describe cover letter composition in terms akin to the balancing acts of trick seals nosing beach balls aloft in exchange for applause and morsels of fish. In less than one page of text, a cover letter describes one’s qualifications by achieving three objectives: (a) expressing authentic-seeming interest in an organization’s mission and culture, (b) demonstrating adequate proof of having mobilized pertinent skills in previous contexts, and (c) communicating with sufficient obeisance to norms of professional décor. If you want to be a seal, I’m the best trainer in the circus. We can be done in minutes. But to understand cover letters will take longer. * As the worst of the Great Recession finally began to wane in 2013, The Atlantic published an article by Stephen Lurie on the history of cover letters. Then, as now, an interest in the cover letter ballooned as applicants flooded a desperate job market. Lurie argues, with a suspicious specificity, “The first use of ‘cover letter’ in the context of employment is on September 23, 1956.” In his telling, that day marked the moment that cover letters commenced their association with job applications because one was requested in the New York Times. As evidence, he points to an ad in the classifieds section for a job at Dutch Boy Paints, which asks that candidates, “submit résumé with cover letter.” This presupposes that a history of the cover letter begins with something being named a cover letter, which does not seem convincing. Writers don’t name genres and then figure out what to write. The laws of genre do not mimic laws written by legislatures, in which case language dictates practice. Rather, conventions and rules begin to coalesce first. Practices evolve. Habits begin to form. And only then do names get attached to them. I’m not merely guessing here. Just one week earlier (on September 16, 1956), Dutch Boy Paints solicited applications for the same position in the Times. In most general respects, it parrots the call from September 26 that Lurie cites. But it differs in an important respect, requesting not a cover letter, but a covering letter. It seems very improbable that a wholly new genre of professional communication evolved in seven days. To pinpoint the moment of a genre’s conception proves tricky, and it is difficult to know when exactly we began to (mis)communicate with one another in a brand-new way. Neither the novel nor the epic poem nor the cover letter had a clear and datable first. * At the age of nineteen in 1771, Benjamin Thompson married the widow Sarah Rolfe, and instantly became one of the wealthiest men in the colony of New Hampshire. A 1950 article written by Sanborn C. Brown and Elbridge W. Stein in the American Journal of Police Science reveals Thompson’s minor role in the history of the American Revolution and his curious contribution to the history of cover letters. The authors claim Thompson was responsible, in a three-page letter dated May 6, 1775, for “the first known example of the use of secret ink in the American Revolution.” The document in question actually represents two interwoven texts. A short and innocuous note—which would have been visible to the naked eye upon its original delivery—reads as follows: Sir / If you will be so kind as to deliver to / Mr. [redacted] of Boston, the Papers which I / left in your care, and take his Receipt for the same, / You will much oblige / Your Humble Servant / [erased]. But interlaced between these lines snakes a much longer message that divulges the size of the gathering Continental Army. Amid details of men and munitions, Thompson laments, “Upon my refusing to bear Arms against the king I was more than ever suspected by the people in this part of the country.” These lines, composed in invisible ink, would have required the application of chemicals or heat to become legible. This longer message comprises the true meaning of the correspondence. The thousand-word secret message surrounds and punctures the inane three-line message and would not have been legible to a recipient without the technological means to develop it. Or in Brown and Stein’s words, “The letter was originally written in two parts, a short visible cover letter and a long invisible part which was left developed by the recipient.” To read Brown and Stein literally suggests that the first cover letter in the New World had nothing to do with job applications at all. When Brown and Stein refer to Thompson’s espionage as an act of cover letter authorship, they potentially expand the universe of what it means to perform that act. Perhaps a cover letter always implies a cover-up, a cover story, an omission, a disguise, a lie. Every cover letter dribbles onto the page a few syllables about self-worth in language that reduces human value to sets of marketable skills, attempting to fit a person to a particular labor slot. The best letters, given the rules of job applications, succeed in rendering entirely secret the full truth of the writer’s selfhood. * For as long as we have been writing cover letters, or covering letters, and whatever preceded covering letters, writers have sought the support of those who have mastered the craft. Lurie describes what he believes is the earliest example of an advertisement for how-to guides on writing cover letters. He says, “The first true sign that cover letters were mainstream enough to cause job applicants some anxiety was an advertisement in 1965, in the Boston Globe.” Again, it should come as no surprise, that one will find an advertisement for a how-to guide on “the covering letter” (again in the New York Times) in August 1955—more than a decade before the example that Mr. Lurie cites in the Boston Globe, and indeed much closer to the pair of Dutch Boy ads. I press back on Lurie’s timeline, not to denigrate a fellow historian of cover letters—indeed, I laud anyone interested enough in cover letters to investigate them in the first place. Rather, it seems important to return to the refrain: what frustrates job applicants in their composition of cover letters proves not to have anything to do with what that genre is named, but on the arbitrary demand to account for one’s value in the form of a page of text. If we were to trace the earliest ever attempt at self-aggrandizing bluster by a job applicant, we would do best to start with the Ancient Greeks, not with mid-twentieth-century America. * “No one will read this,” my advisees lament, often as I am reading their cover letter right in front of them. I know they mean that no one important will read it. I don’t count. Regardless, I will read it closely, provide margin notes and extensive line edits, make recommendations related to font selection, and so on. In the end, I may prove the only person to read the letter. Certainly no one will read it more carefully. Given this attention, I wonder: Who could the letter have been meant for, but for me? I recently came across an article from The Saturday Evening Post, which in 1947 ran a story about three copies of a “covering letter” (there’s that tricky -ing suffix again) dropped from a B-29 bomber—taped to balloon-borne radio instruments—just before the world’s third atom bomb detonated over Nagasaki. Three Manhattan Project scientists had written the letter, addressing it to Japanese physicist Ryokichi Sagane of the Imperial University. Years earlier, Sagane had been their colleague. Now an adversary, they warned him desperately, “Unless Japan surrenders at once, this rain of atomic bombs will increase many times in fury.” The letter did not reach Sagane until after the war, though copies that fell on Japan from those balloons were indeed retrieved by what I can only imagine were very confused civilians. One made its way, years later, to the archives of Washington State University, and one of the original authors added his signature to it. When dropping a letter from a plane over enemy terrain, before unleashing the deadliest weapon ever used, I wonder who these scientists thought that they were actually addressing. They must have known that the odds of the letter reaching the eyes of their intended reader—particularly in time to make any kind of difference in the direction of world affairs—were slim. The question, implied in a different context by Jacques Lacan in his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” is whether the intention of the letter writer has any kind of significance. This may seem obvious, but whomever the letter ultimately reaches—regardless of the letter writer’s intentions—is the letter’s audience. You may very well address your cover letter “To whom it may concern.” The specific “whom” does not matter. You write this letter, send it off with your hopes and ambitions, imagine yourself in the role of associate. Surely, this job will transform your life and your career trajectory! And this letter will get you there. The cover letter is not written with any expectation of readership or audience. It is written with hope and desperation in equal measures. One writes under conditions of duress, anxiety, optimism, nausea, arrogance, and deep insecurity. And in these respects, the address to no one—writing for an imagined and idealized audience—might be the only redeeming quality of the whole endeavor. For in this, you are not unlike Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, who also writes to no one. You are writing for the only audience you could hope to reach if you wrote honestly and with your whole heart: yourself. * My work helps others find work. If you know a way out of this labor camp, tell me. But for now, there’s a recession, and a pandemic, and my inbox swells with cover letters. My mother—a pediatric nurse for more than forty-five years—raised me to be mindful of how I could use the tools I have to help others. The gods blessed and cursed me with the ability to turn the muck and dross of corporate-speak into something that can pass for English. And in that margin can lie the difference between garble and dignity. Let the poets have the work of inspiring with song, I say. For now, I tie the strings of my bloodied smock behind my back and pick up my hacksaw. There is work to be done. A-J Aronstein is a dean at Barnard College, where he runs the career advising center. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and The Millions.
January 25, 2021 Arts & Culture Eccentricity as Feminism By Olga Tokarczuk Leonora Carrington. Photo: Emerico “Chiki” Weisz. Courtesy of New York Review Books. The first time I read Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, I knew nothing about its author, so I had the incredible experience of coming to this short novel in a state of innocence. I was wholly unaware, for instance, that Carrington had been a painter, that she spent most of her life as an expat in Mexico, and that in her youth she had been in a relationship with Max Ernst, one of the greatest surrealists. But the anarchic tone and perverse nature of this little book made a powerful impression, one that has never left me. There are two qualities in fiction that I find particularly astonishing and moving: open-endedness and wild metaphysics. The first quality is structural. Open-ended books intentionally leave themes and ideas unrestricted, rendering them a little blurred. They grant us wonderful space for making our own surmises, for seeking associations, for thinking and interpreting. This interpretive process is a source of great intellectual pleasure, and it also acts as a friendly nudge toward further prospecting. Books of this sort have no theses, but they arouse questions that would not have occurred to us otherwise. To my mind, the second quality, wild metaphysics, touches on a very serious question: Why do we read novels in the first place? Inevitably among the many true responses will be: We read novels to gain a broader perspective on everything that happens to people on Earth. Our own experience is too small, our beings too helpless, to make sense of the complexity and enormity of the universe; we desire to see life up close, to get a glimpse of the existences of others. Do we have anything in common with them? Are they anything like us? We are seeking a shared communal order, each of us a stitch in a piece of knitted fabric. In short, we expect novels to put forward certain hypotheses that might tell us what’s what. And banal as it might sound, this is a metaphysical question: On what principles does the world operate? Read More
January 21, 2021 Arts & Culture Insane Places By Elisa Gabbert On Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. In 1973, the psychologist David Rosenhan published a paper in the journal Science called “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” The paper was based on an experiment he had conducted, sometimes called the Thud Experiment, designed to interrogate how we distinguish the sane from the insane, if in fact sanity and insanity are distinguishable states. Rosenhan arranged to have eight “pseudopatients” seek voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital. The instigating complaint was of auditory hallucinations: the patients claimed to hear voices saying the words empty, hollow, and thud. All eight were admitted into psychiatric wards, most with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Once in the wards, the patients experienced some initial anxiety—they hadn’t expected to get in so easily—but then proceeded to act normally. Rosenhan writes: The pseudopatient, very much as a true psychiatric patient, entered a hospital with no foreknowledge of when he would be discharged. Each was told that he would have to get out by his own devices, essentially by convincing the staff that he was sane. The psychological stresses associated with hospitalization were considerable, and all but one of the pseudopatients desired to be discharged almost immediately after being admitted. They were, therefore, motivated not only to behave sanely, but to be paragons of cooperation. When asked how they were feeling, the patients all said they felt fine and were no longer hearing any voices. But they continued to be treated as though they were schizophrenic. They were kept in the hospital for an average of nineteen days (one for fifty-two days), and when they were eventually discharged, it was under the assumption of “remission.” Rosenhan (who was himself one of the pseudopatients) came to the conclusion that “we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.” You could say that the staff were prone to overdiagnosis, that the structure of the institution creates a hammer/nail relation between doctor and patient—or you could say that the structure of the institution creates the conditions for insanity. Rosenhan claimed that, in a hospital setting, “the normal are not detectably sane.” So were they all mad, as in Wonderland? (“ ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’ ”) (It must be noted that the validity of the study, and indeed most studies, has been called into question.) Read More
January 20, 2021 Arts & Culture More Primitive, More Sensual, More Obscene By Marina Benjamin Jacques Gautier d’Agoty, anatomical plate, 1773 Last spring, as leaves unrolled to catch the light, the American writer Melissa Febos took to social media vowing to drop the word “seminal” from her lexicon of praise, because “why should formative, ground-breaking things evoke semen?” The post caught my eye. Febos put out a playful call for female-centered alternatives to seminal, sourced in women’s pleasure zones, and I joined the gaggle of respondents who offered a string of high-spirited replies. Because it made me laugh and picture cartoonish ideas budding, ballooning out, then floating off like soap bubbles, I suggested boobissimo. But the coinages that really sang to me announced themselves with more poetry: clitoral, oveal, vulvate, luteal, lacteal, hysteral, gyntastic. Here were terms that evoked dark and brooding spaces: undergrowth, caverns, grottos, hidden streams, the richly symbolic unconscious, places where things might be synthesized from organic mulch and unusual elements might combine, becoming impressed with secret shapes before oozing forth from the gloaming. There was something messy and uncontainable about these words, so unlike the clean linearity we associate with sprouting seeds. Febos clearly had politics on her mind. She wanted to kvetch about the way maleness is always and everywhere universalized, not least when encoding creative achievement. It is the seed, not the egg, that implants ideas in our heads and suggests vistas pregnant with possibility. It is the seed (or inspiration) that counts, even when the most promising ideas need to gestate before they can bloom, or incubate, or marinate: that is, sit for a time in a stew of nutrient-rich fluids. Her post made me think of the way maleness aggrandizes itself, arrogates territory to itself, then others the things it discards. It made me think of those early modern theories of reproduction that imagined microscopic homunculi folded up inside every spermatozoa, the egg conscripted only to provide food and shelter. Although the terms Febos crowdsourced were contrived to make a point, the same way herstory makes a point, they hit my ears just so, setting off a chain of satisfying little tingles all along the neural axis that links visceral sensations to head and heart. I have been thinking a lot lately, you see, about the codependence of language, body, and self, the way each constitutes the other and the inescapable sense it makes to acknowledge that where we speak from and who we speak for is bound ufp with our experience not just as historical beings, but as material beings. I have been thinking about this in ways that run explicitly counter to all my old commitments, ever since having my uterus and ovaries removed six years ago. At the time, I hoped the surgery would free me, and it did, from the daily drag generated by my fibroid-mangled organs, which had a way of stopping me in my tracks, paralyzed with pain, and from the different kind of drag that came from living with the bleak specter of ovarian cancer. With my organs gone I moved more lightly through the world. But I was unprepared for the toxic shock of sudden menopause that caused my body to snag up like a choked machine, gears rattling, rivets loosening and popping off, red lights flashing at the controls. It was as if one set of problems (compromising, but nevertheless known) had been elbowed aside only to make room for a new and entirely foreign set, more onerous than the ones they had replaced. Instantly I swung into firefighting mode, determined to combat the rage, tearfulness, severe depression, insomnia, night sweats, fatigue, and memory loss that arrived out of nowhere to assail me, failing to see that all the while I was so intent on putting out the flames, the ground was giving way elsewhere. Something more nebulous was happening to me. My center of gravity was shifting, or migrating, my sense of self, dissolving: the person I’d always been was morphing into who knows what. I wandered about the world queasily off-balance. Out and about on basic errands in my neighborhood, I’d be so high on a sense of unreality as to be practically levitating; and because language is expressive of our material condition, not just the seemingly free-floating thoughts “inside” our heads, my command of that suffered, too. In the weeks after my surgery, I may as well have been a hologram. I’d speak to people only to be looked through and unheard. A range of interesting speech impediments took hold. Where once I communicated fluently, without giving the mechanism a second thought, I now kept stalling, lapsed and confused. Words flew from my brain and dissipated upward like a flock of birds. Nouns, in particular, kept disappearing. This broken link between word and object mattered. When you name things you acquaint yourself with the world, rescribing it daily via a ritual “Hello again.” More importantly, you constitute who you are to yourself. You affirm that you’re the kind of person who notices this or appreciates that, has an affinity for this and an aversion to that, who arrives at an understanding of their particular interiority through calibrating the temperature between inside and out. Noun-mute, I had a hangdog feeling of being locked out of my own mind. The place I was speaking from was the void. Now and again, I surprised myself with what did come out of my mouth. I’d say pencils instead of flowers, substitute wallet for fridge. If my husband shot me a look of concern I’d brush it off, joking that my brain appeared to be hung up on morphological resemblances. Yet too often sentences that began well, with clear intention, would lose direction and peter out or else freeze abruptly, midway between the starting line and the finish. Too many times, talking to someone at home, at work, socially, my mouth would open and nothing at all would come out. People looked at me expectantly and in apology I’d shrug. I figured this was what dementia must feel like from the inside. But given that trauma is by definition unspeakable, I can’t help but wonder now if my problems with language weren’t masking something else. Read More
January 19, 2021 Arts & Culture Charm and How to Come By It By Dubravka Ugresic The following is Dubravka Ugrešić’s preface to Damion Searls’s new translation of Marshlands, by André Gide, published earlier this month by New York Review Books. André Gide, 1893. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Why a preface? Prefaces usually offer the reader a guide to the book before them; they say a few words about the book’s author and place the book in its historical or contemporary literary context. In the pre-Internet age this was a job entrusted to literary experts. Today, with the assistance of the Internet, expertise is no longer considered necessary. I confess, I myself am no expert, arbiter, or competent interpreter of André Gide’s work. I am here merely as a literary interloper and I see it as my task to respond to two questions: How did this little French book come to be translated into English? Why did I once love this book, do I love it still today, and if I have loved it, why do I think others will? * Literature as Seduction I made the acquaintance of Damion Searls—who has translated Marshlands into English—in 1998 at a literary event in Vienna. Our encounter was fleeting and superficial. Four years later, when he was on a Fulbright, Damion turned up in Amsterdam. This was our chance to spend more time together. True book lovers—writers, critics, translators, publishers, and readers—can be identified (or at least I identify them!) by the way they allow themselves to be “seduced” by books. If the art of the word, meaning literature, is a form of interhuman communication, then “seduction” is one of the forms this communication takes. Literary seduction doesn’t know or respect age, nor national, ethnic, racial, gender, or cultural boundaries. Yet finding a true friend, a book lover, is a true rarity. Read More
January 19, 2021 Arts & Culture Reading the Artifacts After the Capitol Riot By Swati Rana Portrait of Dalip Singh Saud by Jon R. Friedman (Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives) As curators search the Capitol Building, cataloging and repairing the damage done by the January 6 riot, I read for news of a painting of Dalip Singh Saund that I saw two years ago when I visited Washington. On the landing of the East Grand Staircase, the portrait’s richly marbled frame is adorned with symbols of Saund’s immigration, education, and career. A plaque below the painting commemorates his historic election as the “First Asian American in Congress”—he represented California from 1957 to 1963. As reports emerge of how mob vandalism targeted, in particular, certain racialized objects within the U.S. Capitol, we need to reckon with the artifacts within its walls. Images from the January 6 riot make clear the white supremacist terms upon which entry into the U.S. Capitol is premised. While these scenes are new and unprecedented, they are not an aberration. Those who make a study of U.S. empire, enslavement, genocide, segregation, and voter suppression know that the Capitol represents the illusion of democracy. To the extent that the rioters stand for antidemocratic, fascist, and racist principles, it is not surprising to see them inside the Capitol Building. They are a feature of the system. This is their house, and they write on its walls with impunity. Read More