A Noir State of Mind

…gave this blog its title. Job hunting is on my top ten list of least favorite things to do, and while hundreds, possibly thousands of books and articles and websites claim to have found an easy solution, these are people, to take a passage from Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder” slightly out of context, “whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering [a] culture.” Job hunting cannot be easy when done right, and I’m not talking about sending out resumes in response to newspaper or internet ads. The mere thought of having to “network” is enough to give me the creeps (read more in the entry “Double Bluff”). Combined with the gloomy job market in the spring of 2009, it was enough to put me in a noir mood, and I realized that I needed to keep track of my steps to future employment. Nearly everyone who has ever looked for a job that was not a McJob  and who is not extremely well connected  knows what is involved.

To my knowledge, Chandler did not write extensively about the job market per se, but he knew how to write detective stories, and in his hallmark essay went to great lengths to explain why it was anything but simple. He was a realist (some would say a cynic) who wanted to write about characters that had to operate within the shortcomings of contemporary society–”not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it.” As a job hunter in this less than perfect market, I’d like some of that “tough mind” and “cool spirit of detachment.”

In this spirit, this blog details trials and tribulations of a thirty-something college grad (B.A. and M.A. in English) and really excellent bilingual writer (English and German) on the search for the Holy Grail, aka a fabulous job in the corporate world or higher ed that requires a large amount of writing while paying a living wage. Location: southeastern Unites States.