Steve was born in San Francisco, California, in nineteen fiftyfive;
San Francisco that for a while was home to the Gold Rush and the population boomed during the Great Depression the banks never crashed and San Francisco built the Oakland Bay Golden Gate bridges. During the fifties San Francisco’s Treaty ended war with Japan and it redeveloped into neighborhoods freeways its demographics dropped 10 percent but never did its spirit;
he was adopted they swore to Mother that he would go to college when they had not even finished high school. His father was a machinist when he wasn’t a coast guard vet; he brought Steve in the Garage and put his hands on tools, taught him electronics before the alphabet and they lived in Silicon Valley née Mountain View
Steve Jobs was bored, his aptitude high and he could have skipped some grades, could have flown by but Mom and Dad said no so he stuck it out. College: Six months later a drop out. He sat in on calligraphy courses instead and by god did he learn to love typography
You can’t connect the dots looking forward: you can only connect them looking backwards
He met the Woz in high school, we both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips I found what I wanted to do early in life they sold a Volkswagen bus and a scientific calculator paid no rent to work out of the Garage and thus began
a revolution
the computer became smaller cheaper intuitive
accessible to every day consumers
they democratized technology it was user-friendly only $666.66 even the Devil was impressed $774,000 became $139,000,000 and profits sorted and the world witness the birth of Christ
the Macintosh nineteen eightyfour
Management pushed Steve out, nineteen eightyfive he was hurting the company they said he was fired, he left I loved what I did You’ve got to find what you love The only way to do great work is to love what you do Steve goes on he makes NeXT and buys George’s Pixar and becomes the biggest shareholder of Walt Disney yet he enriched a world of technology he had his hands in them in the Garage
The Great Return nineteen ninetyseven revitalizing the company, CEO with a one dollar salary and they thought he was hurting the company he dictated the evolution of technology and all the others scrambled to compare to produce to become Macbook Air, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iDeclare
Sick. NDA’s on his health, twenty othree it was operable but postponed. Nine months later twenty ofour success five yeaars later losing weight and he said it was a hormone imbalance he said Tim could take the wheels for day-to-day Operations
he was the Master of Ceremonies delivering his quiet resignation
Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life Don’t be trapped
living the results of other people’s thinking Don’t
let the noise of others’ opinions drown out
your own inner voice
Twenty eleven, preparing to pass away quietly, worth $6,500,000 to $7,000,000 Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose You are already naked
But we will remember
Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want
a chance to change the world
a man’s black and white face immortalized on the cover of TIME,
a hand picking through his orchard for the best of the bushel
and his last words OH WOW OH WOW OH WOW
still seeing how the dots connected his life:
Stay hungry Stay foolish
With this piece, I attempted a stylistic imitation of Dos Passos’s biographies. Though we briefly discussed them in class, I think much of the class didn’t recognize these sections as biographies of historic icons simply because they seemed random and vague. Occasionally, the pieces refer to these heroes in nickname or last name only, which further obscures meaning from audiences reading The 42nd Parallel today. Many contemporary readers have not encountered figures like William Jennings Bryan or Andrew Carnegie since middle-school history; figures like William “Bill” Haywood may ignite recognition by name. Therefore, with my imitation, I tried to incorporate these disguising elements based on a more modern figure: Steve Jobs. Similarly, Dos Passos’s biographies began to follow a technical and work-force driven trend, so my mind instinctively turned towards Jobs as a modern hallmark of where the incredibly important work of figures like Carnegie and Edison have taken us. The biographies also fluctuate in form throughout The 42nd Parallel – some take the face of prose, while others utilize the power of the poetic line, and others still incorporate both elements. Ultimately, I tried to imitate the latter, particularly drawing on “The Electrical Wizard” and “Fighting Bob” as inspirations for form. All information and quotes (written in italics) were drawn from the Steve Jobs entry on Biography.com as well as his 2005 Standford Commencement Speech. Ultimately, I wanted to try and paint the life of a man whose work has significantly shaped our world, and which presents modern America by following the chronological boundaries which Dos Passos traces throughout this novel and, presumably, the rest of the trilogy. My only disappointment in creating this piece is that I had to sacrifice more literal attempts at formatting like Dos Passos, as this system doesn’t seem to support indention or multiple spaces to emulate an indention, and I ended up fooling around with code to create a similar, desired effect.
I really love the stylistic imitation–and updating–here. Jobs captures a certain spirit of innovation, boundary-breaking, and extreme wealth. He’s a great target for this kind of bio because a great question mark hangs over his legacy: he’s an American hero, for sure, but he’s partly responsible for ushering in the i-BLANK generation, a generation glued to screens, strapped into technology. You lightly capture this irony in our reference to 1984. I imagine part of the real work of writing this had to do with where to suggests that sense of questioning, doubt, or melancholy that sometimes subtly marks these bios and sometimes absolutely weighs them down.
I really appreciate how you capture Dos Passos’s unique stylistic move whereby he creates new compound words in a way that both speeds us up and slows us down, sparking a different kind of recognition. Same goes for his use of the run-on and lack of punctuation, which you reflect here as well.
Awesome imitation! (also, great title)