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J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, in Black and White
- kwindla 9y agoBefore he won the Nobel Prize in 2003, J. M. Coetzee was a computer programmer. And before he was a writer, he was apparently a passionate amateur photographer. This New York Times story about an exhibition of newly descovered Coetzee photographs, taken with a Wega 35mm camera in the mid-1950s, is really interesting. The first volume of Coetzee's fictionalized autobiography, Youth, contains an account of his career as a programmer at IBM in London in the 1960s. "At 18 he might have been a poet. Now he is not a poet, not a writer, not an artist. He is a computer programmer, a 24year old computer programmer in a world where there are (yet) no 30 year old computer programmers. At 31 he is too old to be a programmer: one turns oneself into something else - some kind of businessman - or shoots oneself" And of course, as covered previously on HN, he used that computer at night to write poetry of a kind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776042