
J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, in Black and White - kwindla
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/arts/design/coetzee-photographs.html?_r=0
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kwindla
Before 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)

