Intersection: Joseph Epstein / Larry McMurtry

Here are some jobs that I believe are distinctly not worth having...any job that requires sucking up to the rich. (Joseph Epstein, In a Cardboard Belt!)

Now this is a sentiment of Epstein's that I can wholeheartedly endorse.

One of the skills an urban bookseller -- or any antiquarian book seller -- needs to cultivate is how to deal with rich people. (Larry McMurtry, Books)

This fact would have short-circuited my career as a book-dealer in the early Nineties, if I had actually gotten so far as to be exposed to rich people and their book holdings, but I failed well short of that level. I know how to conduct myself around rich people just fine -- I got a little practice in that line at Yale -- but I am constitutionally unable to suck up. (That inability includes, in a different context, sucking up to the leader of whatever institution happens to be employing me at a given time; I'm terrible at that useful and usually necessary job skill.)