Monday Scramble:
Freelance
Two artefacts of my youth that I don’t miss in the slightest: typewriters and phonographs. No amount of nostalgia — and nostalgia is not one of my weaknesses, anyway — will ever obscure from me the fact that neither machine was adequate to its purpose. It would be generous to call typewriters “unforgiving” — and also dishonest, because writing in type, imitating printed books that is, was categorically beyond the capabilities of typewriters until the very end of their run. As for a sound-transmission system that depends upon the physics of friction — erosion — for its effects, I have one word for devotees of vinyl: demented. And then I have another word: deaf.
These slightly churlish but metabolically stimulating reactions are prompted this morning by the most delightful little book, Arthur Krystal’s The Half-Life of an American Essayist, which was published by David R Godine in 2007. More specifically, what got me going was the following sentence from an essay on the typewriter:
Of course, if you are under twenty-one you have probably never used a typewriter except to fill out an application, and consequentely the loud thwack of typewriter keys striking a cylindrical roller and the satisfying ping of the carriage reaching the end of the track are not in your mnemonic repertoire.
I have read no further; I put the book down then and there to write this. But by then I had read two essays and the book’s introduction, all of which are really and truly and simply marvelous. I put the book down to discharge my dissatisfactions with pings and thwacks and scratches and skips — Mr Krystal does not take up the LP, I don’t think, but the memory lingered of an item in the Times reporting increased sales of “vinyl” — in order to clear my mind for larger thoughts on how better to distribute not so much Mr Krystal’s book as news of its excellence.
I don’t intend to write about the two essays that I’ve read and liked, although I am sorely tempted to admire the title piece, which is a rumination on the facts of life as confronted by anyone disposed to make a career out of writing essays. I’d like to copy out a rather large slab, three paragraphs from the heart of the piece. Some other time, perhaps. For the moment, a lovely drollery will do:
There are, it should be said, some good points about being a freelance writer: You can sleep late, set your own hours, work at your own pace, and not worry about someone looking over your shoulder. On the other hand, you tend to sleep late, you have to set your own hours, you work only when you feel like it, and there is no one looking over your shoulder.
Since this is supposed to be about Mr Krystal, and not about how I cope with fashioning a workable schedule, I’ll note the principle difference between us, which is that Mr Krystal hates writing for money but wouldn’t bother writing at all (or so he says) unless he were going to be paid. Money hasn’t entered the picture for me, so far, but it does not stand to reason, at least on the record that I have amassed to date, that I would write less if I were paid. (Perhaps I would, though: there is no end to the perversity of the curious imagination!) I do wish that Mr Krystal would keep a blog, or a Web site, or something; it would suit him down to the ground — if he could be paid.
What is to be done? Pennies make dollars, mills make pennies, and computers have been keeping track of micropayments for the telephone company for over a generation. That is what is to be done.