6/29, penultimate June, and 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️ the day of the 2025 San Francisco Pride Parade (the 55th, theme: Queer Joy is Resistance), which I’ll be watching in another window while I’m working on posting, with breaks to assemble more of the thousands of objects I need to dispose of to move to assisted living months down the line; endless puzzlements, some of which I’ll soon be posting about. A move that serves as segue to the topic of work, thanks to this 6/26 note on Facebook from Heidi Harley, with my response:
— HH: the move will be a relief and potentially a joy, depending on the other residents and the nature of the place …
— AZ > HH: I’m actually doing just fine at home, with all sorts of workarounds, plus a helper / caregiver a couple times a week. But everyone’s worried about what will happen if I need intensive medical care. I’m determined to continue my writing, which I view as a profession and a calling (as you know).
An additional note: writing is real work — takes intense concentration, long stretches of rewriting and editing to make it better, and so on — but like many kinds of real work, it can be deeply satisfying, a source of genuine pleasure.
And from that I’m taken to the Reading (PA) Eagle newspaper (afternoon and Sunday), where I started my first real job (initially as a copyboy), beginning in June 1958, when I was 17; I was soon shifted to the editorial staff as a floater (I’ll explain), and worked full-time for three summers (and part-time during university breaks) while I went to Princeton. It was a dream job, combining experience with all kinds of writing; learning to work on one thing after another, all relentlessly on deadline; working with a huge cast of characters, of many different natures; and gaining detailed knowledge of the way the world works — gritty stuff, scary stuff, fascinating stuff, and uplifting stuff, all gemischt.
Some recollections of my Eagle days will then lead to Studs Terkel (who died in 2008) and to Calvin Trillin (who’s still alive, at age 89).
The note paper. In recent e-mail, my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell referred to the pale green Reading Eagle note paper. My reply (somewhat edited and expanded):
… not just note paper. Those were pads of cheap paper for writing heads (horizontally), then the story on spools of white paper got pasted on the bottom with a special glue that sat around in big pots, and the copyboy took them to typesetters (hot lead!). The setters worked stripped to the waist, with towels to mop up their sweat, and — surprise! — they were demon spellers and authorities on the fine points of house style, and fiercely proud of their work; they could copyread their work set in type on plates, reading it backwards, of course. They were also crude, profane, and tough.
A strange milieu — the reading room of the British Library crossed with the foundry floor at Bethlehem Steel. I was in principle an effete college boy, but the typesetters saw the striving working-class kid and were fraternally protective (they openly despised some of the reporters, and I came to see that their judgments were fair, and accurate); I suspect that they saw in me something of what they wanted their sons to become, doing good, honest, and in fact important work, like theirs, but without the godawful din and the murderous heat.
The cheap green paper for head writing bleached when exposed to sunlight, and yellowed with age. But it was tremendously useful. It served me, my family, and my friends for many years.
You see, when I left the paper, to go to grad school in linguistics, the paper was shifting to a digital operation, and so the editors gave me a huge box of the green pads as a kind of going-away present — obviously useful for a writer who needed to run through drafts of stuff, not to mention shopping lists.
Doing good, honest, and in fact important work, work we could be proud of, both of us. An attitude I was familiar with from the skilled tradespeople, farmfolk, technical factory staff, small shopkeepers, and military servicemembers I grew up with. Also an attitude captured in oral historian and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel’s moving book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), an exploration of what makes work meaningful for people in all walks of life (Wikipedia link).
Studs Terkel. From my 11/3/08 posting “Studs Terkel” on Language Log:
Studs Terkel, who died recently, at the age of 96, had a special place in the hearts of some linguists — those who were studying the syntax (and accompanying pragmatics) of colloquial English, back in the old days, before very large corpora and automated search techniques were easily available.
There were essentially two says to investigate colloquial language non-anecdotally: collect your own corpora (by eliciting speech, recording it, transcribing the recordings, and coding the transcriptions); or use other people’s corpora, collected for other purposes (in which case, other people do the elicitation, recording, and transcribing, leaving you to do the coding — and of course the counting and the analysis). That’s still the case.
Collecting your own corpora is hard work, it takes time (transcription is particularly tedious), it takes skill (in elicitation, especially; you can’t just stick a microphone in someone’s face and tell them to talk to you). and it takes money. Piggy-backing on other people’s corpora hugely simplifies the task. For many purposes, that just won’t do. But sometimes, things sing.
That’s where Studs Terkel comes in. He spent decades interviewing (mostly) ordinary people and publishing the conversations, and he was fantastic at establishing a rapport with the folks he interviewed. The result was a body of corpora that’s a goldmine of data for (some) linguists, from Division Street (1966) on.
… [I use his first name (well, the name he used; his birth name was Louis), partly because almost everyone did, and he invited it, but also because we actually talked, back in 2002, when I was trying to persuade him to give a plenary talk at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference at Stanford that year. He was charmed and honored by linguists’ interests in the way he interviewed people and crafted his texts, but at around 90, the prospect of a plane trip from Chicago to San Francisco and a long crowded weekend of meetings, all of which would take him away from projects he wanted to finish before he died, was just too much. Who could argue with that?]
Calvin Trillin. Back to the Reading Eagle, which takes me to two books of Calvin Trillin’s:
— in my 9/9/14 posting “floater”:
My early work experience included some time on a newspaper that published weekdays and Sundays — a context in which employees couldn’t just take off on vacation, since the paper had to get out, every day of the week, with current news. Things were managed in several ways, like staggered vacations, but one part of the system was the use of a “floater” (that would be me) who would fill in wherever hands were needed.
… And then there’s Calvin Trillin, author of the 1980 comic novel Floater:
[review by Amazon customer W. C. Hall] “Floater” is the writing job at a fictional news magazine held by the book’s central character Fred Becker. (It’s also a job Trillin once held in his pre-New Yorker days.) A “floater” does not have a permanent assignment, but moves from one section of the magazine to another as illness or other reason creates a temporary need.
— in my 10/25/17 posting “Eggcornic verse”, a section on Calvin Trillin’s 1994 book about a poetry experiment, Deadline Poet: My Life As a Doggerelist, in which he provides running political and cultural commentary around the weekly topical verses he had written for the Nation since 1990; the twist is that he treated writing these verses as he would a newspaper writing assignment, having to be produced on deadline.
I have never been good about meeting deadlines for my professional work (editors, please don’t write to assail me retrospectively), but once I started this blog, I’ve treated it as an assignment to produce at least one column a day, every day of the year, on deadline, as if I were writing a daily column for the Eagle (as the editor of my high school newspaper, I did a weekly humor column, but only for the weeks when school was in session). I have occasionally missed a day (or much more), through some terrible affliction or overwhelming personal difficulties, but when that happens I feel that I’ve failed my readers; though now, of course, it occurs to me that what this household needs is a floater. The staff roster is awfully shallow.
June 29, 2025 at 3:06 pm |
From Mike Pope on Facebook: