Counting the hoursstrictly editorial

November 21, 2006

Worse than having too much work to do and too many directions to follow is being shackled to a chair in a lightly populated office on an old computer with a slow connection and too little to do, $50 an hour notwithstanding. One's mind wanders. One reflects that as difficult the discipline of cracking out a medium copyedit at a rate of 10 pages an hour, even more difficult is dragging same out to 1 paragraph an hour.

One remembers recalcitrant manual typewriters. One recalls memorizing poems for elocution class some years back.

On the eighteenth of April in seventy-five, hardly a man is now alive, who remembers that famous day and year...

Who touches a hair on yon gray head, dies like a dog, march on, he said...

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies [...] And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!