Odd Jobs
Authors: John Updike
2012 Random House Trade Paperbacks Edition
Copyright © 1991 by John Updike
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
T
RADE
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64585-6
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © H. Armstrong Roberts/Getty Images
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ContentsN
OT LONG AFTER ASSEMBLING
my last eight-years’ accumulation of essays and criticism,
Hugging the Shore
, I acquired a word processor, a writing instrument so dazzling that I composed a poem to it, on it, beginning
Wee.word.processor,.is.it.not
De.
trop
.of.you.to.put.a.dot
Between.the.words.your.nimble.screen
Displays.in.phosphorescent.green?
and ending
My.circuits.have.been.scrambled.by
Your.being.brighter,.far,.than.I.
In fact the machine does have a staring quality that introduces an element of social embarrassment into the prolonged, tenuous intimacy of composing a novel, and that drives one back to pencil on paper. But for odd jobs, the odd literary jobs—the prefaces and puffs, the “few paragraphs” on beauty or baseball—that a persevering writer, aging into a shaky sort of celebrity, gets increasingly asked to do, the machine is ideal, rattling off clean copy at the stab of a switch, accommodating revisions in a seamless electronic twinkling. An element of technological suavity is introduced into one’s hitherto clumsy literary labors, with their bleary carbons and slow-drying whiteout and anxious marginalia. Almost irresistible become the seductive invitations on the perfumed stationery of ad-chocked ladies’ magazines for a feuilleton on femininity, the brisk demands from conglomerate-owned publishers for a fresh introductory slant onto their new printing of an alleged classic, the charmingly
hand-penned notes from the guiding spirits of highbrow quarterlies, the disarmingly misspelled and dot-matrixed pleas for a credo from college monthlies, the imperious phone calls from the English-accented secretaries of editorial powerbrokers in their Manhattan aeries, the urgent requests that bring the white Federal Express trucks roaring up the driveway and once again over the freshly seeded edges of the lawn. With his wonderful new tool of ease how can a writer say No?