3
MANY TEMPS DON’T LIKE DOING TAPES; I DO. NATURALLY I like transcribing some tapes better than others. In the early eighties I worked in the office of the head of a big company — well, why should I suppress the name? — in the office of Andrew Fleury, the head of Noptica. He had a three-person WP staff who did nothing but type his gigantic output of correspondence, speeches, interviews, Q-and-A sessions at stockholder meetings, and so on. I think he must have had political ambitions even then. I worked there several times. One long tape of his that I did included a letter ordering a case of some rare sort of Armagnac from a local liquor wholesaler. (It was a personal letter, let me say.) I didn’t know what Armagnac was, and, guessing, I typed Armaniac. Discovering this, Fleury flew into a rage. I heard him laying into one of the two co-office managers—“Paula, tell me what is wrong with this paragraph!” The letter was returned to me with the following marginal scholium: “An alcoholic beverage, not a crazy Armenian!! Don’t guess, look it up!!” Well, maybe he was right — I should have looked it up. But once Fleury caught the error, he could have at least passed on the fact that the word had a g in it. I lost five minutes flipping around in a dictionary. Most of the time, though, salaried people expect so little from temps that any slight awareness of a letter or memo’s context or intent fills them with joy, and they are as a result very easy to work for.
But why is it that I so like typing tapes? I’ve seen word-processing operators throw their headsets down after several hours of transcribing, shouting, “I hate doing this!” Yet I even liked typing Fleury’s tapes. For one thing, I like that I’m fairly good at it — I can, for instance, often engage in a little parallel processing, typing the sentence that just passed while listening to and storing the phrase that I’m currently hearing: I enjoy seeing how long I can go without resorting to the rewind half of the foot-pedal. But mainly I prefer doing tapes to typing handwritten documents simply because you can hear the dictator thinking. You can hear him groping for the conventional formula that will cover a slightly unusual case. You can occasionally hear undertones of irritation or affection. It is a great privilege to be present when a person slowly puts his thoughts into words, phrase by phrase, doing the best he can. Because you are traveling right along with him as he forms his sentences, making each word he says appear as a little clump of letters on your screen, you begin to feel as if you are doing the thinking yourself; you occupy some dark space in the interior of his mind as he goes about his job.
It isn’t difficult to imagine an erotic aspect to all this. Sandi, a temp I discussed the subject with a year ago or so, told me she once developed an intense thing for a man she transcribed for. He was in personnel, and his job was to advise employees and retired employees on the best way to handle their pensions. He talked very slowly, she said, in an almost dreamy but loud low voice, with long bold pauses. She said he sounded a little like David Bowie in “China Girl.” He very seldom resorted to the pause switch on his machine; he just let the tape run. And he talked a great deal in his letters about “invading the annuity.” “If your husband predeceases you, Mrs. Plochman,” he would say in a letter, “and you elect to invade the annuity …” “If, on the other hand, you both invade the annuity now …” So often repeated, this particular actuarial idiom began, as a result, to take on a special meaning for her. As she typed it, it was as if she were handling what he was saying, consenting to it, letting it run scarf-like through her fingers. “Please do,” she felt she was whispering back to him by typing exactly what he spoke into her headset, “please do invade my annuity.” They never did anything sexual, though.
In my own case, I often get thoroughly hypnotized by the tapes of women dictators. Women litigators, especially: when they say things like “Although there are no hornbook rules,” my breathing elevates. And I already mentioned the strange thrill I felt when I heard in a credit update Joyce quote someone as saying that someone else “lied like hell.” Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce’s forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce’s case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I let it surround me, it is as if I’m sunk into the pond of what she is saying, as if I’m some kind of patient, cruising amphibian, drifting in black water, entirely submerged except for my eyes, which blink every so often. Each word comes floating up to me like a thick, healthy lily pad and brushes past my head. And sometimes, especially if Joyce kindly lets me hear her hesitate (rather than clicking her recorder off to hide the length of her hesitation, I mean), the stretch of black still water between the intermittent green floating words can momentarily expand into infinitude. All the lily pads withdraw themselves from me. At those times I become amazed by the power I have: the power to lift my foot off the transcriber pedal at will and halt that sentence of hers right there for as long as I want in order to think about just where I am in it, and about what it can mean that this living, feeling creature is spending five days a week saying such things into a tape recorder, and about what her mouth looks like as she says them. I pause within her pause and float in the sensory-deprived lagoon of her suspended meaning. What is especially nice, in this state of “deep transcription,” as I call it, is to look up and discover that cheerful, unmysterious Joyce herself is walking briskly somewhere, perhaps toward my desk, wiggling a pen in her fingers.
So there is, without a doubt, a strong chronanistic element to my doing of tapes. It may even be that if I hadn’t spent so large a portion of the last ten years of my life transcribing words, starting and stopping so many thousands and thousands of modest human sentences-in-progress with my foot-pedal, I would have long ago lost the ability to drop into the Fold altogether. The daily regimen of microcassettes has kept me unusually sensitive, perhaps, to the editability of the temporal continuum — to the fact that an apparently seamless vocalization may actually elide, glide over, hide whole self-contained vugs of hidden activity or distraction — sneezes, expletives, spilled coffee, sexual adventures — within. “The mind is a lyric cry in the midst of business,” says George Santayana, whose autobiography (volume one) I got out of the Boston Public Library yesterday; and it occurs to me that this aphorism illuminates the peculiar suggestiveness of the microcassette, and of all audiocassettes, in fact: these stocky, solid, paragraph-shaped material objects, held together with minuscule Phillips-head screws at each corner (the screws are smaller, incidentally, than the screws in the hinges of my glasses, so small that only SCARA robots could have twirled them in place in such quantity), with their pair of unfixed center sprockets left deliberately loose so that they can comply with slight variations in the spindle distances of different brands of machine — these chunky pieces of geometrical business within which, nonetheless, an elfin wisp of Mylar frisks around any tiny struts or blocks of felt placed in its path, minnowing the ferromagnetic after-sparkle of a voiced personality through whatever Baroque diagonals and Bezier curves it can contort from the givens of its prison.