employment

Leave a comment July 26, 2021 Steve Wiggins

It’s like when you slowly pull a cotton ball apart. Interrupted reading, that is. Some people never cotton onto reading—we’re all different—but some of us find it such a beguiling exercise that we neglect other aspects of life so that we can engage it. Almost an altered state of consciousness. That moment when you have to close a good book, though. There’s nothing else like it. It’s difficult to pinpoint whether images or words make up the continuity a reader experiences. For me it’s like a continuous conversation. Since my life may be too regulated (“nine-to-five” jobs are like that), every day at work begins with interrupted reading. If you’re awake early, you’ll find there’s no other uninterrupted time like it. No librarian has to shush anyone at three a.m.

My job is largely reading. It’s also a good deal of customer service. As an author myself I guess I get that. Content is what the world wants, and if you find a writer who does what your press likes, well, you try to keep her happy. Why doesn’t enforced reading feel like reading by choice, though? It’s that reading before work that feels like the pulling apart of fibers that’ve organically grown together. By nighttime, which is still light in summer, it’s not so much pulling apart cotton balls. Bedtime reading is more like stumbling through a forest. When you come to that part of the path you know you’ve been on before—perhaps multiple times—it’s time to put the book down and hopefully reboot.

There may be jobs which consist entirely of reading for pleasure. If there are I never learned about them in high school or college. I have a friend who’s a musician. Many years ago I asked him what he like to play for fun. He looked at me and said “Music, for me, is work.” I have to believe that somewhere deep inside he still found it enjoyable, but I instinctively grasped what he meant. Once you take your passion and convert it into a source of income the magic goes out of it. Once I get out of work the thing I want to do immediately is read, but what I want to read. And although studies show that the reasonable way to get your best work out of your employees is to give them more time off, employers tend to disagree with the data. The more hours you put in the more “dedicated” you are. But then, some of us are in publishing because we love to read. But even now, as work time approaches, the cotton ball begins to shred.

Leave a comment December 28, 2019 Steve Wiggins

The other day I read something where the author casually suggested some biblical personage was doing their job. That idea seemed to stick in my throat on the way down, like improperly masticated toast. Jobs are something we do in a surplus economy, but in biblical times could what anyone did properly be called a “job”? Sure, there were kings (aka bullies), and priests. They were exempted from too much physical labor. Even the plaintive bleating of sheep followed by a thud and sudden, eerie silence, was carried out by lesser temple functionaries. But did these people think of what they did as jobs? Did someone write them a check at the end of two weeks so they could pay their rent and utilities, and spend their weekends wishing they were doing something else? Jobs are a modern phenomenon.

How easy it is to forget that ancient people were by and large country folk. Even until late in the nineteenth century (CE, for those who are counting) in the United States most people were farmers living in the country. Their job? Simple survival. Trading on the surplus—of course money had been invented by this point—they grew or tended what their land allowed but what they did wasn’t so much a job as it was a way to keep alive. In the earlier biblical times, back beyond the New Testament, money wasn’t always an assured way of trade. Many people could go their entire lives without seeing silver or gold. Those in cities specialized their trades somewhat, but if they grew weary of say, weaving luxury textiles, did they have to carefully consider healthcare options before “quitting their jobs”? Rolling over their 401Ks? Writing new killer cover letters?

We need another word for ancient occupations. And we also need an awareness of how our modern lenses distort our vision of ancient lives. People lived for short periods of time. Most men died by forty and most women by their twenties. Sure, you could survive longer than that—much longer—but healthcare perks weren’t then what they are today for those who can afford them. Your perspective would certainly shift if your life expectancy were so short. I can’t help think, though, that there were people like me out there in the field, perhaps watching over a flock of mangy sheep, thinking about the larger issues consciousness affords. They couldn’t get a job as an editor, I don’t suppose, since literacy was rare. If they’d been trained to write their future would’ve been secure. But times change, even as does the very concept of a job.