But once I get to sleep and my little old Subconscious gets started working, things begin to pick up. It does everything but sing to me. Dates and names that I have been unable to remember during the day are flashed before my closed eyelids; ideas which have kept coyly hidden behind a barricade when I wanted them suddenly trip out and say: “Here I am, Daddy!” Solutions to problems which had me beating my head and heels on the carpet when I was awake offer themselves with startling simplicity, and if I could only train my Subconscious to make notes during the night, I could get through the next day with flying colors.
Last week, while wallowing with some friends in onion sandwiches and Limburger, one of the less-highly educated members of the party asked what the German word for “onion” was. Quick as a flash I volunteered the information that it was “zweibel.” There being no Germans in the group, I got away with it, and even asked if there were any other German words they wanted to know about.
But I had scarcely got to sleep that night when my Subconscious started in on me. “A fine mess you made of that word for ‘onion,’” it said to me crossly. “You know as well as I do that it is ‘zwiebel’ and not ‘zweibel.’ Now you wake right up and telephone that guy that you made a horrible mistake, and tell him what the right word is. That all reflects on me, you know.”
I tried to argue that the next day would be time enough, but my Subconscious would stand for no dilly-dallying, so I woke up and did the handsome thing. The fact that it was three in the morning made my retraction a little less impressive than it might have been in the daylight, but, at any rate, I squared myself with my Subconscious. This sort of thing could get to be a nuisance in time, I am afraid, at any rate to my friends.
The trouble is that it has now reached a point where I don’t know whether my Subconscious or I am on the job. If I happen to be reading in bed and doze off in the middle of a paragraph, my Subconscious finishes the paragraph on its own hook, sometimes in a rather fancy fashion. Then I come to and go on reading, and have a little difficulty in tying up the two versions, the written one and my Subconscious’s.
The worst of it is that my Subconscious’s version makes just enough sense for me to believe that I have actually read it, and makes me liable to assert the next day that I saw in “Time” where Ambassador Bullitt had blown up the Kremlin. This is bad for “Time,” Ambassador Bullitt and me, especially for me, as I cannot find the paragraph to prove it.
However, on the whole, my Subconscious makes a much better job of things than I do, and a little flightiness in current events shouldn’t be held against it. If I could somehow manage to get my Subconscious at the controls during the daytime and take over the reins myself when I am asleep, I am sure there wouldn’t be all this criticism.
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Professional Pride
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I suppose that it is a very good thing for the Nation’s business to have people take pride in their work, and I am sure, from certain hints dropped here and there, that it would be a lot better for me if I took more pains with my own.
It probably is because I am always in a hurry when I get my hair cut that it seems to me that barbers, as a class, have made too much of a religion of the mere snipping and shaving of hair. Granted that hair-cutting is a delicate operation, the bungling of which can send a man, or a woman, blushing into the seclusion of a hill-side dugout for two weeks.
But once my hair is cut or my face shaved with all the artistry that he wants to bestow upon the job, couldn’t he just dust me off and let me out of the chair without taking as long on the “finishing touches” as Gutzon Borglum on the mountain carving of George Washington’s head?
The curator of the Luxembourg Museum never took so long in dusting off a Rodin as most barbers take in flicking a few hairs away from my neck. It is bad enough that they insert dry towels into your ears, causing a squeak which is practically death-dealing to a man of my temperament. But surely five minutes is too long to stand flicking, like an artist, in front of a canvas, just to get me ready for the street.
Granted that after shaving some sort of cooling lotion is grateful, even though you have to avoid your more virile friends for hours after. But why five different lotions?
Then, just as it seems as if it were all over, and you could make your appointment, the hair brushing begins. This involves a free scalp massage, which, in the old days, would have cost you forty cents. A great deal of professional pride goes into this scalp-massaging and it sometimes runs into fifteen or twenty minutes, what with rubbing and finger-waving.
A nice, gentle rub is a highly pleasant experience for any scalp, but I have had barbers who put real venom into the thing, evidently with some idea of getting the fingers through the scalp and well into the anterior lobe of the brain.
Now, all of this comes under the head of hair-cutting and shaving and doesn’t cost you a cent, and I am sure that the barber does it because he wants to give you your money’s worth. This is very laudable of him. But if I am in a hurry, as I always am in a barber’s chair, it is all a little irritating.
This conscientiousness is not confined to barbers alone, although I seem so to have confined it. There are elevator operators who are so careful about stopping the car exactly flush to an eighth of an inch with the landing that you are sometimes kept within calling distance of a business date for ten minutes. There are waiters who –
But there! Why complain, really? Suppose I am a little late getting somewhere? What would I have done if I had been on time?
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A Writers’ Code
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There has been a lot of criticism of the Government (on my part) for not asking the employers of writing labor to submit a code for the regulation of hours and wages of their help. Are we writers to be the only workers left shackled to a medieval machine?
Working on the piece-system as we do (so much per word or per piece – or perhaps) it should be fairly easy to set a minimum wage and keep to it. The only difficulty comes in counting the words. I can’t count words on a page without getting dizzy after eight lines. You try it.
You begin “one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight” (I wish I were getting paid by the word for this one) – “one-two-three-four-five-six,” using a pencil-point as a guide. The idea, in general, is to see how many words there are in perhaps six or seven typical lines, strike an average, and then count the number of lines. This, I may say, gets you nowhere. Before you have got very far down the page, the lines begin unravelling on you, forming designs like jack-straws and sometimes actually wriggling out of position and moving upward vertically. This confuses anyone but the most phlegmatic line-counter.
I have evolved, therefore, a system of wordage-reckoning called “the guess-system.” Instead of actually counting and giving myself vertigo, I guess at the number of words and let it go at that. That this is not the ideal measure can be seen by glancing at the space between the end of this column and the bottom of the page. There is something wrong somewhere.
Some editors, descendants of Simon Legree, adopt sweatshop tactics in such cases and call for “about two hundred more words to fill.” Now is that any way to talk to an artist? After completing a little gem of English composition, with every word carefully chiseled and polished, so that just enough has been said without saying too much, how would you like to be told to write “about two hundred more words to fill”? Two hundred more words of life’s-blood would come easier. I usually compromise, in such emergencies, by writing an extra introductory paragraph saying exactly what has been said in the original introductory paragraph only in more general terms, and inserting an anecdote in the middle beginning “I once heard of a man who – ,” illustrating some point that has already been made.
I once heard of a man who, when asked to fill out a column with a few words, made up an anecdote about a man who made up an anecdote in order to fill a column, and was later sued f
or libel by another author who claimed that he was unmistakably the one referred to and that his professional standing with editors had been irreparably damaged. Both writers were fired and later married each other. (One of the writers was a woman.)
As for the regulation of hours for writers, the code would have to be pretty fairly elastic. You couldn’t say “no writer shall be made to work more than six hours a day or less than four,” because there would be some days when the salmon had been bad the night before or a couple of people from the next apartment (or even the same apartment) dropped in, and even four minutes’ work would be out of the question. This might even go on for weeks.
My own hours of work depend a great deal on how the rest of the world has been going. If I read something in the papers which upsets me, like the failure of a conference or something unpleasant in Germany, I am no good for the rest of the day. I am also easily affected by the prevalence of divorce items and the Lost and Found columns. I may be all set for a good day’s work and then, on glancing at my newspaper for ideas, read that a Michigan postmaster has reached the appalling age of a hundred and three, and – piff – there goes my day! The only thing left to do is to spend my time looking at pictures in the London illustrated weeklies, of which I have an inexhaustible supply. They are constantly making remarkable discoveries in the Etruscan-tomb belt, and photographs of these have sometimes taken the place of work in my schedule for five or six days.
So it will be seen that any attempt to regulate hours or wages among writers must meet with a certain amount of confusion, but I see no reason why it should be impossible. My idea would be to simplify the problem by paying a minimum weekly wage or, say, five hundred dollars to all writers and more or less leave the hours of work up to them.
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Doing Your Bit
in the Garden
Preferably a Very Little Bit,
If You Are To Be Advised
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During the past month almost every paper, with the exception of the agricultural journals, has installed an agricultural department, containing short articles by Lord Northcliffe, or someone else in the office who had an unoccupied typewriter, telling the American citizen how to start and hold the interest of a small garden. The seed catalog has become the catechism of the patriot, and, if you don’t like to read the brusque, prosy directions on planting as given there, you may find the same thing done in verse in your favorite poetry magazine, or a special department in The Plumbing Age under the heading “The Plumber’s Garden: How and When to Plant.”
But all of these editorial suggestions appear to be conducted by professionals for the benefit of the layman, which seems to me to be a rather one-sided way of going about the thing. Obviously the suggestions should come from a layman himself, in the nature of warnings to others.
I am qualified to put forth such an article because of two weeks’ service in my own back yard, doing my bit for Peter Henderson and planting all sort of things in the ground without the slightest expectation of ever seeing anything of any of them again. If, by any chance, a sprout should show itself, unmistakably the result of one of my plantings, I would be willing to be quoted as saying that Nature is wonderful. In fact, I would take it as a personal favor, and would feel that anything that I could do in the future for Nature would be little enough in return for the special work she went to all the trouble of doing for me. But all of this is on condition that something of mine grows into manhood. Otherwise, Nature can go her way and I’ll go mine, just as we have gone up till now.
However, although I am an amateur, I shall have to adopt, in my writing, the tone of a professional, or I shall never get any one to believe what I say. If, therefore, from now on I sound a bit cold and unfriendly, you will realize that a professional agricultural writer has to have some dignity about his stuff, and that beneath my rough exterior I am a pleasant enough sort of person to meet socially.
Preparing the Ground for the Garden
This is one of the most important things that the young gardener is called upon to do. In fact, a great many young gardeners never do anything further. Some inherited weakness, something they never realized they had before, may crop out during this process: weak back, tendency of shoulder-blades to ossification, misplacement of several important vertebrae, all are apt to be discovered for the first time during the course of one day’s digging. If, on the morning following the first attempt to prepare the ground for planting, you are able to walk in a semi-erect position as far as the bath-tub (and, without outside assistance, lift one foot into the water), you may flatter yourself that you are, joint for joint, in as perfect condition as the man in the rubber-heels advertisements.
Authorities differ as to the best way of digging. All agree that it is impossible to avoid walking about during the following week as if you were impersonating an old colored waiter with lumbago; but there are two schools, each with its own theory, as to the less painful method. One advocates bending over, without once raising up, until the whole row is dug. The others, of whom I must confess that I am one, feel that it is better to draw the body to a more or less erect position after each shovelful. In support of this contention, Greitz, the well-known authority on the muscles of the back, says on page 233 of his “Untersuchungen uber Sittlichkeitsdelikte und Gesellschaftsbiologie”:
“The constant tightening and relaxing of the latissimus dorsi effected in raising the body as the earth is tossed aside, has a tendency to relieve the strain by distributing it equally among the serratus posticus inferior and the corner of Thirty-fourth Street.” He then goes on to say practically what I have said above.
The necessity for work of such a strenuous nature in the mere preliminaries of the process of planting a garden is due to the fact that the average back-yard has, up till the present time, been behaving less like a garden than anything else in the world. You might think that a back-yard, possessed of an ordinary amount of decency and civic-pride would, at some time during its career, have said to itself:
“Now look here! I may some day be called upon to be a garden, and the least I can do is to get myself into some sort of shape, so that, when the time comes, I will be fairly ready to receive a seed or two.”
But no! Year in and year out they have been drifting along in a fools’ paradise, accumulating stones and queer, indistinguishable cans and things, until they were prepared to become anything, quarries, iron-mines, notion-counters – anything but gardens.
I have saved in a box all the things that I have dug from my back-yard, and, when I have them assembled, all I will need will be a good engine to make them into a pretty fairly decent runabout – nothing elaborate, mind you, but good enough to run the family out in on Sunday afternoons.
And then there are lots of other things that wouldn’t even fit into the runabout. Queer-looking objects, they are; things that perhaps in their hey-day were rather stunning, but which have now assumed an air of indifference, as if to say, “Oh, call me anything, old fellow, Ice-pick, Mainspring, Cigar-lighter, anything, I don’t care.” I tell you, it’s enough to make a man stop and think. But there, I mustn’t get sentimental.
Preparing the Ground for the Garden
In preparing the soil for planting, you will need several tools. Dynamite would be a beautiful thing to use, but it would have a tendency to get the dirt into the front-hall and track up the stairs. This not being practicable, there is no other way but for you to get at it with a fork (oh, don’t be silly), a spade, and a rake. If you have an empty and detached furnace boiler, you might bring that along to fill with the stones you will dig up. If it is a small garden, you ought not to have to empty the boiler more than three or four times. Any neighbor who is building a stone house will be glad to contract with you for the stones, and those that are left over after he has got his house built can be sold to another neighbor who is building another stone house. Your market is limited only by the number of neighbors who are building stone
houses.
Preparing the Ground for the Garden
On the first day, when you find yourself confronted by a stretch of untouched ground which is to be turned over (technical phrase, meaning to “turn over”), you may be somewhat at a loss to know where to begin. Such indecision is only natural, and should cause no worry on the part of the young gardener. It is something we all have to go through with. You may feel that it would be futile and unsystematic to go about digging up a forkful here and a shovelful there, tossing the earth at random, in the hope that in due time you will get the place dug up. And so it would.
The thing to do is to decide just where you want your garden, and what its dimensions are to be. This will have necessitated a previous drawing up of a chart, showing just what is to be planted and where. As this chart will be the cause of considerable hard feeling in the family circle, usually precipitating a fist-fight over the number of rows of onions to be set out, I will not touch on that in this article. There are some things too intimate for even a professional agriculturist to write of. I will say, however, that those in the family who are standing out for onions might much better save their time and feelings by pretending to give in, and then, later in the day, sneaking out and slipping the sprouts in by themselves in some spot where they will know where to find them again.
Preparing the Ground for the Garden
Having decided on the general plan and dimensions of the plot, gather the family about as if for a corner-stone dedication, and then make a rather impressive ceremony of driving in the first stake by getting your little boy to sing the first twelve words of some patriotic air. (If he doesn’t know the first twelve, any twelve will do. The idea is to keep the music going during the driving of the stake.)
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