Word: toiled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...York film reviewing. He goes awry when he tries to deal with Hemingway, perceiving the oafishness and neuroticism but for the most part missing the art. Never mind; for Sheed's work, the good word is an honest title. Describing his trade, the author writes: " 'Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail,' is how Sam Johnson, blues singer, described the writer's life." A lovely, far away phrase, that "blues singer," in a fine, argumentative book...
American food, like American farming techniques, will never be the hope of the lesser developed countries. Our current large-scale farming practices are built on our ability to squander cheap energy on fertilizers, mechanization and irrigation, not on a desire to increase the efficiency of human toil without replacing it. As energy gets continually more expensive and the overused water tables continue to drop, we shall reap as we have sown...
Silences is in part a book of ifs. If I had had those years to observe and write and express what was in me... If the factory laborer with latent artistic talent didn't have to toil ceaselessly... If writers didn't have to shape their work to the demands of those who can pay them...
...poor people write? In the first place, Olsen contends, the most fundamental prerequisite for sustained, flourishing productivity, "the even flow of daily life made easy and noiseless," is a luxury the vast majority cannot afford. For mothers whose lives are "distraction, not meditation... interruption, not continuity' spasmodic, not constant toil," the long peaceful hours when the mind can rove and wander, and the writer can then bring his mind's meanderings to paper, those hours simply do not exist. For the poor, the illiterate, the hungry, or even those who, though not poor, must work five days a week...
...Working, we hear something very close to the blue-collar blues, as waitresses, firemen, call girls, mill hands, gas-meter readers, tie salesmen and other assorted sons and daughters of toil tell of the hopes, frustrations and occasional joys of their daily march in the army of labor...