17/06/98 16:39:57 Rettberg get this: I got a new job today. Proofreading. Proofreading transcriptions of speeches. Proofreading transcriptions of speeches by football coaches. Oh, man. Sentences with missing verbs. Crude descriptions of complicated plays. Numbers, with no clear idea of whether they should be written out or typed as characters. 3 or four. $.50 a page. I sat there in that office, and I thought: football, money there. Little do these people know that I am Q. Synopsis, author of an editorial in the Octopus that caused many football zealots to write really mean and scary responses. A job. I am glowing, absolutely glowing. She says it will be a maximum of thirty days before I get paid. “that’s a lot.” I said. “But I’ll take it.” Football coaches’oral speeches transcribed carelessly into type. And I am a band-aid for completely unintelligible writing. Because it is talking. And because it is a dialect. And it bums me out. Ha. Urg. Jobs: get some so we can get ourselves in print through Lightning Quick. I am excited about our hypertext. Thanks for the fun. I’m enclosing a webpage story that would be better as a hypertext, because I found it easy to read on the screen. I am not going to stop applying for jobs. Nor will I write much for awhile. All that writing interferes with being unemployed, and savoring the feeling of being unemployed. Mmmmmm. We need to hang out more often, I think. We could get a couple more credit cards and have the Unknown II (I think we should call the first book Unknown II, so that the book of criticism can be Unknown I (the or no the) ready by September and then for my birthday have a gigantic publicity stunt; or we could just keep working on the hypertext all summer. My priorities are skewed. It is because there isn’t much money that I don’t know if I can do either, if there was money we could do both. And you could live in a real cool apartment on Lakeshore Drive with track lighting and a view of the Lake, eastern exposure. And Dirk, I don’t know. Where is he going to end up after his whirlwind tour of the country, burning those very dollars that could get him into print? But not to worry. There is a real market for football coach speeches out there, and if I can keep my foothold, and prove exceptional at translating them into English, then that first check, when it comes, is really, in the deepest sense, going to help cover rent. So to speak. Money is really interesting, don’t you think. Dickens wrote about money a lot. A lot of writers have decried capitalism, and wealth, and profit. Like Marx. Or Vonnegut. What is up with that? Is it because money is really, truly, pure evil and filthy, if you will, lucre? I guess so, probably. Grants. We need grants. That’s it. Illinois Arts Council grants! Scott! I’ve figured it out! Let’s get grants! Do you know how?! What grants are there for us to get? Do you know anybody who understands grants? We need a handler, a manager, an agent. Someone to free us from these concerns so that we can write. Ah, to write, to practice those arts we know so well. Sorry I got so drunk. Saturday. Well, I’ve applied for another job working in the library of a hospital. So I think I can relax for the rest of the day. And proofread speeches by football coaches. Your obedient servant, William

William’s Job Read 4/19/99 at Priceless Books, Urbana, IL 4:01 460K RealAudio Clip