The Transcript Weekly Quotes

Sleeping in a hallway around Bedford Park later that week, I took out my blank transcripts and filled in the grades I wanted, making neat little columns of A’s. If I could picture it—if I could take out these transcripts and look at them—then it was almost as if the A’s had already happened. Day by day, I was just catching up with what was already real. My future A’s, in my heart, had already occurred. Now I just had to get to them.

Much of the rest of the summer and fall were devoted to the transcription of Invitation to a Beheading, a first draft of which Vladimir had written in a lightning two weeks, on Véra’s return from the clinic. To his dismay the typing seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time; in November an exhausted Véra was at the machine night and day. From outside the third-floor apartment, recalled Nabokov, “we heard Hitler’s voice from rooftop loudspeakers.

Once inside his office, Cade took a seat at his desk and resolved, as he had many times over the last two weeks, to focus on work. He managed to do a decent job of that, putting himself on autopilot until the end of the day, when a knock on his office door interrupted him. Vaughn stood in the doorway. “Thought I’d see if you want to grab a drink at O’Malley’s.” Cade rubbed his face, realizing that he’d been reading audio transcripts for hours. “Sure.” He blinked, and then cocked his head. “I didn’t realize you had any meetings here today.” “I didn’t.” Huh. “Then why are you here?” Vaughn shrugged. “I just figured you might, you know, need a drink.” Cade frowned. “Why would you th—” Then it dawned on him. “Oh, no. You and I are not doing this. We are not having this conversation.” The idea of him and Vaughn having some sort of best friend heart-to-heart about his relationship troubles was laughable at best. “You’ve been brooding for two weeks, Morgan. So yes, we are having this conversation.” “I appreciate it, Vaughn. Really. But no offense—you suck at this stuff as much as I do.” Vaughn tucked his hands into his pants pockets, not looking offended in the slightest. “Yep. And that’s why God made whiskey.

...[T]hough the whole point of his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman.

The first is the result of ordinary nourishment and eliminates itself naturally, and this must be each day, otherwise there follow all sorts of illnesses. (The physician knows this well.) For the same reason that you go to the bathroom for this maintenance, you must go to the bathroom for the second excrement which is rejected from you by the sexual function. It is necessary for health and the equilibrium of the body; and certainly it is necessary in some to do it each day, in others each week, in others again every month or every six months. It is subjective. For this you must choose a proper bathroom. One that is good for you. A third excrement is formed in the head; it is rubbish of the food impressions, and the wastes accumulate in the brain. (The physician ignores it, just as he ignores the important role of the appendix in digestion, and rejects it as wastes.)

The guard turned quickly, and somehow his gaze landed not on Henry but on Francis, who was standing staring into space. "So it's you, is it?" he said with venom. "Mr Off-Campus who thinks he can park in the faculty parking lot." Francis started, a wild look in his eye. "Yes, you. You know how many unpaid violations you're carrying? Nine. I turned your registration in to the Dean just last week. They can put yo on probation, hold your transcripts, what have you. Suspend your library privileges. If it was up to me they'd put you in jail." Francis gaped at him. Henry caught him by the sleeve and pulled him away.

The story told to Teeny is also different, the 1950 tale about rabbits because of it being closer to Easter and this story about cuckoos. Transcriptions of earlier shows were used to produce this episode. When Marian was still not well enough to return after three weeks of repeats, new shows were written.

It reminds me of how often we educated, higher-class black people change the tone in our voices, like we’re getting ready to sing an old Negro spiritual anytime we quote from “Ain’t I a Woman.” Sojourner Truth never said “Ain’t I a Woman.” She said, “I am a woman’s rights.” The phrase that elucidates how Truth saw herself—an enslaved black woman—as central to any conversation America can have about the law. She did not need to be rich or privileged to do this. She did not ask anyone if she was human enough to be of consideration. Truth’s speech, which was published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle weeks after her extemporaneous delivery, was “translated” by a white female abolitionist twelve years later to sound like minstrel black English. The transcription from the Bugle looks nothing like “Ain’t I a Woman.” Truth’s speech was originally delivered, and printed, in scholarly American English. Yet, here we are, Truth inscribed in even our memories as some white person’s version of her. I think

She was cast in the egodeflating role she had always played, and her interest in radio was at a low ebb. Then she met CBS boss William Paley at a nightclub. Paley proposed that she star in a prospective comedy series, to be called Our Miss Brooks, but the script she received failed to convince her. The promised rewrite, by Al Lewis and Joe Quillan, was more to her liking: the character was perhaps settling around Arden’s real personality by then. Lewis would later put her in a comedy league with Groucho Marx, calling her the only woman in show business capable of achieving that kind of humor. She agreed to do the show if the eight weeks could be transcribed, allowing her to get away with her children for the summer. The network ban against transcriptions had already begun crumbling, so Our Miss Brooks premiered in July 1948 by transcription.

In the transcripts, he described how the accident took place because of a “routine safety test.” Because the test put the reactor in a highly unstable state, Anatoly Diatlov, the second chief engineer at the plant, told two operators (both would die a few weeks later in Hospital No. 6) to turn off the reactor’s alarm system. They did and then proceeded to manually slow down the reactor to see if the turbines would generate electricity with the reactor coasting to a stop. Once they finished the test, Diatlov gave the order to activate the SCRAM button for a complete shutdown. Five seconds later the reactor blew.