McNally: I miss the sounds of a roomful of people typing.  You know when you hear that sound that something tangible is being accomplished, as opposed to the soft-touch keypad where someone is likely Googling themselves or updating their Myspace page.  What I miss about the typewriter is that its purpose was singular.  The only thing to do with it is type.  No surfing, no Googling, no checking Amazon rankings, no looking up old enemies to see if they’ve self-destructed.  I have great memories of sitting in front of my typewriter, working on short stories.  I have no memories attached to my computers, which are as disposable as a twin blade razor.

Reyn: Partially, I would like to exorcise my slavish devotion to the lives depicted in those films. Even if the exchanges at these cinematic dinners (at Elaine’s or more likely in someone’s book-lined, impossibly cozy Upper West Side apartment) were often self-indulgent parodies, I would feel that I have achieved something by participating in its real, present-day incarnation. Somehow, and perhaps this is linked to my Russian soul or growing up in Queens, I somehow became convinced that if a wild-haired, bespectacled man in a V-neck sweater handed me a marked-up volume of The Collected Poetry of e.e. cummings across a food-laden table in Manhattan, it would mark me at the epicenter of intellectual life.

Trachtenberg: To begin with, the IWW is a global organization, in both senses of the word. One of the reasons the old labor movement was so ineffectual was that it defined its interests narrowly. It was organized by industry—automotive, film, etc—and its power was highly centralized, and the result was that there was little solidarity among its individual unions. Auto workers wouldn’t mobilize on behalf of miners; teamsters wouldn’t strike in solidarity with civil servants. And of course the more powerful the leadership grew, the more it became like management. In theory, at least, the IWW is an organization that recognizes the common interests of everybody who works, including the self-employed, whom the old unions excluded. What all of us have in common is that we work for our living, as opposed to invest or manipulate money—in the case of the banks and brokerage houses, money that doesn’t even belong to them. Our commodity isn’t money, it’s ourselves, our strength, our skill, our knowledge. And in a global economy in which corporations can hire those things more cheaply overseas with the push of a few buttons, all of us are in the same boat. As a writer and teacher, I’m as vulnerable as anybody who works on the line at GM.


––How do you think the present would be improved?

Beal: Instead of a lot of isolated chaos among families in separate apartments at meal time and a lot of frantic preparing of variations on salty, starchy foods and then cajoling the kids to eat, there would be mass and melded chaos among many families together. The kids who were old enough to play on their own would do so, the younger ones would have many adults to pass them around and keep an eye on them. Also, ideally the chuck wagon driver (called "Cookie") would play the guitar and sing and have a good number of tall tales to tell so there would be built in entertainment around the campfire. This sounds like a happy alternative to the whining (kids) and threatening (parents) no dessert that is our usual m.o. And then of course all mess would be on the ground and not all over the kitchen floor. The skillet would add a little iron to our diet, and the horses would have velvety noses, gentle demeanors, and sweet breaths.

Bock: Life would be a whole lot more fun if there were really high-end automats with walls of machines and all kinds of cool buttons and sliding doors, behind which awaited all sorts of yummy gourmet fast foods made with free range organic type ingredients. Major metropolitan areas already have such a high speed and level of automation — there’s a level of popish Hong Kong-style architecture to stores now where they’re basically kiosks anyway, and you get your cream puff or whatever and move along, high turnover, bing bang boom.   At some moments I think the automat fits perfectly with this.