{"id":20321,"date":"2011-09-05T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T12:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=20321"},"modified":"2011-09-05T22:23:36","modified_gmt":"2011-09-06T02:23:36","slug":"labor-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/05\/labor-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Labor Days"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_20322\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/Millet.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-20322\" class=\"size-full wp-image-20322\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/Millet.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"382\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/Millet.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/Millet-235x300.jpg 235w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-20322\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet, Peasant Spreading Manure, 1855, oil on canvas.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em>Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I\u2019ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs. Here, in honor of Labor Day, T. C. Boyle and Jim Shepard present stories of factory work.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong><em><\/em>T. C. Boyle:<\/strong> I worked\u00a0one summer\u00a0at a factory near my hometown of Peekskill.\u00a0I was a college kid, the other workers were lifers.\u00a0I was never quite clear what the cast-metal things we made there were\u2014they were called muffins and aximaxes\u2014and I wasn\u2019t much good at repetitive tasks.\u00a0I was far better at after-work activities, like driving my spavined, oil-burning Renault to the local bars and the deep clear lakes.\u00a0But when I think back on that time, I see elephant-size pots of molten metal, steam rising\u2014or maybe it was some sort of\u00a0carcinogenic gas\u2014and I see the one-armed guy my own age, Vinnie, a lifer, to whom I eventually sold my Renault for the same amount I\u2019d paid for it at the beginning of the summer: fifty dollars. My final recollection of him, of that time, that place?\u00a0Waving good-bye.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Shepard:<\/strong> For some weeks one summer when I was in high school I worked as something called a passivator for a company that manufactured cabinets for computers. The cabinets were the size of desks and dressers and made of stainless steel, and the solder marks discolored the steel in rainbow patterns. Those patterns had to be removed, but the steel couldn\u2019t be sanded, so that\u2019s where I came in. I stood in a large sink, like a small above-ground swimming pool made out of steel, in the basement of the building. There, I swabbed the discolorations with a wand covered with gauze soaked in hydrochloric acid. The wand had an electric current flowing through it. The combination of the current and the acid washed away the discolorations like magic. Alas, the fumes from the acid were also so strong that they made it hard for me to see straight. And the gauze had to be changed periodically. And the acid ate through my giant rubber gloves. How would I know when the acid had eaten through too much of the gloves? I would feel, I was told, a slippery sensation, before the burning began. And that was indeed the case. My father put a stop to my working there when he heard, with some disbelief, what I\u2019d been doing.<\/p>\n<p><em><em>Chris Flynn is the\u00a0books editor at <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bigissue.com\/\">The Big Issue<\/a> <em>and the fiction editor at <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.australianbookreview.com.au\/\">Australian Book Review<\/a><em>.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I\u2019ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs. Here, in honor of Labor Day, T. C. Boyle and Jim Shepard present stories of factory work. T. C. Boyle: I worked\u00a0one summer\u00a0at a factory [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":219,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[3648,3649,3644,3650,3646,3647,3645],"class_list":["post-20321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odd-jobs","tag-factory","tag-hydrochloric-acid","tag-jim-shepard","tag-passivator","tag-peekskill","tag-renault","tag-t-c-boyle"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Labor Days by Chris Flynn<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 5, 2011 \u2013 Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I\u2019ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. 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