Adventures in Transcription

So I just finished transcribing a letter by Marcel Duchamp about his opinion of art in 1952 for the Smithsonian's Transcription Center.  It was only 6 pages long but the whole time, I'm sitting there thinking "OMG, someone get this man some Prozac".  I mean,  yeah, Duchamp has a reputation as having been kind of a downer (and not just about art - his advice on being a chess player is very much in the same vein) --- but wow.  I don't think of myself as a peppy, cheery person (I'm kind of more like a "whatever, it's all cool with me", easy-going type) but I sure felt like it by comparison as I worked on that letter. 

And... its a good thing I didn't work on this one at work - I sometimes do transcription on my lunch breaks.  I came across a french word I didn't know and my spellchecker recognized it as a real word but wordreference and GoogleTranslate didn't have a translation for me so I tried french wikipedia - turns out it meant erection.  And the article was illustrated so you know the school's web filter software would not have liked me for that.  But, you know, pursuit of knowledge and all that.