In December, she received a “first reading agreement” from The New Yorker; the magazine would have first refusal rights for her submissions, which would be paid by the word, plus an extra 25 percent and an annual cost-of-living increase. Money was always on Elizabeth’s mind. Although she regretted having bought a “monstrous” TV on sale—she and Cal were now ignoring it in favor of their classical FM radio station and phonograph records—she felt “a sort of nagging obligation to the beastly TV [sic], merely because I paid money for it.”117 To friends (who would have understood the implicit comparison with radio), she explained that the problem with TV was that “it involved a surrender of one’s sight. . . . the total self goes into a TV program; and they are grotesquely bad. . . . Worst of all . . . no matter how big your house is, one TV set ruins its charm, just as if you had a built in odor of some kind.”118