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| Hearsay: |
There’s been a strange glut of news around Cormac McCarthy auctioning off his typewriter for charity. It seems to have fascinated every (but me). Perhaps this is because the typewriter itself seems to have garnered some archetypal importance to the process for a certain generation of both writers AND readers. Me? If I can’t copy and paste, I ain’t using it. Me? If I can’t copy and paste, I ain’t using it. Me? If I can’t copy and paste, I ain’t using it. Me? If I can’t copy and paste, I ain’t using it.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote for more than four decades on an Underwood portable. For him, his machine was a kind of first editor. “If this typewriter doesn’t like a story, it refuses to work,” he said. “I don’t get a man to correct it since I know if I get a good idea the machine will make peace with me again. I don’t believe my own words saying this, but I’ve had the experience so many times that I’m really astonished. But the typewriter is 42 years old. It should have some literary experience, it should have a mind of its own.”
There is still a sense of urgency about the writing that scrolls off the platen of a typewriter. At The Times we occasionally use a typeface called Typeka: a slightly broken-up old typewriter face that looks like the letters might have come off Cormac McCarthy’s battered machine. And yet those letterforms somehow convey an immediacy — in pullout quotes or strips of bulletin text. Born only in the late-19th century, the typewriter has entered our literary cellular memory.
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December 7th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I miss using my old typewriter sometimes. My was totally manual. Not electric. Tried getting back into it once. Got excited in a fast moving section of the manuscript and all those dadgum letter striker stick thingies jammed into a pile on the paper and I had to un-jam them by hand half a dozen times. Then I remembered why I was excited to get a PC twenty years ago and put the type writer back in the nostalgia chamber (aka basement)
December 8th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Aside from learning to type on an old IBM electric (good ol’ grade 9 typing) I haven’t actually seen a typewriter in years. When it comes to writing a novel, I’d think that using a word processor would make life a heck of a lot easier.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:22 am
I own five manual typewriters.
They’re fascinating. In 1950s designs, there’s an endless variety of invention in solutions to little typing problems, such as the trademarked “Magic Margin” feature of my Royal Quiet Deluxe. MS Word, of course, has intricacies of its own, but you can’t see them. It’s a black box.
That’s the reason for collecting.
But I actually do use them, too.
December 9th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Me? If I can’t copy and paste, I ain’t using it.Me? If I can’t copy and paste, I ain’t using it.Me? If I can’t copy and paste, I ain’t using it.Me? If I can’t copy and paste, I ain’t using it.Me? If I can’t copy and paste, I ain’t using it.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:20 am
I’m a 26 year-old who uses a Smith Corona for writing poems and songs. Computers are too distracting and CTRL Z is too easy an option. In my opinion, how you go about doing something directly affects what is produced. That’s not to say I don’t edit the crap out of anything and everything. Hm..too much to say aboot it in a wee comment post, I guess.
December 29th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Some of my pieces of writing will go through twenty or more versions before I’m happy with them. It’s difficult to imagine doing that on a typewriter without throwing it at the wall in frustration.
Of course you could say that I would edit differently if I used a typewriter, and that may or may not be true, but then I couldn’t email it to friends on the other side of the world to get comments.
Almost any way you look at it computers are an improvement.