Deborah Makarios – Page 156

June 17, 2016October 19, 2023

In Praise of Another Old Technology

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways… I love the hand-crank sewing machine, fountain pens and candle-lamp; I love the simple perfection of the stick that is the rimu nostepinne. And, it turns out, I love the typewriter.

Proper manual typewriters, that is. None of this pansy give-me-electricity-or-give-me-death stuff. The whole point of the typewriter nowadays is the freedom it gives you: freedom from electricity, software upgrades (or crashes), printers, digital mass surveillance, illegible handwriting, planned obsolescence and blue-light-emitting screens – to name just a few.

And, of course, there’s the sound of typing. Tom Hanks says laptop typing sounds “mousy… cozy and small, like knitting needles creating a pair of socks. [Nothing wrong with knitting socks, Mr Hanks.] Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand, the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK.”

I’ve been reading the book The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century by Richard Polt, a book packed full of history and helpful advice, along with a horde of fascinating snippets. For instance: the first documented user of a typewriter was a blind Italian countess (back in 1801); you should never use WD40 on a typewriter; and keychopping – the practice of cutting the keys off old typewriters to use for making jewellery – is like “declawing a cat and throwing away the cat.”

L. Frank Baum, 1899 — L. Frank Baum, the man behind Oz

There’s also a discussion of different makes and models of typewriters, with mentions of the people who use/d them. Agatha Christie and George Orwell used Remingtons, as did George Bernard Shaw and Margaret Mitchell. e.e. cummings used a Smith-Corona portable (with, one is tempted to speculate, a broken shift). Nick Cave uses an Olivetti; as does Cormac McCarthy, who cannily sold his old one for over a quarter of a million dollars and then replaced it for under $20. Ho Chi Minh used a typewriter known as a Hermes Baby, which doesn’t exactly fit with the revolutionary image.

I myself have a powder-blue Brother De Luxe ultraportable typewriter, which weighs a smidgen over five kilos in its case. It is relatively young, having rolled off the production line in Nagoya in February 1969, and is still in very good working condition. A few days ago I took the outer cladding off to give it a good clean, but that was all it needed, besides perhaps a new ribbon in the near future. I didn’t pick it apart further, because a) I wasn’t entirely confident of my ability to put it back together properly, and b) whoever put those screws in wasn’t messing around (and I have a twisted screwdriver to prove it).

typewriter clean — My desk, mid-operation. Note the convenient disassembly diagram – which may be for another typewriter – and the extracted fluff to the right.

Nonetheless, there is something very capable-feeling about being able to take a machine at least partially apart and then successfully put it back together again (with some assistance from a spare pair of hands and the muscles attached to them). All the more so, as I am not naturally mechanically minded. All I found inside was some gunge and fluff – unlike others who, according to Polt, have found everything from a mummified mouse (minus head) to five hundred dollars to a wasps nest. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved.

The point of a typewriter, of course, is to use it. It is no longer the most efficient way to produce text, but efficiency is seldom a guarantee of quality. Those of you who are au fait with the modern phenomenon known as NaNoWriMo may be interested to know that there is a group who knock out their 50,000 words on typewriters. One, Mike Clemens, says he’s heard the bell at the end of each line likened to a personal word-count cheerleader – and of course it always helps to be able to see your progress stacking up next to you. (On which note, bring back paperweights!)

My own plan is to write – or at least draft – a novel or play on this typewriter. Not immediately, since I am at present in the midst of rewriting/edits which are best done on computer, but hopefully in the not too distant future. Because I have at last found another phrase to rival the beauty of piston-filling fountain pen: annotated typescript.

June 13, 2016

Typewriters

Love them? Loathe them? Never actually seen one in person? What’s your experience of typewriters?

June 10, 2016

Productive Routine

Whether we like it or not, routine is very often the key to a productive life, even for those creatively chaotic types who loathe the idea of “everyday” or “usual”. It’s important to remember, however, that a routine doesn’t have to be bland and boring or the same thing everyone else does. According to Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Nicholson Baker gets up at half past four in the morning, writes for an hour and a half or thereabouts, and then goes back to bed til half past eight. Routine? Yes. Bland, boring and pedestrian? No.

The main thing is to have a habitual element in your life which promotes the production of whatever it is you produce, be it words or music or thingamajigs. Such as Stephen King’s pre-writing ritual, which, like the more widespread before-bed ritual, gets him into the right frame of mind for what follows. There doesn’t even have to be a rational link between the one and the other, as long as it works. As the choreographer George Balanchine said, “When I’m ironing, that’s when I do most of my work.” (Is a board equivalent to a barre? The mind boggles.)

It’s not just a matter of scheduling, either. Consider the habits of monks and nuns. No, really. Their habits. As John Michael Talbot said (alas, I can’t find the reference), deciding what to wear in the morning is very simple: “Shall I wear this plain brown habit, or that plain brown habit?” Of course, clothing doesn’t have to be plain to be habitual. The composer Erik Satie had twelve identical suits of chestnut velvet with matching hats – anything but plain.

Sometimes a little change is all it takes to make a big difference – as long as you make it in the right place. I discovered this for myself when I tried to figure out what I could do to increase my writing productivity. Why wasn’t I getting as much done as I used to? Because I had two or three short writing sessions instead of one long one, and I don’t work well in small chunks. Why had I moved from one long session to two or three short ones? Because I was starting later in the morning, and stopping at the same time – lunch – then trying to make up the time here and there later. So why was I starting later? Because I was sleeping later. Why? Because I wasn’t waking up. Obvious, yes, but what could be done about it?

For medical reasons which I will not go into, an alarming alarm is not workable for us. Instead we have a white-noise ‘alarm’ which starts with an almost inaudible whoosh and gets louder and louder until you wake up and turn it off. But it wasn’t waking me. Why? Because it was on the other side of the bed, and the Caped Gooseberry was the one waking up and turning it off, while I continued blissfully slumbering. Experiment: put the whoosh-whoosh on my side of the bed. Result: waking up a lot sooner! The precise point at which I wake up varies by about half an hour, depending on how deeply asleep I am when the whoosh-whoosh starts, but I have reclaimed hours from my morning. It’s not quite a chorus of angels, but it does the job.

Unfortunately, this still hasn’t fixed the lying-awake-for-hours-when-I-go-to-bed problem, but it’s better than before. Which, coincidentally, is the title of a book about habits, written by Gretchen Rubin. She makes some interesting points about how it’s easiest to create habits that stick if we make strategies based on our own nature. Just because it works for someone else, doesn’t mean it will work for us, and there’s no point expending our energies in trying to make it.

As Bernard Malamud said, “How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help… Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”