Today: I broke one of the rules (!) and spent the afternoon in a used book store. I hope that heaven is like a used book store--discovering delightful things that you couldn't have imagined existed, such as Robert Penn Warren's Jefferson Lecture, entitled, Poetry and Democracy, an exciting find given a conference paper on poetry in the democratic age that I'll be working on again when comps are done.Also, tonight a reward for completing a specific amount of studying was that I got to go on a run. Remember, I don't like running (okay, fine, I sort of like it lately). Anyway, my life is sort of upsidedown.
Finally, for the moment, I do love the Economist obituaries, but this one, in particular, is outstanding. I can't keep myself from quoting at length (you know, or ought to know, how I feel about typewriters):
AN
YONE who had dealings with manual typewriters—the past tense, sadly, is necessary—knew that they were not mere machines. Eased heavily from the box, they would sit on the desk with an air of expectancy, like a concert grand once the lid is raised. On older models the keys, metal-rimmed with white inlay, invited the user to play forceful concertos on them, while the silvery type-bars rose and fell chittering and whispering from their beds. Such sounds once filled the offices of the world, and Martin Tytell’s life.
Everything about a manual was sensual and tactile, from the careful placing of paper round the platen (which might be plump and soft or hard and dry, and was, Mr Tytell said, a typewriter’s heart) to the clicking whirr of the winding knob, the slight high conferred by a new, wet, Mylar ribbon and the feeding of it, with inkier and inkier fingers, through the twin black guides by the spool. Typewriters asked for effort and energy. They repaid it, on a good day, with the triumphant repeated ping! of the carriage return and the blithe sweep of the lever that inched the paper upwards.
[Okay, so the psychoanalysis bit that follows might be over the top, but after that we find out that he met his wife over a typewriter!]
Each typewriter was, to him, an individual. Its soul, he reminded Mr Frazier, did not come through a cable in the wall, but lay within. It also had distinguishing marks—that dimple on the platen, that sluggishness in the typebars, that particular wear on the “G”, or the “t”—that would be left, like a fingerprint, on paper.
YONE who had dealings with manual typewriters—the past tense, sadly, is necessary—knew that they were not mere machines. Eased heavily from the box, they would sit on the desk with an air of expectancy, like a concert grand once the lid is raised. On older models the keys, metal-rimmed with white inlay, invited the user to play forceful concertos on them, while the silvery type-bars rose and fell chittering and whispering from their beds. Such sounds once filled the offices of the world, and Martin Tytell’s life.Everything about a manual was sensual and tactile, from the careful placing of paper round the platen (which might be plump and soft or hard and dry, and was, Mr Tytell said, a typewriter’s heart) to the clicking whirr of the winding knob, the slight high conferred by a new, wet, Mylar ribbon and the feeding of it, with inkier and inkier fingers, through the twin black guides by the spool. Typewriters asked for effort and energy. They repaid it, on a good day, with the triumphant repeated ping! of the carriage return and the blithe sweep of the lever that inched the paper upwards.
[Okay, so the psychoanalysis bit that follows might be over the top, but after that we find out that he met his wife over a typewriter!]
Each typewriter was, to him, an individual. Its soul, he reminded Mr Frazier, did not come through a cable in the wall, but lay within. It also had distinguishing marks—that dimple on the platen, that sluggishness in the typebars, that particular wear on the “G”, or the “t”—that would be left, like a fingerprint, on paper.
1 comment:
I love it:
She wanted a Royal for her office; he persuaded her into a Remington, and then marriage.
It reminds me of how you once described courtship - what was it? It's when a man tries to trick a woman into marrying him.
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