Personal Density

RIP: The Typewriter / That New Kindle Smell

The Atlantic just ran a piece on the shuttering of the world’s last typewriter factory.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/last-typewriter-factory-in-the-world-shuts-its-doors/237838/

These end-of-an-era announcements tend to read like coffin nails, but the writing has been on the wall - or more literally on the screen - for years. No doubt there will be plenty of aesthetes and luddites the world over who bemoan its passing, but the typewriter is an empirically inferior writing tool. It’s the stone and chisel, and papyrus is here.

And yet, nearly all of the great works of our modern age were born of these tools. I belong to the first generation that has never had to compose anything on a typewriter, but I can still romanticize the snap of steel hitting paper, the weight of the keys. Is there also something ineffable? What effect do the tools of the trade have on the quality of the product? To work with a stone and chisel requires forethought, commitment; papyrus is more disposable.

Greater tools yield better products, but lesser tools demand more skillful use. Perhaps word processing has made it easier to be a good writer and harder to be a great one. Today we can move words around like soldiers, continually altering the makeup of the platoons until the moment of battle. Typing with ink is a more deliberate process. The physicality of the output demands that the writer hold a steady picture of the universe while placing each individual star.

Maybe. It is nearly impossible to measure the quality of one generation’s writers against those of another, even more so to try and evaluate the effect of machines on the quality of art. Technology should be respected, not feared.

E-readers don’t smell like paper. A book is never more than one book. We accept that the means of consumption effects the reading experience, but we still think of the consumption of literature as an act of the mind; the delivery vehicle is just an aesthetic or functional choice. Writing is certainly a mental exercise, but it is a physical exercise as well. I have no more need of a typewriter than I do a stone tablet, but wonder if I should give it more respect. I could not write as well with ink as I can with pixels, but with practice, could I write better?

The Body Artist

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

Don Delillo, from The Body Artist (2001)

Found this passage underlined in an old paperback last night. I remember being so hugely impressed by the “depth” of his language when I picked it up, nearly ten years ago. As I look at it now, it still strikes me as beautiful, if a little overwrought, but I was more impressed by the end of the chapter (below). There is so much more tension in his depiction of that unremarkable morning scene that it almost makes the payoff - the repetition of that beautiful little phrase - feel trite or out of place. There is enough frustration and malice in her final thought to make you shudder, even though she never speaks it.

When he walked out of the room, she realized there was something she wanted to tell him.

Sometimes she doesn’t think of what she wants to say to him until he walks out of whatever room they’re in. Then she thinks of it. Then she either calls after him or doesn’t and he responds or doesn’t.

She sat there and finished her tea and thought of what she thought of, memory traces and flary images and a friend she missed and all the shadow-dappled stuff of an undividable moment on a normal morning going crazy in ways so humanly routine you can’t even stop and take note except for the Ajax she needs to buy and the birds behind her, rattling the metal frame of the feeder.

It’s such a stupid thing to do, read the newspaper and eat.

She saw him standing in the doorway.

“Have you seen my keys?”

She said, “What?”

He waited for the question to register.

“Which keys?” she said.

He looked at her.

She said, “I bought some lotion yesterday. Which I meant to tell you. It’s a muscle rub. It’s in a green and white tube on the shelf in the big bathroom upstairs. It’s greaseless. It’s a muscle rub. Rub it in, my love. Or ask me nice, I’ll do it for you.”

“All my keys are on one ring,” he said.

She almost said, Is that smart? But then she didn’t. Because what a needless thing. Because how petty it would be to say such a thing, in the morning or any time, on a strong bright day after a storm.

Read all of Chapter 1

Language Matters

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

-George Orwell, from Politics and the English Language (1946)

[full essay]

This is not a justification for word snobs (like moi), but just a reminder that the power of language is tied, in part, to its precision.

I wonder how old George would have weighed in on the current state of political discourse… that is if reading a few text messages hadn’t already broken his spirit.

At the Poetry Reading  

by John Brehm

I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s wife’s legs—
they’re so much more
beautiful than anything he might
be saying, though I’m no longer
in a position really to judge,
having stopped listening some time ago.
He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop
and can therefore get along fine
without my attention. He started in
reading poems about his childhood—
barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers,
that sort of stuff—the loss of
innocence he keeps talking about
between poems, which I can relate to,
especially under these circumstances.
Now he’s on to science, a poem
about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying
to imagine himself turning into hydrogen.
Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining
myself sliding up his wife’s fluid,
rhythmic, lusciously curved, black-
stockinged legs, imagining them arched
around my shoulders, wrapped around my back.
My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her!
He will, no doubt, once she leaves him,
leaves him for another poet, perhaps,
the observant, uninnocent one, who knows
a poem when it sits down in a room with him.