I've never found it difficult to write. I could quote Oscar Wilde about "taking a comma out" but, well, a brief glance at the highlights on this page is sure to amuse you:
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/25/comma/
I stayed up most of the night quite frequently for several decades, and I was busy writing, but that was as much coincidence as cause and effect. For a score or more of years, I only wrote when I couldn't stir up a card game or a board game.
Three or four descriptive paragraphs or a dialogue string seems to me to be a sitting’s worth of work. This gets you within sight of 365 pages a year if actually held to. And yet this is a trivial amount, the size of an email, just an effusion. Ten paragraphs a sitting can be heavy work, but the serious dilettante should reach that pace now and then. And that pace is enough. Writing the words down, or inscription itself, is not the most important part of the craft or practice of writing. If an expression or supposed expression resists itself or seems to need an application of force to put down, then the expression is being assembled wrong and the units need to be looked at again.
Design and material are inseparable. Material defines the range of possible designs, and the purpose of the design is to master and represent the material. If equipoise between material and design is achieved or approached, the execution cannot help being “good.” This is obvious enough in pottery or glassblowing or painting.
The weird, webby quality of language, grammar and words generally helps us forget that writing is also a tactile art. Drawing is a tactile art, and sketching, and calligraphy. Handwriting is not usually called an art but from its first stirrings clutching cigar-sized First Grade pencils, it’s self-evidently a tactile expression. Even when subordinated to the idea, and to the thralls of language and grammar, and in the modern era where the electronic keyboard is king, writing is still a tactile expression. It’s not just a form of reading, or the reverse of the reading process. Writing is an inscriptive act. Its link to ideation is not exact.
Sometime in the early 1960s my mother Hazel decided to go back to work, and invested in a Sears portable typewriter and a typing manual to brush up on her pre-marriage typing skills. My brother Alan and I were still in elementary school, I think. When Hazel went back to work I co-opted the Sears typewriter (but not the manual) and fooled around with it for the next few years typing various things. I didn’t use it for homework—I didn’t want to panic my teachers. I mainly enjoyed playing with this small, comprehensible machine, and working the machinery. Soon I began to get to a decent 5-finger typist stage. However, the 1960 Sears portable was a very basic machine with a beige-colored shield, stiff keys and a very flat click. It was a sad enough little device. The one in the picture here might as well be the same machine.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/25/comma/
I stayed up most of the night quite frequently for several decades, and I was busy writing, but that was as much coincidence as cause and effect. For a score or more of years, I only wrote when I couldn't stir up a card game or a board game.
Three or four descriptive paragraphs or a dialogue string seems to me to be a sitting’s worth of work. This gets you within sight of 365 pages a year if actually held to. And yet this is a trivial amount, the size of an email, just an effusion. Ten paragraphs a sitting can be heavy work, but the serious dilettante should reach that pace now and then. And that pace is enough. Writing the words down, or inscription itself, is not the most important part of the craft or practice of writing. If an expression or supposed expression resists itself or seems to need an application of force to put down, then the expression is being assembled wrong and the units need to be looked at again.
Design and material are inseparable. Material defines the range of possible designs, and the purpose of the design is to master and represent the material. If equipoise between material and design is achieved or approached, the execution cannot help being “good.” This is obvious enough in pottery or glassblowing or painting.
The weird, webby quality of language, grammar and words generally helps us forget that writing is also a tactile art. Drawing is a tactile art, and sketching, and calligraphy. Handwriting is not usually called an art but from its first stirrings clutching cigar-sized First Grade pencils, it’s self-evidently a tactile expression. Even when subordinated to the idea, and to the thralls of language and grammar, and in the modern era where the electronic keyboard is king, writing is still a tactile expression. It’s not just a form of reading, or the reverse of the reading process. Writing is an inscriptive act. Its link to ideation is not exact.
Sometime in the early 1960s my mother Hazel decided to go back to work, and invested in a Sears portable typewriter and a typing manual to brush up on her pre-marriage typing skills. My brother Alan and I were still in elementary school, I think. When Hazel went back to work I co-opted the Sears typewriter (but not the manual) and fooled around with it for the next few years typing various things. I didn’t use it for homework—I didn’t want to panic my teachers. I mainly enjoyed playing with this small, comprehensible machine, and working the machinery. Soon I began to get to a decent 5-finger typist stage. However, the 1960 Sears portable was a very basic machine with a beige-colored shield, stiff keys and a very flat click. It was a sad enough little device. The one in the picture here might as well be the same machine.
http://typewriterdatabase.com/
Something told me I could do better. In the summer before the tenth grade, I saw a lightly used Baby Hermes 3000 portable in the window of Charlottesville Business Machines on West Main Street, at that time the town’s main purveyor of typewriters. The color scheme was aquamarine with white keys. The baby Hermes is usually seafoam and mint. I’ve never seen another one in the blue-white variant. But that’s quite irrelevant. At the time, I neither knew nor cared about equipment brands. I believed without judgment that this was probably the finest piece of writing equipment for sale in Charlottesville at the moment, when I saw it in the window.
Unfortunately my paper route career had just ended and I momentarily had no source of money. But it turned out to be ridiculously easy to get a job at Standard Drug on Main Street as a floor mopper, though God knows I despised the very idea. I knew mopping the drug store would be bad, damn bad; mercifully I did not know how bad. My job was literally to wheel a bucket of gray water around and mop the floor, clean up spills, scrub the word “f*ck” off the walls next to the unguarded back entrance to Water Street, and even clean up the vomit in the event somebody’s diseased kid puked on the floor.
You would think that would never happen. Why would kids puke? But the truth, as the years have confirmed, is that kids puke more than you’d think. I found myself mopping up puke in Standard’s Drug. I’m still a little resentful about it fifty years later. But I had a motive.
So I grudgingly counted down from paycheck #1 to paycheck #5, at which point I quit on the spot, turned in my mop bucket, and bought the Hermes in the window on the way home. I carried it home on foot. We seldom felt like spending a nickel on a bus ride. Indeed we walked everywhere we went; if we were in a hurry or needed to get completely across town, we just walked down the railroad tracks instead of the sidewalks.
You would think that would never happen. Why would kids puke? But the truth, as the years have confirmed, is that kids puke more than you’d think. I found myself mopping up puke in Standard’s Drug. I’m still a little resentful about it fifty years later. But I had a motive.
So I grudgingly counted down from paycheck #1 to paycheck #5, at which point I quit on the spot, turned in my mop bucket, and bought the Hermes in the window on the way home. I carried it home on foot. We seldom felt like spending a nickel on a bus ride. Indeed we walked everywhere we went; if we were in a hurry or needed to get completely across town, we just walked down the railroad tracks instead of the sidewalks.
I had no idea the baby Hermes was a famous typewriter. I never considered trying it out in the store to make sure the keys worked. At home, I was surprised to discover the keyboard was in French. I’d love to have a Hermes 3000 baby portable now, as an artifact. The keys were soft and silky, and the strike had a lovely feminine alto sound very pleasant to the ear. This typewriter received heavy use for years and eventually needed new springs. It could have been reconditioned into a state of perfection but the electric era had arrived.
http://genevatypewriters.blogspot.com/2011/01/typewriter-ephemera-hermes-3000.html
The next machine I used was Karen’s Smith-Corona, which was a good machine.
http://typewriterdatabase.com/
After wearing that one out, I had a year-long run-in with a manual Underwood. I am not sure now what that looked like—it may well have been an Underwood Champion as old as I was. I just don’t remember. It came from a yard sale. People would say, “Man, you type on that?” and I would vainly answer, “Yep, they grow ‘em tough back where I crawled out of the weeds from.”
Obviously at this point I had plunged deeply into the world of second-hand objects. Thereafter, my grad school career was probably literally saved by the lucky discovery of a used IBM Selectric for next to nothing at another yard sale.
A Selectric (later known as the Selectric 1 after the Selectric 2 was released). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter
Selectrics were workhorses and not very breakable or prone to wear. My first-model Selectric was my last typewriter and the one I used the longest. It was not lovely but I was grateful to this machine for ticking on and on without a hint of trouble. I used it until 1983, when I got a job with an office and an IBM Dedicated Word Processor, a station I could not have afforded at home.
IBM Dedicated Word Processor. Note “toaster” drive for big 5 ½ inch floppies.
“The Centre For Computing History” - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/, CC BY 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32890425
“The Centre For Computing History” - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/, CC BY 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32890425
The early word processors were clearly not typewriters, and modern people may have trouble understanding how crisp the dividing line seemed to be. Word processors were much closer to computers, but we could not have known that, since the first Amiga and Commodore systems were still a year or two away. These IBM dedicated word processor systems cost over ten grand at the time, much of the expense being the monster printer (not pictured), which was the size of a washtub and probably gave off gamma rays, and had to have its type ball changed if you wanted to change the font.
Since then I have just typed on throw-away keyboards, which have much sameness. And yet even on keyboards and mice, inscription remains manual and is still a tactile act.
I feel I have a firm tactile grasp of what comes up from the keyboard when I practice writing, but little way of typing an explanation of it. It’s certainly not my intention to tell people things. I leave that to others. The bits of writtenness on my screen are artifacts of a given moment. The paragraphs or larger units are a sort of ornament. They are “a thing to look at.”
Such pieces of writing, or word accretions, are not viewed in a vacuum. They are viewed in the material world, possibly by people who are only reading something at that moment because they are sick in bed with the flu and feel terrible.
Or, for a happier image in the Christmas season, paragraphs are like the decorations one hangs on a tree or wreath of thought. The tree or wreath must be there and be fairly stable. Then the artiste can open his bins and baskets of ornaments and strands and work them all over the tree for the desired effect. The result is inevitably a Christmas tree, but hopefully readers trust that the undecorated space behind the words is not empty.
Since then I have just typed on throw-away keyboards, which have much sameness. And yet even on keyboards and mice, inscription remains manual and is still a tactile act.
I feel I have a firm tactile grasp of what comes up from the keyboard when I practice writing, but little way of typing an explanation of it. It’s certainly not my intention to tell people things. I leave that to others. The bits of writtenness on my screen are artifacts of a given moment. The paragraphs or larger units are a sort of ornament. They are “a thing to look at.”
Such pieces of writing, or word accretions, are not viewed in a vacuum. They are viewed in the material world, possibly by people who are only reading something at that moment because they are sick in bed with the flu and feel terrible.
Or, for a happier image in the Christmas season, paragraphs are like the decorations one hangs on a tree or wreath of thought. The tree or wreath must be there and be fairly stable. Then the artiste can open his bins and baskets of ornaments and strands and work them all over the tree for the desired effect. The result is inevitably a Christmas tree, but hopefully readers trust that the undecorated space behind the words is not empty.
Niblets of typing actually do come from something; they are not ex nihilo. There is an old mnemonic I don’t literally believe in called the Memory Palace, a supposed system for retrieving memories by linking strings of associations together. The ability to regularize strings of associations for predictable results is, maybe, a short definition of what human language is. People, however, have mixed results with self-control, including the control of their memories. But the Memory Palace theory does have something to it; memory connects to the present mainly by strings of association. It is more tree-like than architectural, because it grows new linkages all the time. Ornaments made of words are an appeal to other peoples’ memories. Certainly an odd thing to appeal to, since I cannot see your memory.
My personal mnemonic is not a palace--not even a cottage; styling it a Memory Tree may even be too grandiose. I think I will call it a Memory Weed Lot, where opportunistic memories twine through each other toward the light, growing, dying and seeding season by season.
My personal mnemonic is not a palace--not even a cottage; styling it a Memory Tree may even be too grandiose. I think I will call it a Memory Weed Lot, where opportunistic memories twine through each other toward the light, growing, dying and seeding season by season.
WOODMAN, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I’ll protect it now.
’T was my forefather’s hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
Thy axe shall harm it not.
George Pope Morris (October 10, 1802 – July 6, 1864) was an American editor, poet, and songwriter. (Wikipedia)
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