Remember Hula-hoops, lava lamps, bell bottoms, “Dark Shadows” (a tribute to campy acting and campier plots; eminently watchable in the way that traffic accidents are eminently watchable)? And do you remember typewriters? Whiteoutä, faded ribbons (black on top, red on the bottom), flying T’s, and S’s and Q’s? They were clunky, noisy, charmingly graceless and, as “word processors” go—compared to computers—about as efficient as wingless bees. But hundreds of thousands of books and millions of short stories were written using typewriters. And some of these books and short stories actually saw print.
Do you remember Jack Nicholson (as Jack Torrance) sitting at his cream-colored Adler in the bowels of the Overlook Hotel in the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining? Do you remember the foot-high stack of paper that his wife Wendy discovered—when Jack was off being maniacal—each page filled with nothing more than “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”? Can you imagine how much effort that was for poor Jack and what it said about his frame of mind—that he was half a dozen tiles short of a full bath! Now put a brand new Gateway 2000 and an Epson color printer in place of that clunky cream-colored Adler. What would that say about Jack’s frame of mind? Only that he was very lazy.
That’s the point. Typewriters are work. They defy us. We bash them, stick our fingers into their mechanics and get ourselves gritty with ink to get typewriters to give us what we want—actual manuscript pages. Sitting down at a typewriter to write a book—compared to sitting down to a new Gateway 2000 to write that same book—is like getting on a tricycle to pay a Christmas visit to Aunt Minerva, who lives three states east. But, by God, once we sit down with Aunt Minerva and pile on the cranberry sauce, though our fannies ache and our legs will not pedal us another yard, we know we’ve very nearly accomplished the impossible.
Most of us can guess how a typewriter works. Hit a key and it moves a sprocket that moves a lever that’s attached to a spring that’s attached to a stem—on which is mounted the letter we want to type—and, Voilá! In the space of a few seconds, we’ve created a word.
Typewriters aren’t magical. They’re mechanical. They make noise. And they challenge us in the way that a bumpy road challenges us: Hey, you can get where you’re going, but you’re going to FEEL it!
Computers are magical in the way that gravity is magical, and x-rays, axons, dendrites, life itself, because we mere mortals have little comprehension of how they really work. Computers exist in a virtual world that doesn’t quite exist, and they exist in that world because they create it. A book written there is as ephemeral as a snowflake, even after it’s printed, because the printer itself is a necessary and happy cohabitant of that world.
The soul of the typewriter becomes the soul of its user. After a year or two, its keys become hobbled by the uneven strokes of its user’s fingers. Its platen bears the imprint of its user’s words, its user’s phrases, its user’s mistakes. Its space bar is the negative image of its user’s thumb. Its end-of-line bell knows the rhythm and speed of its user’s fingers. The feet of the typewriter leave their indelible images—in coffee, Cokeä, iced tea—in whatever surface they’ve rested on for a week or two. Typewriters don’t become obsolete, as computers do, because none of them are required to do anything more than create words on paper in ink or carbon. They know nothing of megahertz, gigahertz, bits, bytes or trilobites. And neither do their users. This keeps the brains of these users from becoming clogged with virtual data.
And, yes, it’s true, I’m writing this article in praise of typewriters on a magical, soulless computer. I’d have it no other way. How easily I move the workings of my brain to my fingers, to the monitor, to you. No Whiteoutä, no flying T’s, no fingers gritty with ink. And while I’m writing this article in praise of typewriters on my soulless, magical computer, that same computer is playing a CD of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and it’s also downloading data from a website based somewhere else on the planet (based somewhere on my computer’s hard drive, based somewhere in its wiring, its chips, based somewhere in the pixels that crowd my monitor, based somewhere that’s not anywhere that’s real). The computer is multitasking. How magical. Typewriters can’t multitask. They can only mono-task. A key is struck and a letter is created on paper. A key is struck again and another letter is created. How linear. One letter after another. That’s it. Letter, letter, letter, letter, space, letter, letter, space… How beautifully linear. Like any good book.
Like any good book.
— TMW
©2000 T.M. Wright
Originally published in Writer Online
Tiny Lights Publications is proud to announce the arrival of “Lights On-Line,” its new online personal-essay quarterly. The first issue, “Evocations,” features the lyrical conjuring of Kim Bromley, Jordan Rosenfeld, Tonia Taylor, Kyra Anderson, Trisha Camera, Laurie Reaume, M.J. Iuppa, Liz Hannon, and Peggy Roth.
You can find “Evocations” in the “Lights On-Line” file at http://www.tiny-lights.com.
