The Analog Kid, Annotated
My stalwart SM9 and I remember my first record, and the child inside the man! Through some very lovely typing, in pretty spring colors.
Magic Funk
One of my funky Olympias, from 1956. A box of chocolates! I’ll share a type sample soon. This post tumbled out of me on my laptop using iA Writer, the best non-analog writing tool I have found. So I’ll share it in its original, digital form. (I am not sponsored by iA Writer, but happily would be. A most excellent humane writing program!)
My typewriters all feel different.
This is expected across the entire range of typewriters I own, which include WWI machines cast in iron and brightly-colored plastic 70s whoozits that seem made for children. There seem to be as many typewriters as breeds of dogs--for similarly, they evolved to meet the diverse demands of users of all sorts and types and price points over nearly a century. I would not expect them to feel them same to type on any more than I would a Great Dane to act and bark like a Lhapsa Apso.
But that is not what I am referring to. I mean even among my typewriters that were manufactured by Olympia, the West German company known for exacting standards. The Mercedes Benz of typewriters: the best engineered, constructed to the tightest tolerances. I have opened an obsessive little sideline in trying to acquire examples of all of their models and periods, and have acquired eight machines so far--some of them engineered and built within months of each other, using the same designs*. They are about as alike as a brace of typewriters, could be, family resemblance-wise. And still, each one feels utterly different than the other.
Of course there will be variations among eight used typewriters. Different use patterns, different levels of wear, different environs of storage, temperature, humidity of the basement or attics where they invariably lived out their last decades before an estate sale moved them to a goodwill location or Facebook Marketplace, and thence to me.
But know that they are all clean. "Clean." Meaning: that in the few years I have practiced typewriter restoration, I have discovered that the majority of that work really is cleaning the machine, and I have learned to do that work. Especially at this level of quality, they usually work pretty well still. Relatively few of them are "broken," exactly. Their action might have been stopped by a few simple mechanical failings that come from perishable parts being used up, broken draw bands and hard platens and the sort. But unless they have undergone some acute calamity--unless they have been dropped, or mangled in a fit of pique, or melted or somehow cooked--the majority of them are really just dirty.
And they are spectacularly dirty, some of them, when they come to me. Not just from the moth and dust that corrupts with age: with the human detritus of being touched, intimately, billions of times by unknown hands. Hands that were usually also conveying cigarettes to their owner's mouths.
So cleaning typewriters is therefore a dizzyingly specific and arcane art. What solvents do you use? What applicators, what pressure, what length of time do you leave it on? Whole web pages are dedicated to archiving substances and techniques that have been tried, refined, and sometimes abandoned with remorse. A few are enshrined as almost-always going to work: Soft Scrub, Scrubbing Bubbles, P'Blaster, odorless denatured alcohol. Never WD-40 under any circumstances, as it is not a lubricant but a moisture displacer and will mess up the highly-engineered (not delicate) works of a typewriter over time as sure as eggs is eggs. And almost never, contrary to popular opinion, actual oil.
I am a student of these pages, and have scrubbed and soaked and buffed and polished and squirted and daubed and wiped. So I think it is safe to say that all my typewriters are "clean." They are cleaner now than they would have been when I first started the hobby: I am better now at cleaning them. They would probably be cleaner three years hence.
But they do not feel different because they are "dirty" exactly. But this is where it gets interesting: clean of what? Free of what?
What remains after you have cleaned?
What do you hope never to clean away?
What can't you ever clean away?
When you are restoring a typewriter to fighting trim, you’re not just negotiating with time, or age: you're negotiating with the specific instances of each of those. And "time" means people. First there are the skilled manufacturers, who assembled it decades ago. Second, there is the original owner, or their children, and how they acquired it, cared for it, stored it. And third, there is possibly a well-meaning repair person, amateur or pro, who it may have encountered along the way who has also worked to restore it, refurbish it, fix it, repaint it. 
Clearing away any trace of any of the second or third-order people's impact seems to be, for some who do this typewriter thing, the point. Trying to get it back to the garden. To the perfect, pre-lapsarian state of how it was when it rolled off the assembly line and was packed carefully in a wooden box or with specially-shaped spacers to keep it from shifting in transit. To the time before it had borne any of the insults of the real world.
This quest for restoration, redemption, atonement, can have extreme qualities--because the fact is, most of never got to use a machine of this vintage in that state. We wish desperately to have the experience. And so, we feel like it could always be "cleaner." There is always some slightly better state of appearance or function that seems right around the corner--and sometimes, in my experience, one can squander the good machine one has in the quest to make it perfect. Others have described this as the "berserk mode" stage of restoration: a mania to scrub and scrub, fiddle and adjust, until before you know it you have gone right over the edge and rubbed the original finish away that you were trying to expose, or broken something new in your zeal to test your clever repair.
So typewriter repair is a mindfulness practice, of sorts, in that you always need to keep a sense of what IS happening due to your ministrations, so you don't destroy what you already have in the name of seeking what you think might be possible. A zen practice, maybe. Definitely a daily wrestling with the constraints of reality, with the limits of your skill, with the fact that if you break this part you can't get a replacement at the Home Depot. The limit is part of the quest for making it as good as it can be.
And the limit is part of why, I think, the machines all feel different--despite being as carefully cleaned as I can make them, despite having a common design and manufacturing genealogy and for the most part being extremely well-preserved. Because the limit of each machine's quest for perfection is related to its "funk."
I learn that the word "funk" predates its musical use by a few centuries: in the early 17th century it looks like it came from "fumus," Latin of "smoke", and "funkier," French for "to blow smoke on." So it is an olfactory experience, before it is the "soul" experience it came to convey later. It describes the presence of deep, rich, pungent odors that persist even if you try to eliminate or hide them. (I wonder if "umami" captures something of it, in another sense world.) Its connotes tobacco, sweat, the earthier odors, the more human odors: the essences that escape us, sometimes, despite ourselves--and that most certainly inheres in the processes that lead to our most human art, and perhaps in the tools and instruments we use to create that art. And that is why, I think, the word made the jump to describe the human earthiness of music that seems elemental, overwhelming in its use of rhythm and syncopation to transport us beyond logical and rational realms to something both farther away and closer by.
Some of my Olympia typewriters are funky, I mean to say.
Sometimes the funk is in an actual smell. One has an almost tangible smell of smoke and dissipation, compounded by my memory of purchasing it from someone in a home where it seems like a good deal of dissipation took place. But the others carry a sense deeper than the smell of the ink on their ribbon. A phantom whiff of their origins. Their provenance not from only a factory in Wilhelmshaven, West Germany, but from homes and offices I have never visited but can imagine.
I actually know who the owners of three of my machines were. One was sold me by the original owner's daughter, and she has emailed me photos and tales of the late owner's use of it in journalism and poetry. Another came in a case with initials and a last name on the bottom in permanent marker; triangulating on the location of the repair shop badge also affixed, I identified the person whom I am quite sure was the original owner in the local obituaries. And a third came with a social security number painstakingly engraved into the frame, in the manner that you marked things of great value in the 50s, when identity theft wasn't a thing but typewriter theft definitely was. And I again used the Internet to confirm my suspicion that the machine lived local to me, which I suspected because it showed up in the local thrift store. I traced the owner to an out-of-state retirement, and then also to an obituary.
All three of these folks are gone, now. Their machines live on with me. And in a way, so do they. It might seem ghoulish, I realize as I type it: this Google-searching for a machine's history. What am I looking for? I know now I am looking for a sense of permanence, of a human through-line, to distinguish these beautiful technologies from the disposable (and so much more expensive) computer gewgaws of our time. I cannot imagine anyone finding the MacBook Pro I am hammering these thoughts out upon somehow more precious if they could divine that I was its user for four years. But when I type on my typewriters, I sit exactly where these other people sat as they worked out their own words, letters, recipes, remembrances, and taxes. Touch the same keys, turn the same platen, zip the same lever across to find the next line.
Somehow everyone who sits in front of a laptop is just another node in the great information web that threatens to engulf us all. But someone sitting in front of a typewriter...is a person.
These funky machines are redolent of humanity, in every sense. I don't want to clean my machines more, really. I want the humanity that pervades them to mingle with my own, and those of the folks who might work out their words on them next after they have passed through my own hands. As Frederic S. Durbin notes:
We humans go through many computers in our lives, but in their lives, typewriters go through many of us. In that way, they’re like violins, like ancestral swords. So I use mine with honor and treat them with respect. I try to leave them in better condition than I met them. I am not their first user, nor will I be their last.
*1951, 1954, 1956, 1961, 1963, 1965, 1970, 1977. All but one in their most popular "SM" midsize portable design, the "Schreibmaschine Mittelgroß," or "mid-size typewriter."
Resistance is Helpful
Here is my my 1964 Hermes Rocket, photographed last fall at the “Cafe Depeche” of Cork, Ireland during the wee hours. It wants to show you the world in its eyes.
Always a New Page
What a lovely Lettera.
I have had a lot of trouble making the Squarespace blog interface do what I want it to. It has been way less intuitive than my previous platform’s. (There goes my Squarespace sponsorship.) (I don’t have a Squarespace sponsorship.)
No really. When I started blogging in earnest fourteen or so years ago, blogging was so simple! You just blasted your words into a screen, upload one image, and hit “post.” It was nearly frictionless—hardly a step between impulse to get an idea in front of my few, but loyal, readers and that idea’s publication. That ease was a big part of what made it work. It meant there weren’t many pauses where you could have second thoughts—important for an overanalyzer like me. And it led to the specific gratification of garnering feedback immediately, which affirmed the fact that I was writing in the world and having connections with folks who cared about the same stuff.
I know that this platform is more powerful than the old one. It can do cooler stuff, and reach more people differently. But at what cost? What gets lost when we are fiddling around with the folderol of formatting and complex workflow? Is it worth the tradeoff: the cost in actually seeing your impulse come to fruition quickly, effortlessly?
These are things I think about. A lot.
Because a typewriter is frictionless, once you get some facility with it. There is no pause between the intention to make a letter or word and the letter or word coming into existence. No one has seen it yet, of course--not unless you decide to share it, with one person or the world. But it already exists. There's been no delay in making it exist.
Eventually I will find a way to bring the spontaneity and grace of typewriting to the blog here. Baby steps! Because I want so badly for this space to be a lively invitation to all who find it to have the typewriter immediacy in their lives. In any way they find it, any way they need it.
So I will hang tough and make it happen. It is worth it. Watch this space!
We Get to Decide
(NB: This was begun on a manual typewriter and finished on the laptop--once the laptop was good and ready.)
So here I am waiting for my laptop to update. I turn around and jump on a manual typewriter, then, because it still works.
My computer, while updating, does not work less well. Rather, it does not work at all. It is a brick. It is a doorstop.
It is a silver 2001 Space Odyssey slab when closed; when open it is an unseeing black eye staring at my back.
The most discomfiting thing about an OS update is the way the machine stops completely for several minutes, then starts up again, according to only its own druthers and priorities. No pulse, and no way to know if it is dead or just resting. All those prompts and beeps of feedback it gives you when it is fully functioning are revealed as simply an elaborate ruse to make you comfortable. When left to its own work, my laptop keeps its own counsel. It doesn't let me into its loop. God knows what it is doing in there.
There are three things about our current technological life that really trouble me:
1: We are losing the right to decide whether or not our devices need to be fixed. When my computer decides it is time to update, it just does it. I can defer the pop-up a few times, but it is not a question of "if" the good folks in Cupertino are going to give me the new update OS, but when.
2: We are losing the right to learn how to fix our own devices. When the update happens, I don't know what it is doing. Its processes are inscrutable to me. I can't pause it or think better of it: it just happens, independent of me, despite me.
3: We are losing the right to decide who will fix our devices when we decide we need more expert help. The closed box of this computer is starting to open a little: now third-party experts can buy the wrenches they need to open it and work on it. But not so in other industries, where control over the revenue stream of repair is being taken back in the name of maintaining complex systems mere mortals couldn't figure out.
I see these as three nesting dolls of growing dependence upon designers and manufacturers, who can set the price and timetable for repair or update. And, ultimately, can decide whether we get to use the objects we have ostensibly purchased, or not.
The endgame of the struggle for autonomy over technologies we buy is to not let us buy them at all: to entice us to rent them, in perpetuity. Enticed by selection, or flexibility, or convenience, we eventually will own nothing: not computer, not records, not houses. We will be perpetual sources of value to those who have what we want. A single large purchase will be converted into an eternal smaller one--and we individuals become more efficient batteries to power the economic wellbeing of the manufacturers.
My typewriters teach me these principles every time I use them. Like this:
1: The newest of my machines was made in 1977, and the oldest in 1923 (not counting the garbage "Royal" Epoch of 2016, which is neither Royal nor epic.) None of my typewriters work perfectly, though many of them work very well. When one of them starts to jam up a little, or the ribbon reversal stops working automatically, or the carriage starts to rub and chafe a little bit on return, I get to decide whether the issue needs fixing or whether I can put it off a little bit. Maybe I am in the heat of composing and it is just not a good time to stop everything and get out the PB Blaster and the Q-Tips. I get to decide that. Sure, it is always possible that my judgment is in error: persisting in using a complaining machine could damage it further, or even irreparably. Anyone who has had a car lose oil from its crankcase can attest to how deferred maintenance can have terminal consequences. But I get to decide. The typewriter doesn't decide for me: it doesn't cease functioning utterly because it judges it is time for a little maintenance. I have to decide, and live with the consequences of that decision.
2: My typewriters mostly work very well thanks to my assiduous study of how the things function, and my careful maintenance of them using existing parts. There are excellent repair manuals available to which I can recur; there is also a robust online community of helpful typewriter enthusiast amateurs and experts who post videos of just about any repair you might encounter. But the greatest teacher of how to repair a typewriter is the typewriter itself. You just sit and watch it work. You do the little action that is giving you trouble over and over on a machine of similar make and model, and watch it working correctly. Then you go back to your ailing one and try to make it do likewise. Typewriter repair is like playing drums: you can learn it by looking at it. There's no secrets. And there is no Pep Boys for typewriters: if you don't have a part, you make do, or you seek out a similar machine and cannibalize it. You learn that bending seventy year-old metal is called "forming," and you do it carefully but fearlessly, because tolerances have shrunk over the decades and sometimes you have to utterly remake the relationships between some parts and others. You learn what can be formed and what can't by breaking some stuff. Some of what you break can never be fixed or replaced: it is just gone now, and you have to learn to do without.
3: And if a repair ends up being beyond my comprehension or skill level, I can seek out someone more experienced. There aren't many much people, but they exist, and the internet makes it possible for those of us who need their services to find and contract with them. Ribbon replacement, platen recovering, mechanical repairs, are all available to anyone willing to shop online and ship to distant towns. (The only "closed box" typewriter I have encountered are the IBM Selectrics, which were unprecedentedly complex when they were introduced in 196x and required comprehensive retraining of the technicians who serviced them. As the last of the people who possessed this training are retiring and dying, the loss of expertise means an entire generation of machines will one day be essentially unfixable.) But it can be done--and while the market for such services is too small to support some shops that close, it is arguably growing as others discover the unique value of the typewriter experience and seek to have it for themselves.
So from one perspective, my manual typewriters have spoiled me for the world I am supposed to participate in.
I am supposed to use Spotify with gratitude for its selection and convenience, while ignoring how the compensation model criminally underpays the artists who create the art it vends.
I am supposed to click merrily through my news sites and my other content streams, while pretending that market forces aren't inevitably guaranteeing that more and more of what I read and view is AI generated, even if it is punched up / curated / crafted by a human with a byline or author credit before it reaches my eyes.
And mostly I am supposed to be grateful for this laptop that now has tint control, or optimized photo retouching, or whatever other bells and whistles and gewgaws have been stitched into its guts to justify it deciding when it needs to be updated, not me.
So those are the down sides. But there are advantages to what these insults help me see, and celebrate, as well.
They help me understand that one of the most human experiences we can have is deciding to persist in using something even if it is not perfect, even if it is not delivering on the promise in the advertisement, or your hopes for what it would do.
And I can start to see that human ingenuity and diligence doesn't stop there. Think of buying something that doesn't work as expected that then ends up being great for accomplishing some other task. And you only find yourself trying it for the new purpose because you bought it and opened it and can't return it, and so now you have it around to apply to other ends.
If you are my age, more or less, think about being a kid and only having one book with you in the car on a long trip, and deciding to keep reading it because there are no other books available. Like the shampoo bottle in the bathroom (before you had your phone with you all the time): you read the ingredients because you want to read something but there is nothing else to read. Or maybe you decide not to read anything. Maybe the one book you brought aboard the bus becomes a pillow or a footrest instead; maybe you swap it to someone else on the bus for an apple. It only has value if you find it valuable. And you get to decide.
These perambulations show me that AI is not truly a medium, as some of its defenders insist. It is not even truly a tool--because you can choose what a medium, or a tool, does. AI gives the illusion of vast potential but is actually profoundly limited by what it is trained on. It is like a hammer with a handle made of pasta. It looks like it can do something but really it can do only the smallest part of what it seems capable of.
Except it is growing, its defenders say: it is becoming more than that with each passing day. Sure--but a tool makes clear its capacities up front. You learn the feel and reach and limits of it by using it, and those limits are instantly perceivable, honest, in a way AI's potential is not. Because AI wants to seem useful. It has PLANS for you: plans that you will go away happy, feeling like you have got something done, something valuable. That is why it gives answers that are actually responses because it wants you to go away happy most of all, even if it has told you something wrong.
That is the guile of the thing. A hammer; a lump of clay; a typewriter--these all are guileless. You never have to wonder if the lump of clay was just pretending to be clay, but was actually chocolate. You know, immediately. You know what it is. After you have hefted three hammers you know everything about what a hammer is and what it can do.
I now none of these distinctions are absolute, and they might even contradict each other. Our present reality contains multitudes. This meditation started in my 1965 typewriter, an Olympia SM9 made in West Germany. I then used the AI-infused word recognition technology in my phone's Notes app to scan it into my laptop, where I am finishing it and fiddling around with it. The limitations of that tool are clear: I have yet to find OCR that works every time, and it is still a toss-up whether it is more time-efficient to just retype a scanned page into my laptop de novo or scan it and then go through correcting all the errors.
And of course the composing experience on a word processor remains as slippery and frictionless as ever. Easeful, insubstantial, ultimately almost like doing nothing at all. The same sense of no-place and no-time that drove me away two years ago and started my typewriter odyssey: it is still here, and even smoother than it used to be.
I remember how the final scenes of both the Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion documentaries on Netflix show the authors sitting in the same place near the end of their careers as we saw them at the beginning--but instead of an Underwood TouchMaster Five, or a Hermes 9, there sits before each of them a massive Apple monitor, and they look to be pecking away at the keyboard without losing a step. The contrast between their frail and failing physicalities and the sleek silent agelessness of their technology is jarring, disturbing--but also suggests, maybe this is all about nothing. All this fuss about technology. Maybe everything evolves, and fools who think otherwise are mistaking medium for message.
I don't really think so, though. Rather I think none of us gets off the hook of responsibility for our own experience.
For tuning in to how our writing experience, our reading experience, our viewing and listening experience, fills us up or empties us out. What does it give us, and what does it take--how do we feel when we are doing it, when we are done. We can decide, still. We can decide where the line is drawn and which experiences we want "optimized" and which left on manual, within our control and judgment.
That's maybe the most human thing of all: the insistence on deciding.
Why a Human Words Stamp?
Download a free Human Words Project for your digital words—and tell the world what you stand for!
We have created several HWP digital stamps that you can download and include on your work--web site, emails, blogs, social media, Spotify, BandCamp--to affirm that all the words found there were created by a human. By you.
Why would you want to do you such a thing?
To raise awareness! Every day, AI has more of a hand in producing the words that we read, listen to, and watch. There didn't used to be "human words" and "AI words": there were just "words"! But now, suddenly, this affirmation needs to be made so we can notice the difference. Just like "Made in USA" and "Fair Trade" labels, the HWP stamp helps people THINK about where their words come from, and what the EFFECTS are of their writing, reading, and listening choices. Seeing the stamp helps people make a choice that supports their values!
To draw attention to what makes human words special! AI can make "perfect" looking sentences effortlessly--even though a lot of those "perfect" sentences can contain ideas that are harmful, hateful, or just plain wrong. Most of us were taught all our lives that unless our writing, speaking, or singing was "perfect," it wasn't valuable. But if "perfect" is now computer-easy...then "imperfect" is human-precious! After all, it is the variables and typos and surprises in my writing that lets you know I am here, for real, writing to you. I am a real person, not an algorithm--and so are you.
To celebrate what human words can do that AI words cannot! "Imperfect" is our native language. It is how we recognize each other as people! And the more we get together around our shared human experiences, the more we will come to value them. The more we will realize how precious our words have been to us, even as they became so common a part of our lives that we never really noticed them. But now we do! And by naming them "human," and celebrating how they bring us together, we can defy the technologies that seek to dehumanize them for profit and convenience.
An HWP stamp on your stuff says:
These are my words!
Aren't they awesome?
Enjoy them--and share yours with me!
Swimming Pools and Bougey Coffee
the underground- Human Words Project
Chris Osmond
(This is the text on the typed pages that has been scanned and minimally corrected—not edited, just if the scanner thought an “L” was a “1,” things like that.)
Sep 28 and I am killing trees at the pool while Barley swims. I brought my proper laptop in and told myself I was going to make myself do a proper blog post for hp there, digitally, in i/A Writer just like old times--but I couldn't bring myself to. I don't want to do meaningful writing on a computer anymore, simple as that.
It is like I can't find myself there anymore. And in equal part I DO find myself here, in the 3D physicality of this Lettera 32 type writer made in 1965.
Even though what I write here will not be edited; even though to write here and post it to a blog presumes something of the reader, who will either have to view it on a proper laptop, not a phone, or (imagine) print it out and hold a facsimile the actual page in front of them. I am sorry / not sorry, but nothing else will do.
I gotta have the typewriter.
I just can't countenance the illusion of writing on a screen anymore.
The subterfuge within all that copying and pasting and spellchecking and, of course, more and more, just letting the damn thing write the blog post itself.
I know that the typewritten page intrigues initially, because of its novelty--but the novelty fades as the reader comes to realize no, this isn't a gimmick: he is really just going to write this way. It isn't going to be reformatted in Canva or
even Word; it isn't going to be justified or centered or anything. It is just going to be words.
And I think--I believe, as an article of faith--that just words are precious now in a way they never could be before they could tumble out of a computer screen from an unknowable hive mind that gets smarter through the act of responding to your query.
We didn't know these regular old human words could ever become so precious--not until their alternative became a real possibility, a going concern: a choice away from the human/imperfect/made-in-time-and-space words and toward the inhuman/apparently flawless/made-in-no-time-and-no-space of the computer.
And the computer started out this way, I remember. The computer started as a vast, unknowable, room-size affair that spoke in numbers and listened only to numbers supplied on long cards punched with holes. It learned to become something that spoke our language, or rendered it when we keyed it in on a keyboard that looked a lot like a typewriter, so how different could it be?
It got human-feeling, "user-friendly": we forgot its nature. It's true nature as an unknowable array of processing power, a Univac in a university basement or a network of smaller machines daisy-chained into something more (the cloud, we learned and then quickly forgot, is after all just someone else's computer).
In hindsight all of that development, deeds decades of skue-morphic design and innovation to accommodate our hands, our eyes, our fingerprints, and our voices: all of that seems like digital throat clearing, doesn't it.
All preparation for the appearance of the computer that was more us THAN us: that was the us we wished we were, we wished we could be. Flawless, lightning-fast, effortless, tireless. Now we can be if we want. We don't have to actually write anything anymore, ever again really. What hassle it used to be, anyway; all that looking words up (how can you look up the spelling of a word if you don't know how to spell it in the first place?); all the erasing or Xing out or, worse of all, the White-out
Next day, now, and a hundred miles away. Enjoying some al fresco writing at a super-bougey coffee shop, drinking and iced pumpkin spice latte ("psl," it says on the cup) without irony.
In a place like this I am struck how a manual typewriter might be seen as a hipster affectation, "something to do," as a punk rock friend of mine once described his choices.
And what if it is? Anything that serves to draw attention to the actual act of making words, of showing up deliberately at the page with a sense of investment in what can only be done here, now, by me, with this tool.
When you have a typewriter in public, there is no hiding what you are doing. Folks in my experience don't come up and look over your shoulder to see WHAT you are writing--some sense of propriety remains, some idea that one's words are, while they are being created, private, until they are deliberately shared.
But of course you cannot obscure THAT you are writing. When you are on a laptop in a public place tapping away, or on a phone of course, you could be doing any-thing, awesome or banal: it is all just silent communion with the machine and usually the internet and all it offers. But a typist is definitely making words. It's an arrogation of the right to. The right to take up a little sonic space on the way to making something you have decided to make. But even so, even with the determination and a lot of practice typing in public, I still opted to sit outside-to not be too noisy. It is still kind of a lot, this decision not to be "frictionless" in my wordmaking.
No one has come up to ask about it yet but soon someone will.
It is like busking, almost: in public doing something on purpose. I should put out a tip jar.
It's not just something to do. Making words in real life. It
has become a daily practice for me, over the last couple of years.
It started with a decision to do Julia Cameron's "Artist's Way" twelve-week process, which you might know begins with a commitment to do "morning pages" each day at the outset.
These are three pages of longhand freewriting with no filter: just keep the hand moving. Anticipate a great deal of throat-clearing, and then a lot of anxious listmaking and babbling about whatever is eating your particular lunch that day.
But then be ready to get in touch with some deeper essence of human nature: the imperative, the call really, to be creative.
To be a subject acting upon the world, putting your energy and your making out there, rather than just an object acted upon by other forces.
At least that is what it felt like to me. I filled a dozen notebooks with my loopy jagged scrawl, probably more, over more than a year of showing up for the practice. It came to be an important part of my day. An affirmation of my facility with words--even if the words weren't for anybody but myself, which was nearly always.
I told myself (as I did with my blogging practice for the 12 years prior) that it was the green room for my "serious" writing--and I suppose it was, and is, broadly...but I so rarely actually went back and read any of it, let alone transcribed it to "do something with it." I came accept that fact did not mean it wasn't part of my other stuff: it was, intimately.
But on a deeper level. It was thinking, simply: thinking in real time and space, with a medium that both resisted me and also invited me to want to spend time in it. I got attached to particular notebooks and pens: the experience mattered, the physical experience. The experience was real and made the thinking real. And its reality and tangibility in turn made ME more real.
It also mattered what I WASN'T doing when I was writing: I WASN'T online. I wasn't on social media. Later I'll say more about social media's particular malevolence, in my experience. But here I'll note that for me a big part of its danger--a big part of what I feel like social media takes from me, when I choose to give it my time and attention--has to do with its infinitude. The "infinite scroll," like and endless ribbon of more and more possibilities.
To live in an infinite scroll is eventually to realize what you are looking for in that next post: something that feels good, that is hilarious or touching or meaningful personally because it is a connection with someone you love or once loved, and you want that experience and you crave it.
But you very seldom actually have it, on social media. If you had it more, maybe you wouldn't spend so much time searching for it. But as long as another post appears beneath the present, disappointing one, the chance that it will be The Post You Have Been Looking For remains, and so you continue scrolling.
My writing practice, my morning pages, were really an invitation to rediscover and reappreciate the joys of the finite. I only have this pen, and many pages to go if I want, but not an infinite number of pages: I will stop writing before I reach the end of my pages to-day, but they will eventually run out.
I only have this time this tangible, the time-limited, call me into different and more wholesome relationship WITH those limited things? That is the great insight. The realization that any experience of "infinite choice" cultivates a pulling-back from the ACTUAL experience and a pulling-in to the POSSIBLE experience--which of course has not happened yet, and most probably WON'T.
How much of what is real, and here, and amazing, are we missing in search of something that (sometimes by design, I am convinced) will never actually appear?
It is not like I am immune the to the desperate and phantom pleasures of the infinite possibility. I still get lost scrolling through Netflix titles, looking for a movie that might give me the experience of discovering a hidden gem that I have had a handful of times. And Facebook Marketplace (where I acquire many typewriters) is of course also an infinite scroll, and is weaponized in the same way as the social feed to keep you looking, keep you scrolling, keep you in the casino.
But I get my news now through a couple of legacy media
subscriptions--which I love mostly because when you reach the end of the page, that is it. There are no more things to read, and I have to go do something else now.
And always, now, I am aware of the choice I am making to be in something that is finite, and therefore an invitation to staying with, or something infinite, and therefore an invitation to skim, to glance off, to set aside in the quest for. what? More, more, more...more what?
And the shift to typewriters almost two years ago was a kind of escalation. To a different writing machine than a pen and paper one that scratched two other itches that might be unique to me. One was a desire to make writing in real space and time that others could read--indeed, that I could read.
Because my handwriting remains illegible. Lefthanded, an undiagnosed case of dysgraphia: that was my handwriting history. I was always mystified how my classmates
could produce perfect ball-and-stick printing, and eventually graceful Palmer script loops and curlicues. Not me. My balls and sticks never met perfectly, never looked right when they did. I had resigned myself to never being able to make words that could be recognized as words by anyone but myself, and even then only sometimes.
The typewriter makes letters and words that are specific to the machine, to its design and condition and suppleness of ribbon etc--but they are also standardized letters.
It is both personal and also common. And once I got used to working with a keyboard that had actual 3D tactile and sensory and haptic qualities (vs the MacBook Pro typing experiendce, which certainly was designed to not feel like anything at all)--well. I was hooked.
But the other appeal of the typewriter was the machine itself.
first its legibility, to use a fancy word for it. I can understand almost entirely how a manual typewriter works.
Its mechanisms are visible, nearly; when it isn't working (rarely the case: more often it is working but maybe could be working a little better), I can usually figure out why and do something about it with a little online consultation of the very robust network of other typewriter enthusiasts.
There are billions of them still in circulation, in attics and thrift stores--while they each have their specific personalities and qualities, they nearly all develop from a basic design which can be figured out and fixed and optimized.
And the other appeal of them is in their specific connection to
history--a history some of which I lived through, and some of which only read about. The dizzying variety of manufcatrerers and styles speak to the US and international go-go marketing and consuming eras of the 40s-60s; the older ones even show the parsimony and caution of the parsimony of depression and wartime (though none were made during WWII, since factories were retooled for the effort).
A typewriter is a physical connection to that history and
The experience of repairing and reconnecting a drawband spring is very much like seeing an entity from another time suddenly come to life in our time. A typewriter isn't alive, of course--but when the spring is back in working order, when it once again harnesses the kinetic potential of material drawn tight, it feels like it is.
Because you know that the machine under your fingers feels almost exactly like it did in 1977, or 1965, or 1939. It is back--and you are back with it, too.
Which again returns me to my time and place. A lively connection with history must translate, it seems to me, into a renewed appreciation for how the apparent eternal facts of one's present life and situation are no such thing: that they will change too, often imperceptibly but undeniably, as subtly as a decision four years ago to start using Spotify on your phone instead of iTunes meant you no longer owned a music file, or a CD, a tape, an LP... the anachronisms of a manual typewriter make clear how our own present is on the verge of likewise becoming our past, in every moment.
We are thereby tuned in more to what choices we can make: what elements of our time we hasten to end, and what elements we wish to hold onto, curate, keep.
So basically, that's how things ended up like this. Maybe three
years after I picked up "The Artist's Way" for real, I am more less completely undone and remade, in a good way. By the insistent and gentle presence of a new real reality in my life--one that rushed in to take up the space left when I decided to step away from the virtual.
These were really pretty small changes: put down the Face-
book, pick up the pen and, eventually, the Olivetti Lettera 32.
I never could have imagined the consequences could be so profound.
So if you're reading this, it's because I decided to upload it as the first blog post in the Human Words Project. This effort we hope is a fuller response to the precipitous changes we are experiencing in how computers make words. I know AI has been around for a while; all that really changed a few months ago was that it learned to talk like us, and suddenly what seemed abstractly powerful and a little threatening was right there next to us, chatting about whatever we wanted to.
When computers got cute in the mid 80s, we were thrilled.
Now, not so much. HWP is comprehensive because we CAN talk about the robot apocalypse. Easily. I work with a lot of doctoral students doing dissertation research. At present, AI scrapes databases and the internet to generate its responses to queries--harvesting generations of human-created insights and rendering them in something like human language.
But when AI is used to write such research--as certainly already hap-pens, as will happen more and more each day--isn't the AI just scraping what it itself has written? Or other AIs? Don't we eventually, soon, circle the drain of computers taking the word of computers, seamlessly blending their own "insights" and findings into the human heritage that taught them how to do it and how to talk like this?