Swimming Pools and Bougey Coffee
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?