Typewriter Sighting at the Center of the Tardis

Anyone else catch the treasure in the latest episode of Doctor Who: Journey to the Center of the Tardis?

And no, I'm not talking about the pretty lady.

It looks like a Remington to me, quite similar to one I've got hanging around in my collection. But I could be mistaken. It's only on camera for a second and a half.

Information Density

No, I don't plan on outlining my entire novel this way. However, who can resist having a bit of fun with a new stack of index cards and a fresh ribbon?

The nice thing about these cards, I can be typing away on a page, come up with an idea to note for later, and insert an index card behind the paper, roll it through, type it up, and then pull it out without messing up the alignment of the page.

Who says you need a modern operating system to run two processes at the same time?

Dirt, Ribbon, Dream

Typewriter Themed Desktop Wallpapers

A few typewriter themed desktop wallpapers for you guys, all at 1920 by 1080.

Something a little abstract and soothing. (Really looks better full sized.)

My personal favorite.

A little more true to life.

Because who doesn't like the colors of rust and oil, in the fall?

Anyone care to take a guess at the machine? (Answer to come on Saturday.)

Sometimes I like messing about with the photo software, and all these gears and wheels can make semi-abstract art from so many different angles. I'll probably post more of these in the future. Any requests (machines or monitor resolution sizes) let me know, I'll have a go at it.

#

On an administrative note, I think I've got those capchas turned off, and I think I figured out why my larger typecasts wouldn't display at a legible size. Something called lightbox in the blogger settings. I've turned that off, too, and now I can click on images to see them in full size. Which means legible typecasts with regular margins just a click away.

Now I'm hoping these images will upload at their full resolution. Will continue to tinker if not...

UPDATE: Blogger seems to shrink them a bit, and compress the files to half-size. But they're still big! If you'd like a full 1080p render email me at winston.alden@gmail.com and I could send you one. 

Linux, Youtube-DL, and the Tinkerer's Satisfaction

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Shared from a new-to-me Remington. More on that to come...

Fountain Pens, Retro-Tech, and Rebellion

AHA! I’ve broken out The Fountain Pen again! It’s a relic from early in The Marriage, from a year when each of us was delighted, on Christmas Morning, to discover we had bought the other a pen. We were each going to be writers, you see.

Actually, come to think of it, this was before  the marriage—what you could call the pre-marital honeymoon and cohabitation phase.

My Good Lord, were we ever so young?

I bought her a tortoiseshell Parker from Staples. She out-did me with a Schaeffer from the Levenger catalog, a semi-translucent Lucite barrel with brass bands and a 14k gold nib. I’ve used it so much over the years that the tip is visibly worn on one side. This is a small sign of age, compared to what my body shows: grey hair at the temples, laugh-lines around the eyes, spectacles on the face with a corresponding restriction on my driver’s license. This pen has, in fact, remained constant through tremendous change: seven different addresses, six different employers, three novels in countless drafts, summers of sailing and winters on skis.

Now I find myself coming back to the tools of that time. Including this one.

While so much else has changed. Back then, we lived an isolated, 19th century style life in one of the smaller towns on the lower Cape. In a rebellion against the suburban landscape, we survived without a car, riding our bicycles where we needed to go, or walking if there was snow on the sidewalks. There was no Internet, not in the town where we lived, not at a price we could afford. What there were, were plenty of A.O.L. floppy discs coming through the mail, handy to re-format and use as backups for the WordPerfect documents I wrote on The Wife’s laptop, a machine that had cost her $3000 several years earlier, in college. (For several decades there, it seemed that a new computer always cost $3000.) This laptop was a revelation to me, as was the bubblejet printer that could output any font in any size—bringing home to me for the first time the full significance of the Kitchen Table Publishing Revolution. And then for some reason I never entirely embraced it. I wasn’t ready to abandon my Olympia and Remington desktop typewriters. (Later on I did abandon them, to my even later regret.)

We lived our lives in a sort of bubble, getting our news from newspapers purchased at the Superette a couple of miles away, or from the magazines we picked up at the Post Office just down the street from the Superette. Serious entertainment would come from the books we bought in binges from second hand shops in Provincetown or Wellfleet, when friends were kind enough to take us there in cars—or lend their cars to us. (Have you ever wondered if people read Shakespeare for fun? That used to be us, sitting by the fire, arguing over who got to be King Lear and who had to take on all three daughters.) Lighter entertainment came through the TV we had, which was one of those wood-encased models on wheels (the wood would later catch fire) coupled to a VCR. If we walked for two miles in the opposite direction of the Superette, we could reach the Video Empire, which, despite the grand scale implied by its name, was actually a tiny little rental shop in a four-store strip mall. This is where we encountered the BBC renditions of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, and considered ourselves cultured. But on the nights when we didn’t have the energy to pedal to the rental place, we could always pick up one snowy channel whose signal somehow made its way across Cape Cod Bay from Boston. This is how we discovered Judge Judy, as well as a particularly egregious TV adaptation of Conan the Barbarian. Pickings were slim. So other nights we just watched our bootleg recording of Young Frankenstein, which eventually caught fire.

But now look at us. We live in a small house in an isolated Cape Cod town. Well, that hasn’t really hasn’t changed. We have a car, too. But we drive it as little as possible thanks to the tremendous cost of gasoline and repair. So transportation hasn’t changed much either. Instead of the 1890s, we embrace the values of the 1930s. It’s a big step, even if we’re still completely out of our time.

But we’re connected. There are six computers in the house, and a few of them were manufactured just last decade. More importantly, we’ve got a router, and a broadband connection—and this changes life entirely. Now, we can purchase goods from around the world and have them delivered a couple days later. We can watch movies and television programs on demand. The answer to any question we have comes to us through our “Glowing Mother”, The Wife’s nickname for Google piped on to an LCD.  We can follow political revolutions as they unfold, absorbing photos, videos, and reports delivered by citizen journalists and activists around the planet. We can know it all. And if anyone was listening, we could tell it all.

Yet I’m sitting here scratching away with a fountain pen, just as I was all those years ago. Is this the sign of some mental defect? An unwillingness to adapt? Or worse, could this be a sign of intransigence, resistance, incipient luddite revolutionism?

There was a banner in my High School gym that exhorted, “Lead, Follow, or Get Out Of The Way.” Whenever I saw this, I was happy to step to the sidelines, ignore the game, and hang out in my own little mental workshop. Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here, not playing dodge ball. And I was always proud of this rejection. I could rebel by doing nothing. I was your modern day Thoreau.

But today—isn’t this what everyone is doing, with their tablets and their smart-phones? Today, isn’t it the crowd that’s tuning out the big game and plugging in to some kind of interior monologue?

Granted, they’re not alone. They’re texting, reading watching—communicating. But they’re taking themselves out of the local struggle and plugging into an echo-chamber of increasingly-fine-selected special interests. They’re skimming personal-tailored newsfeeds to reinforce their preconceptions and world views, just the way Dick Cheney insisted on having the TV in his hotel room pre-tuned to his precious Fox News. They are alone without being alone. They ignore the game and rebel, but they’re paying subscription fees to participate in the revolution.

I suppose this is what the free market is meant for. Every decision about where to spend our time and money is a sort of revolution, a rejection of what we’d supported before. A bigger market means more options, more chances for satisfaction. This keeps the money flowing, since a system with more options makes it more difficult for people to withdraw from the system entirely. The free market means you can disagree and still be welcome. So long as you spend money, you’re still one of us.

Even pirated music has to come across subscriber-supported lines. Even the pirate’s modem is plugged into electric utilities.

Even this fountain pen, with its gold nib—mined, no doubt, in some miserable hole by long-suffering hands—the use of such an object is a participation in a system, and represents my membership on the team of consumers. Come to think of it, I am on my last ink cartridge, and must soon head to the corporate store, or click Buy Now on the corporate website to acquire more. I’m not opting out. I’m paying in with everybody else.

But no. With this pen, there is some rebellion. It’s in the longevity. This pen has put down half a million words by now. It’s crossed out just as many. It was purchased once, as a token of love, and used hard for a decade and a half. I may have bought cartridge upon cartridge, but I’ve bought no other fountain pen in 15 years. And there’s a rebellion in this monogamy which just turns me on, somehow.

Simple Hand-Me-Down Mower for Hurricane Clean-Up

Sadly, I didn't think to get any "before" pictures of the back yard. But this pile from the neighbor's place gives you some idea of what we were dealing with, before we chopped out the larger trunks and stems.

So it's nice, now, to step outside and see this, instead.

Thanks, Chief!

Hey, this guy likes his Chief, too! He's got the 3.5 HP motor, but otherwise it looks like the same machine. I love that the mower has been in his family for "almost 30 years" and is considered an heirloom.

Standing Down Here, Dreaming of Up There

It's nice to know that our local grass airfield is still offering their biplane rides. It's a sign of summer around here when you see this little red fellow buzzing over the tree-tops.

Come to think of it, I haven't seen many private planes at all in the skies this summer. Every time I hear a buzzing and look up, it's this guy. No doubt the economy and high fuel prices are hitting recreational pilots as hard as everyone else.

I once had dreams of a private pilot's license and invested mumble mumble dollars in nearly forty hours of flight time, stopping just a lesson or two and an FAA exam away from the wings when business opportunities placed other demands on my capital. Those hours aloft were some of the best of my life, and I can flip through the logbook and remember every one of them. But it would be hard to come up with a less practical hobby than flying private aircraft. Even most professional pilots don't make enough to provide a decent standard of living.

It would have been a nice day to be aloft. Our own transportation was a little more prosaic.

But our fuel costs were also far more down to earth. And we had a better view of the boats in the canal.

Antique Typecast - "Rejected"

Another bit of ephemera from the family box of old documents.

 

I'm not as up on my historical presidential politics as I would like to be, but a quick googling of the Nine Old Men makes me think this document has been sitting around since the 1930s. Which makes the age of my previous typecast suddenly likely to be a bit greater.

It seems my ancestors were opposed to the New Deal. Again, I'm not sure if this was composed by some ancestor, or just copied out of a newspaper or magazine. I like that the level of political discourse is such that you couldn't fit it on a bumper sticker (or several) though.

Ephemera Find

All right, Typosphereans and ephemera lovers. Have I got a treat for you.

A humorous poem, hand-typed at some point in the first half of the last century, fresh from a storage box that has sat in an attic for longer than most of us have been alive.

The Wife and I have been learning a lot about my family history as we've been cleaning out some spaces. I suspect my grandmother might have typed this during her education at Lasell Junior College. I doubt she was the author. More likely she was just practicing a bit of copy, or she read it in a book or newspaper somewhere and found it humorous enough to reproduce and save. That woman saved everything. But she wouldn't let us look at anything until, well, until she couldn't stop us any more.

We've got lots and lots of other documents and pictures: civil war letters from the family that adopted my great grandmother, letters to great-uncle with special needs who died in a school fire as a teen, newspaper articles about old family businesses. The Civil War stuff deserves a blog all its own, though it would take a herculean effort to scan and transcribe all those old letters. (1860s handwriting is so pretty but so hard to read.)

Anyway, this brief bit with its bellyaching about progress seemed an extra-special fit for you typewriter lovers, so...there you go.

On The Uses of Quiet

Big Plane on Little Field

I took a scenic route home from work yesterday.  It brought me past the little grass airfield, the sort of place with no control tower, the sort of place where pilots radio in their approaches if they feel like it, and overfly before landing to get a peek at which way the windsock is pointing.  

There was a huge WWII era troop transporter parked by the offices.  It seemed surreal to see something of that scale parked in the grass.  It was a tail-dragger, chin up, with the US Army star painted on the tail and the wings.   A proud mama-plane looming over her children.  I thought, "gosh," and turned around to take a look.  When it comes to airplanes I'm a ten year old boy inside.  

Unfortunately my cellphone camera does not do it justice.  But you get the idea.

The folks out in front of the hangar office were tired of answering questions about her. One of them was kind of a dick about it. Full on sarcasm: "You're the first person to ask about that plane all day."

"I'm sure that's not true," I said.

"You'd think we were having an air-show. Someone else tell him about it. I can't go through it again."

An actual ten year old boy who was hanging out at the airfield obliged me.  Apparently it belongs to a wealthy enthusiast from South Carolina, and it's here for some maintenance. (Really, was that so hard?)

This airport offers glider and biplane rides.  I joked that it looked like they were expanding their operation.

The kid's father said, "No, we can't give rides on that. The operating costs would be too high."

"I bet it burns a ton of fuel," I said.  

"It burns 100 gallons an hour."

Oh, proud mama plane, so noble and strong. Why must you be so thirsty?

Questions for Corporate America (Typecast)

I sat down to my manual typewriter and some classical music to unwind after work and ended up writing about...work.  So it goes.

* For more on The Wife's beloved 1950's visit The Apron Revolution.

I'm not really happy with how blogger is handling my scanned pages.  But clicking on the pages will bring up full-sized, easier to read pages.

This typecasting is a lot harder than it looks.

Franzen on the Cover of Time?

It was nice to see a literary novelist on the cover of Time Magazine this week (and interesting to discover that Oprah Winfrey has some kind of grudge against him).

Jonathan Franzen's new book, Freedom, sounds pretty interesting, and in the Time article (in the actual magazine, not the chopped-up link salad they give you on the website) he speaks to his overarching theme: having freedom is about what we choose give up to live the lives we choose, rather than having the right to do whatever it is that strikes our fancy in any given moment.  Hurrah! to that, I say, and also to his other point: if we're going to define our country as a place that "loves freedom", in conflict with terrorists who "hate freedom", we should really devote some serious thought to just what freedom is.

And we haven't yet, because we're a nation of overindulged, spoiled-rotten eight-year-olds.  (That last sentence was all me, not Franzen.)

From a retro-tech perspective, I got a kick out of the photograph (again, only in the print magazine) of Franzen's workspace.  He rents an office space, which he keeps completely bare, and writes with an outdated laptop computer on a plain desk.  There is absolutely nothing on the desk except for this computer.  He's yanked the wireless card out of the computer to make it internet and distraction free.  Even without the wireless card, though, there was an open ethernet port to tempt him.  So to fix that, he took an old cable, put super-glue on the jack, popped it in, and then cut the cord off of it.  Hole plugged; distractions averted.

I admire that level of dedication.  Personally, I would have brought one of my typewriters to the office.  (But just one, so I wouldn't waste time deciding which to use on a given day.)  There really is no better single purpose machine for writing.  Then again, typewriters necessitate a supply of paper, ribbons, pencils, etc.  Then the accumulations of manuscript pages and handwritten notes have a way of cluttering up the workspace.  So the self-contained laptop feels a lot more tidy.

No matter that it took him eight years to do it; Franzen did manage to get to the end of a lengthy novel, so clearly he's found a level of technology that works for him.  It takes dedication and focus to write, or read, anything long-form these days, and I'm looking forward to reading this once it comes out -- regardless of what Oprah says (or doesn't say) about it.

Typecast on Trash

Found I just couldn't waste this paper, so I typed on it instead. It's all a first draft, appropriate for garbage, but as neat as I could make it. As usual, click on the page for a bigger image.

More Typists Among Us

Dump Find: Typewriter Table

The Wife picked me up a typewriter table (on wheels!) at the dump today.

I assiduously avoid the swap shop when we go there, at least on grumpy days like today, when a winter's worth of yard-garbage is waiting for us to clear it out.  I'm always afraid that I might end up loading up with as much junk as we're unloading, and what's the point of that? 

But I have to admit this is a pretty good find.  The finish is gleaming, the structure is surprisingly solid and non wobbly (I really thought those wheels would be rolling all over my crooked, 300 year old floor.) and it means I don't have to rearrange my desk when I want to set aside the keyboard and do some proper noisy typing.

She got a new mid-century office chair for herself, too, more comfortable than the one she's been using.  And she found a home for some tacky plastic newfangled mop products our tenants left behind.  (They're crap, but somebody might as well use them before they end up in the landfill.) 

Please don't attach too much significance to the books on the shelf.  A lot of those came from the dump as well.  (The pipes, however, were all hand-selected.)

As far as dumps go, we're blessed with a pretty special one.  

Three Old Bikes

A lovely off yesterday. Three of us headed down to the canal on three bicycles which cost us a total of $40. Mine was the most recent roadside find, an old Schwinn The Wife spotted in a front yard with a "free" sign scrawled on cardboard, and insisted on stopping to take. It's chain could have used some lubrication. It rattled away like a pocket full of unhappy keys. But it ran fine with no more work than pumping air in the tires. It's a single-speed, old school machine, which you pedal backwords to apply the brakes and hope you've got lots of room to stop, but it doesn't really matter much because you're not going to go too fast on it. And it's got a kick-stand - something high performance bikes omit in the name of efficiency, but which I suspect is just another scam to defraud the consumer.

Another perfect machine for the bike trail along the canal, in other words, and I can even keep my pipe lit as I'm rolling along. We headed all the way to the mouth of the canal to sit on the jetty and watch the ducks taking off and the currents swirling the surface of the glassy water. No ships came through on this particular Sunday Morning, and the sky was clear and mild, so the foghorn on the other side of the water played to an empty house.

It felt liberating to park our three bicycles at the end of the sandy trail without chaining them up, worrying about them. They got some curious looks, certainly, though I couldn't tell whether people thought they were roadside trash or vintage treasure. Still, if someone was inclined to steal them, no big deal. Easy come, easy go. (This is part of what I was trying to get at with yesterday's sarcastically voiced post. Our economy does toss off some pretty good treasures as garbage. There's much pleasure to be had if we tear our eyes away from the advertisements and help ourselves to richer folks' hand-me-downs.)

Certainly the mild weather played a part, but there's nothing that makes one feel more expansive and generous than smoking a bowl of tobacco on the seat of a free bicycle.

A question for the typosphere and other retrotech enthusiasts:

How can the same company which made this sexy little race-car of a machine

 

go ahead and produce a clunky camel like this?

I've got one of the first, though it's in the more common blue that Cormac McCarthy used until recently.  When a local seller went on eBay to sell one of the latter, still in box, for $100, and then re-listed it for $50 when there were no bidders, I was sorely tempted to drive by his operation and pay some cash for it.  Manual typewriters are not typically a thing you have the opportunity to buy new in box.  And there's nothing like a nice solid desktop machine for smooth typing.

But the more I looked at the picture, the more I knew it could never be.  There's no harmony between the keys and the body, and the keys themselves look like ungrateful, chunky lozenges.  I knew that, once the thrill of unpacking it was over, I'd be stuck with a just another boat anchor to store in the shed.

Besides, I have too many of the damn things already. 

Typewritten Past

"But the blots, Turkey," intimated I.

"True, --but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs!  I am getting old.  Surely, sir a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs.  Old age--even if it blot the page--is honourable.  With submission, sir, we both are getting old."

---Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener"

What was it like, before the internet?  I can barely remember it.  But I was there.

When did I get old enough to say, "I was there"?

I've had this love for typewriters since back before typing was required, back when "keyboarding" class was for kids who needed to find their way around an Apple IIE and "Typing 1 through 4" were for women who wanted to sit in lobbies and wear skirts and take cigarette breaks where they tried to seduce their bosses.  This was when I taught myself to type. 

Because I played piano pretty well, and because I had intentions of writing several novels, I figured I could teach myself and avoid associations with geeks and secretaries.  I took an old 1970s typing textbook and my Olympia desktop beheamoth and worked my way through February vacation.  Not once did I talk to Mavis Beacon.  But I got the basics down, and now if you put me in front of a well-serviced IBM Selectric I'll lay down 120 words a minute.  (I'll do the same in front of a computer, but with less satisfying noise.)

* * *

My grandmother only had three stories.  The first was about taking her Mercedes around the racetrack in Daytona, and I don't think it really happened.  The second was about taking the controls of a Cessna airplane after her second husband blacked out.  This was true.  He suffers from vertigo and extremely bad manners.  However you would assume from her telling that she actually landed the plane.  If you dug for details you'd learn that she just descended a bit and kept it straight and level until he woke back up.

Her last story was about her typing teacher and her fingernails.

My grandmother was once as pretty and rich as she was shallow.  She still looked elegant when she was older, but she'd lost her youthful looks and most of her money by the time I could know her.  And part of those looks were some long and well-tended fingernails.

At the women's junior college, her typing teacher disapproved of long fingernails.  She would threaten my grandmother: if she got anything less than a perfect score on her mid-term typing exam, she would force her to cut her fingernails off.

Can you guess the conclusion of the story?  It was the same every time.  "I got that perfect score, and my teacher couldn't have my nails."  She was still a young woman when my grandfather died, and those nails may have helped her to attract that second husband, the one with the vertigo and the bad manners.  And despite his faults she stuck with him until he killed her in a car crash that he walked away from.

So it goes.

* * *

About the typing, though: I always thought it was neat that my grandmother grew up in a world where one could take so much pride in doing such a common thing so well.

But then, it wasn't quite as common, at the time.  Secretaries typed official documents, authors typed creative documents (when they didn't use secretaries) and the rest of the folks pecked along as well as they could when they had to.  Or they didn't bother.  It was only when I could put my grandmother's childhood in perspective that I realised what a trade typing must have been.

The keyboard-entered word is so common now that it seems cheap and tawdry compared to the words of past decades.  Short, abbreviated text has become the norm.  No more than 75 characters, please!  And you can only display them in a few uniform fonts (not "typefaces, which sound lively and engaging; but "fonts," which sound more like curses, something you want to leave behind and be rid of) on tiny screens.  Our universe is more granular now, now that we have made the move from atoms to bits.  There's no room for quirks, dust, smudges, or smells on the LCD display of a smart-phone.  There's no occasion for an attorney to bark at his scriveners, "The blots, Turkey!"  nor to forgive a professional for having too much beer with lunch.  One curses, instead, about the cost of a toner cartridge, fully aware that the manufacturer has no chance of hearing, and wouldn't listen if he could.

Before the internet a thought would have to rest on the page for a time before postmen carried it to a publisher and it became available to the world.  It wasn't indexed electronically, and no one could use a trademarked term as a verb to search for it.  There were proper channels for those who wanted to publish, and most of them would turn your fingers black.

This wasn't a better state of affairs, some pre-electronic Eden we should set out to reclaim.  But the old ways did lead one to put a certain care and deliberation behind one's communications, which came across to the reader as respect and good manners.

When a typo on the final draft meant reproducing an entire page letter by letter, accuracy and care became well-ingrained habits.

Once my facility with the typewriter surpassed that of the pen, it was a great discovery that a sheet of carbon paper would allow me to both mail a letter and keep it too.  To make a copy with no extra effort--Melville's scriveners would have swooned at such facility!  (Or would they have despaired at pending unemployment.)  Parsimony with my own words had led me to to feel I should hoard them--banking, perhaps, against some future blight of original thought, when for inspiration I might want to page through and rediscover the methods I once used to woo a high school sweetheart.

"You be careful with those notes you're always passing back and forth," the mother of one such sweetheart advised me.  "You should realise that once you become famous and successful, all your juvenilia will be published and scrutinised in academic journals."

Flattering as it was to assume anyone would care, I came to find this an unhealthy attitude.  One cannot live a satisfying life while feeling unduly concerned about the opinions of their biographer.  Kids really should be passing long, impassioned, perhaps even erotic (so long as they are literate) missives to each other when they pass in the hallways.  The possibilities for anticipation and savour are so far beyond what's possible with instant messages and "texts", that to compare the handwritten note to the text message would be like comparing lovemaking with pornography.

But one should not expect the handwritten note to last.  Perhaps my originals are out there still in the attic shoeboxes of old friends and sweethearts.  But the binder where I obsessively kept my carbons has long been mislaid in one move or another, and this is probably the first time that I have thought of it since high school.

Meanwhile the missive that you've sent from your phone to another's, or posted to Myspace or Facebook, has multiplied and copied and propagated across servers to live forever, annotating and incriminating.  Or maybe it will degrade and disappear through bit-rot.  No one will be sure until some lawyer or secret policeman has occasion to search for it.

And we wrote letters every day
Which were later thrown away
And God knows what we wrote, or what they said
But this is probably how they read

* musical interlude *

I left the letters behind
In the basement of the apartment building when we moved
For the mice to nibble on.
I wonder how long they lasted.

-- The Fiery Furnaces, "We Wrote Letters Every Day"

Rough draft: