Fancy Work on the Typewriter

Maria Popova on a new anthology of typewriter art.

Closing tabs

The cold I have is making me feel distinctly glum. Exercise deprivation not helping. Came home after morning work and midday meetings and went back to bed for about three hours in the afternoon; am hoping a long night of sleep tonight may make me feel a bit better in the morning, though I think it will be Saturday before I can exercise. (Chelsea Piers is finally reopening on Saturday post-Sandy, and I am much looking forward to attending Joanna's 10am spin class, which I have sorely missed!)

Minor light reading: Jussi Adler-Olsen, The Absent One (don't think I'll continue with this series, too preposterous); Michael Connelly, The Black Box (suitable reading for illness, but fairly slight).

Closing tabs:

Chinese typewriters anticipated predictive text functions (via Wen Jin).

Further clarification on the OED's supposedly missing loan words.

Human skulls carved from books! (Via Nico.)

Every child needs a typewriter

Paul Collins on the life and death [ED. "disappearance" will be the better word!] of child novelist Barbara Newhall Follett. (Courtesy of Ed Park.)

Would be geniuses

From Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (required reading, in my opinion, for stylists aspirational and otherwise):

Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.

Also: antique typewriters! (Courtesy of my father.)

Chronicles of the IBM Selectric

Joanna Smith Rakoff used to have a job answering J.D. Salinger's unwanted fan mail...

Wednesday miscellany

The second paragraph of this piece was so extraordinarily vicious that I read to the end with a kind of enthralled fascination! I have no reason to disagree with its verdict, and I too am rendered extraordinarily irritable by slack writing, but it has also always seemed to me that it is bad for the soul to write a review of this ilk very often...

At Tor.com, Fabio Fernandes on translating A Clockwork Orange into Brazilian Portuguese.

A countdown of the hundred best fantasy and science-fiction novels?

The syllabus for Matthew Kirschenbaum's graduate seminar on simulations.

Last but not least: Charlie Williams prefers typecasting to podcasting.

This week's mostly all about catching up on miscellaneous medical appointments (nothing major), rehearsing for Tino's Guggenheim piece and trying to sort out a good exercise routine - not doing so well on the last front, but it is a work in progress. The other major activity is a massive reading binge - at the humane society charity shop in Cayman, one of the volumes I picked up was Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo Rising. I liked Dunnett's mystery novels very much when I was a teenager, but her historical ones never held much appeal for me, despite my dear friend E.B.T.'s enthusiastic advocacy of them during our grad school years. But long is good when it comes to charity-shop light reading, and though I wouldn't say it's my perfect light reading (also it suffers from the unfortunate juxtaposition with Hilary Mantel's really brilliant Wolf Hall!), I certainly enjoyed the first installment enough to go and check out volumes two through seven from the Barnard Library yesterday.

(Where, by the way, I ran into a colleague of mine who is also doing Tino's piece - and as we discussed it, the young lady behind the library checkout counter exclaimed, "Are you doing Tino's piece? So am I!" It is a cast of thousands!)

There is something truly lovely and addictive about reading through a huge series in a relatively small amount of time. I read Lian Hearn's trilogy like that; Susan Howatch is perhaps my most recent long immersive series-reading experience, at least the one that comes most strongly to mind; but I was reminded as I plucked Dunnetts from the shelf of how I held out for a long time against the Aubrey-Maturin novels and then read the first one and basically couldn't really do anything else until I had read all of them - every day I went to Cross-Campus Library at Yale and checked out another armful or four or five of them and took them home and read them all, four or five days later I was done and wished I had eked them out for longer, but it was well worth it!

(On which note, I will conclude by adding that Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to A Suitable Boy, another long book I read in fits of transport...)

Vile jelly

At the Sunday Times, Erica Wagner on the means of production:

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote for more than four decades on an Underwood portable. For him, his machine was a kind of first editor. “If this typewriter doesn’t like a story, it refuses to work,” he said. “I don’t get a man to correct it since I know if I get a good idea the machine will make peace with me again. I don’t believe my own words saying this, but I’ve had the experience so many times that I’m really astonished. But the typewriter is 42 years old. It should have some literary experience, it should have a mind of its own.”

Wodehousiana

at the Guardian: "He wrote his first story aged five. When describing what he might have been doing before he was five, he wrote 'Oh, just loafing, I suppose'."

The road of excess

Diana Athill's father simply could not face brown envelopes.

Also: a slightly facile but still thought-provoking piece by Adam Phillips on excess and balance (one day I will write an essay on William Blake, who is surely the prime expert on this question).

A drawer of umlauts

A nice obituary at the Economist for a man who loved typewriters (link courtesy of Our Girl in Chicago):

Each typewriter was, to him, an individual. Its soul, he reminded Mr Frazier, did not come through a cable in the wall, but lay within. It also had distinguishing marks—that dimple on the platen, that sluggishness in the typebars, that particular wear on the “G”, or the “t”—that would be left, like a fingerprint, on paper. Much of Mr Tytell’s work over the years was to examine typewritten documents for the FBI and the police. Once shown a letter, he could find the culprit machine.

It was therefore ironic that his most famous achievement was to build a typewriter at the request of the defence lawyers for Alger Hiss, who was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union. His lawyers wanted to prove that typewriters could be made exactly alike, in order to frame someone. Mr Tytell spent two years on the job, replicating, down to the merest spot and flaw, the Hiss Woodstock N230099. In effect, he made a perfect clone of it. But it was no help to Hiss’s appeal; for Mr Tytell still could not account for his typewriter’s politics, or its dreams.

Also, a post with pictures at my neglected Explosionist blog (nothing to do with typewriters, except that there is an important typewriter scene in the novel - I love the word "platen"!)...