As a Typewriter

In one of those fortuitous encounters, last night I was reading one of Carl Claudy's 1930s wonder tales written for a juvenile audience, and came across a line that leapt out at me. I had written earlier in the day, for this blog, about typewriting. The narrator is speaking about Martians -- these particular ones are brains-inside-machines affairs -- and describing them in this way: "They were responsive to any suggestion, just as a calculating engine is to any hand which presses its keys, as inexorable in their thinking as a locomotive is in progress, as emotionless as a typewriter."

I look at any one of my various typewriters nearby, and think they have such character. An emotionless character? I suppose so -- and suppose that the same could be said of all the old things that adorn and clutter our existence.

At the time Claudy was writing, the typewriter was still a relatively young bit of technology -- some decades old as a somewhat commonplace piece of mechanical equipment. (And with important roots here in Wisconsin.)

Yet that phrase "as emotionless as a typewriter" has a magic ring to it (as in the ring at the carriage-return) -- and so I believe I will attempt to be as emotionless as a typewriter in something or other that I do today.

Cheers ...

Automated Writers

Although Cyril Kornbluth lived only to age 34, the amount of material I had to review, absorb and fit into the life-and-career story that became C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary was fairly sizable. The book itself became sizable, too -- some 240,000 words, as I recall. I ended up doing much of the writing directly to electronic file. I regret this, since a few repetitions and other problems resulted that I might have avoided, had I fleshed it out on paper, first, at a more leisurely pace.

Although I type with some rapidity, I find that the slower nature of the manual typewriter, as against the faster electronic keyboard, results in cleaner, more interesting writing. The eye and mind are not hypnotized by the radiant screen. The light of day, usually, illuminates the page.

Handwriting sometimes goes more slowly but sometimes as quickly as typewriting; yet in the long run it may lead to the shortest writing times. Handwriting seems to lead the mind to produce its most thought-out, most interesting, most well-wrought sentences -- so that the time spent in rewriting is all the less.

For deadline writing, word-processing -- a term of significant homeliness, quite in keeping with our Age of the Masses -- has its advantages.

Yet as with other automations, it offers increased production of diminished-quality results.

I suspect our age, so prone to look down upon the productions of earlier ages, has produced record quantities of writing not worth reading.

Cheers ...