Cormac McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32
classictypewriter.com
classictypewriter.com
I had previously only associated McCarthy with The Road and Blood Meridian, but I'm glad I gave some of his other work a shot.
I've only read The Road and Blood Meridian, though. Does Suttree follow the same pattern?
[edit] Thank you for the answers!
There is less violence and more drinking than his other novels.
It doesn’t really investigate morality in the ways most of his novels do.
It is the last of his early novels set in Appalachia.
McCarthy's sense for capturing dialects is fascinatingly good, really. I remember somebody saying that to a significant part, the phenomenon of Quentin Tarantino's movies lays in his ability to very deeply understand how people actually speak. I'm not from the US, but I would like to say the same about Cormac McCarthy.
[0] Which was later demonstrated to be due to a lack of inspiration from my math teachers, a fact that Mrs. King taught me so well in her pre-algebra class in 9th grade. From then on, I got straight As in math. To this day, nearly forty years later, I still credit Mrs. King for helping me get down the path to whatever success I have had in life.
A really embarrassing error, entirely due to poor command of English language. Once again, I apologize. I wish you all the best, mate.
I confess that when I was much younger, I used that same word in the same way. It was only after my coming to understand how my usage of that word had hurt other people that I came to where I am today.
So, yours is a pain that I know well, and I trust that we are both better for this exchange.
Thanks!
We live in the time of the blessing and the curse of choice.
I learned to type on a typewriter. I sadly don’t remember the brand or model as I was a kid, but in my house, we used it /kind of/ as one would use a printer now. We did not type stuff from scratch there. Too expensive (IIRC paper was more of a problem than the ink ribbon, but again, I was a kid). We wrote on paper, by hand, and typed things up when they were ready in their final form.
I love love /loved/ that typewriter and would love to have it now to use it every now and then (not sure to write what though, I’m not a writer), but I feel there’s a bit of cargo-cult writing now involving them. As you say, writers used the tool they had at hand. It was no life hack to use a typewriter, it was just better to share text than handwriting for most people.
People dismiss these things as hipsterism but there is definitely something to be said for using them. There was an interview with Neil Gaiman where he talks about being an editor and noticing that after computers became widespread that the average length of stories being submitted increased dramatically with no increase in quality, or worse, a decrease in quality. He subsequently took personal efforts to avoid falling into the same trap. I believe he now writes all his first drafts using fountain pens and paper. Something about the slower nature of typewriters and handwriting forces you to slow down and think more which I believe is particularly useful when you’re writing fiction.
I agree about the typewriter but there's a lot to be said for actual writing too.
I relearned the motions of how to handwrite using Briem's handwriting repair curriculum: https://sites.google.com/view/briem/free-books/handwriting-r... Now I really enjoy writing by hand. Of course if I'm writing quickly the quality isn't as nice as when I can take more time.
There is a section on the site specifically about hand tension here: https://sites.google.com/view/briem/handwriting/writing-cram...
If you do decide to try one, start with an inexpensive steel-nibbed model like a Pilot Metropolitan. Transitioning from pencils and ball pens involves some unlearning, as you adjust your hand posture and develop a feel for how little force is required. It takes a while, and depending on how hard a hand you have to start, a gold nib may not hold up.
We missed a trick when we stopped teaching kids to write with fountain pens, but the lack is easily remedied in later life with a bit of interest and diligence. Fair warning, though: you may find them so comfortable to use for long periods that you develop a writer's bump like mine!
+1 also on Gaiman's thoughts. I have done a lot of writing (professional level journalism, closet-level fiction). I almost always write a better first draft longhand -- probably because writing by hand is so much slower, you'll end up with a much more concise sentence.
From another perspective, I recently finished "The Kindly Ones" by Jonathan Littell. 900+ pages of Kafka-style wall of text -- but I often just couldn't put the book down. So stream of consciousness still seems to work from a reader's perspective, too; maybe computers do give some "oomph" to a writer who prefers this style, the kind of feverish way of writing. That said, "The Kindly Ones" is definitely a unique, remarkable, even incredible book; part of its power surely lays in the fact that Littell reportedly did some 10 years of research prior to writing it.
There have also been prolific and influential writers in the past who composed their drafts in pen shorthand. Iirc, in Europe, Astrid Lindgren was one (and I believe she was actually trained as a touch typist).
For some reason, this makes me think of pipe organs.
If there's a ten point portability scale, maybe a pipe organ could be 1, a piano might be 2. A pencil could be 10. A sausage dog might be an 8 or 9. Some of these would be more practical writing instruments than others. I'm not familiar with Underwood typewriters, but my arms are feeling tired merely after looking at some photos online. It might be around a 3 or a 4 on our portability scale.
In any case, these little machines are brilliant and I’ve owned around 4 of them over the years.
[0] https://ireland.apollo.olxcdn.com/v1/files/h5jm4s38hndf3-PL/...
And how fast can you type on it? You might need to hurry on doomsday but this looks more suited to poetry than urgent communiqués in the AI Wars.
I'm old enough to appreciate a device that does one thing and does it really well, has almost no dependencies (just paper and ribbons, and if it's a cloth ribbon, you can re-ink it even more cheaply), doesn't need electricity, built like a tank, and can be remarkably portable, and is the epitome of a distraction-free writing environment. Even the most ruggedized laptop probably can't take a bullet and keep on working.