Setting up my new blogging engine

Work in progress

Here is today’s newsletter as it is intended to be read. If, for whatever reason, you’d prefer to read this as actual text rather than embedded images, there is a mostly faithful transcript with slightly fewer typos and more footnotes below.

So I have a typewriter now I'm a typewriter person. I'm very sorry.

I have been experimenting with having longish breaks from electronic devices recently and it has generally been great, but one of the big problems with it is that I can't write. I can journal, because journalling is handwritten, but there is a fundamentally different character of thought to the typed and handwritten word. It is not literally impossible for me to write an essay by hand but it is hard enough that I will basically never bother.

A little while back it occurred to me that the obvious solution to this problem would be to own a typewriter. I briefly considered it and looked on ebay for one but wasn't very inspired by anything I saw. I expected it would just be a large sum of money for a badly maintained object that didn't actually work. So I set the idea aside and didn't think about it much further. Fortunately though I did mention the thought to Lisa.

Earlier today they [Dave and Lisa] were out for a walk and popped into one of the better local charity shops. While there they spotted a lovely vintage typewriter. Dave commented on it and Lisa mentioned that she thought I wanted one. Some WhatsApp messages later, I owned a typewriter.

It ' s great. I love it. It also doesn't exactly satisfy my intended use case because it's actually a totally different experience again from either handwriting or writing on the computer. Something that (in retrospect unsurprisingly) is halfway between the two.

For example I can'r go back and edit text. I said above that Dave and Lisa had bought this for me today but that isn't actually true. It was yesterday. I'm writing this the next day because we had to buy new ribbon for it. WE GOT IT ON oops shift lock. We got it on Amazon next day delivery. We also looked up the manual online and watched YouTube videos of how to operate it. The whole experience has been a really interesting blend of the old and the new.

Another way this is more like handwriting is just how intensely physical experience using it is. The force with which I hit the key is the force with which the hammer hits the page. If I don’t press the key hard enough then the letter doesn’t show up properly. I have to press back spacer and try again. The result is much slower and, frankly, physically exhausting. It has taken me maybe half an hour to type the above… what? 300 words? [Actually 421]. I normally type at 60-100 words per minute. That 1 is a lower case L by the way. This is such a ridiculous experience and it’s genuinely great.¹

Another aspect of the experience is just how incredibly mechanical an object this is. You can see how all of the bits fit together. They don’t, as it turns out, make ribbons for this typewriter any more, what with it being from some time in the 30s or earlier. I thought the ribbon I bought would be compatible, and it was, but it came on spools that were not. So we cut it out of its spools and rewound it onto the old spools. We then had to manually rethread the new ribbon onto the ypewriter (of course. What other way to do it could there be?) and then spend some time figuring out how we’d fitted it wrong. It was very satisfying.

I’ve just had to start a new page I can’t see what I’ve previously written. It reminds me of a complaint that my grandmother had back in the… late 80s? Early 90s? We had bought her an electric typewriter, or rather an early word processor, and she complained that what she had written kept disappearing. It had scrolled off the top of the tiny screen. This is both like and unlike my current experience. The words are gone but I know they are still there, because fundamentally this is not a word processor. It is a machine for putting ink on a piece of paper.

It is an intensely Real² object, in a way few things that I own are. I have no idea why there is that large gap there!³ I probably just literally didn’t physically push the carriage return far enough. The real is very inconvenient sometimes. I understand why Albert Borgmann prefers Things to Devices but I think it is clear to me at this point just how much better a computer is at producing text. Maybe that is the commoditisation of text, but such are the tradeoffs we make.

But also… I have been absorbed solidly in writing for an hour. That doesn’t happen in front of the computer, which is fundamentally designed to distract.⁴

When we were setting up this typewriter, Dave mentioned that it made him appreciate the steampunk aesthetic more. I get it. But at the same time, I think this is different, because so much of the appeal is tied up in the experience of how genuinely inconvenient an object this is. It is the actual hard mechanical details that are required to make it work.

I started to explain C Thi Nguyen’s notion of generic porn to him at that point, but we got distracted by the mechanical details of typewriter ribbon placement, so I’ll explain it to you now. Generic Porn is “Representations of a thing consumed for enjoyment, without the usual costs and consequences of that thing”.⁵ Whatever this is, steampunk is porn of it.

Not that I’m claiming moral superiority you understand. I may be doing the real thing, but I’m just a tourist. I expect to visit regularly, and will get a lot out of it, but at this point my back is aching and my hands are tired, and I think I shall return to my real keyboard now.

1. The OCR completely failed on this paragraph and I had to manually transcribe it and boy did the difference in the experience of writing it the first and second time highlight the point I was making in it.

2. In the sense of Aesthetics, identity, and Real objects

3. This exclamation point is written by pressing period, back spacer, shift-8. Typewriters are ridiculous.

4. I must have tabbed away 5 or 6 times in the course of transcribing this so far.

5. C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams’s notion of generic porn is, more properly:

a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content.