luddites ship (to paraphrase steve jobs)
Thursday 16 October 2008 | someone left a cookie
The End took ten years to write…. The writing process resembled the probably wasteful method of building a stone bridge in which a wooden bridge is first erected, the stone is fitted overtop of it, and then the wood is dismantled and burned.
The book was composed longhand, then typed on an Underwood manual typewriter, then revised and retyped repeatedly, one chapter at a time, until fatigue and disillusionment set in. Longhand lent itself to recklessness, an openness to mess and surprise. Once on the typewriter, the writing was more deliberate and settled. The persistent thwacking of the machine under the direct physical power of one’s fingers, the feel of the keys striking the paper and the platen are so emphatic that they seem to lend their distinctive spirit to the writing itself. Meanwhile the manually typed page, ragged with x-ing out, unequal spaces, the faint stem of the “q,” reminds the eye that this is not yet a final draft; the text is still growing.
Once on the computer, the final stage for me, the language begins to die. The computer immediately yields a sleek, glib surface, whether the composition is a brainstorm or the distillation of years. A word on a laser-printed page is like a silver dollar under shellac on a bar. I have trouble judging whether it’s real or fake because the attractive surface is so impenetrable. The computer saves needless retyping in the last drafts, but I distrust its phony perfectionism, and the million distractions it offers, and its capricious habit of swallowing files; so I don’t own one. The final versions…were typed into a loaner.
(National Book Award finalist Salvatore Scibona)
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I still find it incredibly difficult to “write” on the computer. I imagine that the magic shortcut from spirit or unconsious to hand that bypasses the brain altogether (although that description should serve as dire warning to me) is lost somehow when typing. I stumble and struggle even more on the keyboard, and I can’t use my carefully crafted system of arrows and stars and underlines. :/