A Week in Paradise, and I Whined about Wi-Fi
For a glimpse into all the things that went beautifully, sparklingly right on this trip, click here. There's no whining there, I promise.
Alabama Girls Do All Right
Occasionally, I get a little Ebay-happy and bid on a typewriter I'm completely unsure of. The machine usually has a bad picture or a lackluster description. Sometimes I email the seller and get back either useless information or no email at all. This has happened to me three times and every single time I've lucked into a prize.
This one is prize number three. I'm always a fraidy-cat when it comes to opening The Box on the Porch when a new typewriter arrives. It's the moment of truth, especially when the machine inside is a gamble. I paid almost nothing for this Royal Futura 800 - even less than the low shipping cost. Sometimes, though, you've got to put it in perspective: I've spent more on a dinner out at a mediocre restaurant. I've bought earrings more expensive than this. Just cruising past the Estee Lauder counter sets me back twice the cost of the shipping alone.
In the end, it was sent to the wrong address, poorly packed, and the case...well. I spent the better part of an hour just trying to get the rusted latch to open, when it might have been easier just to start ripping the leather away by hand.
But look what was inside. Aside from Tallulah's obvious beauty, all I had to do was put in a fresh ribbon and start typing. Just like that. I took her to my office the very next day and kept her on my desk as an everyday typer. The color is interesting - something between blush and band-aid, but it has an angelic, effortless touch. Ed at Acme Business Machines said that of all the typewriters I've ever brought him, this was his favorite. She's such a coquette. Just look at her up there, posing in the gardenias.
She's also a sassy Alabama girl with (literally) untapped ambition. Possibly a graduation gift to a young girl who'd rather marry her high school sweetheart than go to college, and so the gift languished, unused, and stored carefully away. Then uncarefully away as the kids and her life began to fill out. It's possible this typewriter represented a regrettable decision and finally went to live with the shed spiders. Who knows.
So I named her Tallulah Bankhead, because sometimes good Alabama girls didn't marry the sweetheart, sometimes they left home and became famous bad girls.
The Bottom Line
This little ditty from Modern Mechanix is confusing. I'm trying to remember EVER seeing a mirror taped to anyone's desk and I get nothing.
I'm not making light of the real issue, however, which is quite serious. How DO you keep from running out of paper? How did we write all of those foot-noted papers in college without running out of room every single time?
I don't remember. That was too long ago and I paid my roommate to type up my papers at $2 a page anyway. I was young. Typing papers was about layout perfection and margins and no white-out. Even though I bask in the glory of strikethroughs and fictional hyphenation strategies now, I remember when the whole world was ready to pound and pronounce upon the smallest mistake. Especially marginal mistakes. I didn't type much back then.
I had an old boyfriend who, for a semester or two, channelled or copied or posed as Jack Kerouac. Or Sal Paradise. Or both. This was a common malady among my English major/poet boyfriends back then, but this one in particular liked to tape all of his pages together, one after the other, a la Kerouac, until he had a mountainous pile of over-inflated ego drivel. That's how he solved The Problem of the Bottom Margin - no margins at all.
Later, Bob earned a Phd in Medieval Lit, then changed his name and became a rodeo announcer. Just thought I'd throw that in.
I handle the paper problem by cheating a bit with this fabulous lined and numbered legal paper. I just roll it in behind a sheet of perfect 9 lb. onionskin, peer through it, and voila - stop typing when the number "32" rolls up. Easy.
What's your trick?
Typing vs. Typesetting
I ran across this little ditty in my travels and it's given me pause.
For the better part of the twentieth century, the distinctive forms of typewriter type (notably its single-character width and unstressed stroke) characterized the immediacy of thought: getting the idea down without dressing it up. Now that computers have replaced typewriters, most word processing programs default to Helvetica or Times Roman (or their derivatives) as the typographic expression of simple typing. [...] As a typographer, you should recognise the difference between typing and typesetting. Time and usage may ultimately make Inkjet Sans the expected typeface for letters. For now, however, on paper, typewriter type is still the best expression of the intimate, informal voice — direct address. Imitating the formalities of typesetting in a letter is always inappropriate because it suggests an undeserved permanence — the end of a discussion, not its continuation. (John Kane, A Type Primer, p85)
I raised rent money during college by selling advertising for a local newspaper. At the time, that meant laying out the ads as well, and we did that on light tables with Exacto-knives and streamers of print from the typesetting machine. I wasn't allowed to handle the typesetting machine, of course, because there was a Typesetter whose job it was to set type. A person who, by the way, made four times the money I did. It was a highly skilled position.
I'm beginning to believe the computer has turned us all into typesetters. As a matter of fact, I'm typesetting right now in various ways to make this little blog post presentable. I'm also editing and creating layout without sharp instruments or a light table, but it's cut and paste and move and re-adjust all the same.
Well. I've called the act of throwing together this blog "writing," but now I'm not so sure. And I'm feeling more than a little guilty that a whole skilled trade vanished while I was looking the other way - at a computer screen, no doubt.
Andy Rooney "Throwing rocks" at Windows
This is vintage Rooney. I love it.
