My new Typewriter
Posted on | October 19, 2008 |
I have been trying to sit down and do this all morning. It is now 12:10 p.m.. We had to start laundry. I picked up the living room. Cuddles. A shower. Bathroom breaks. Eating a pear. Rosey lost her iPod. We found it twenty minutes later. Tried to hook up a new mouse.
Finally. We tap away at our keyboards. I enjoy listening to the tap-tap-tic of the keyboard. If you listen Rosey hits the keys much harder and much faster than I do. I am slower and delete less. She hits them with a fury and then pounds on the delete key before returning to rewrite the sentence again.
I am getting a new typewriter soon. I write in courier font because it makes me feel like a writer. But, soon I will have a typewriter that will have a set font (I hope it is courier) that I can type on and establish my own rhythm. Many writers talk about the sound of their tying guiding their writing. It is quiet in here today. Neither of us turned on any music, and we do not own a television.
Rosey’s mom found the typewriter for me. I asked her to keep her eye out for one. She is great at finding odd things like this so when I saw an old black typewriter in a storefront down Fillmore I decided to look for one. I did not need to actively search, but I recruited Paullie as an extra pair of eyes.
She called Rosey this week with the good news. Paullie’s long-time friend is moving out of her house and getting rid of many of her things. I am told that Janette worked to save the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis and many of the cobblestone streets in the city. I am getting a Royal Aristocrat with a history. The weight of the typewriter’s past will inspire me to do good things with the old machine.
What I look forward to other than the sound of the typewriter is the austerity of the machine. I will have no quick access to the internet to distract me. I will not be able to edit photos or check my email. It will just be me and the blank page.
I will also not have the convenience of the spellchecker. It just irritates me more often. Right now, it has all of the names underlined in red. It just marks up my page. At KPFA I like that I write stories in the Wire notepad and it does not spellcheck for me. I print out my story and have to edit it. I turn it in to Mark and it will be read on the air, so the physical act of editing as opposed to clicking through the spellcheck makes me rethink the sentences, learn the words and read carefully.
The machine will also slow me down. I will move slower on it. But, with the demand of thinking on paper and exercising, I hope my writing will improve.
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November 7th, 2008 @ 11:01 am
Trust me, you will hate working on a typewriter.