Content 21+ (published as is, blog owner may have different opinion from the author) One of my teenage Russian Skype students, a very bright young fellow named Maxim, is more or less obsessed with cars. Often at the weekends he visits the Moscow dealerships just to check them out. But his interest does not go the usual route of jargon-signifying chatter about what’s under the hood and snorting demands of “Does it have four-wheel drive?” Nor — at least I don’t think — is he at the point yet where a car becomes a phallic symbol.
He is a historian and, believe it or not, a connoisseur. He knows every model and where it started. Together we have watched documentaries tracing the history of Le Mans, for example, and all the technology behind the development of these rocketing machines, the dreamers who conceived of and built them, and the intrepid drivers who gunned them through the swerves and bends, many of whom were ‘killed in action.’
Maxim also knows a tremendous amount about the history of American music. Because of him — he is only about 15, maybe 16 (I’ll have to ask) — I now know more about this industry in my own (former) country than I did before. That means the blues, jazz, country, rock & roll, and vintage pop. The kid is a walking, talking encyclopedia. If you want to learn about Miles Davis or Buddy Holly, just ask Maxim. He’ll tell you. Before Max showed me, I never knew there were so many great documentaries about this fertile (and original) aspect of American history.
Lately, Max has become interested in — of all things — the typewriter. He even went out and bought one. An older model manual one, I mean. (What would have been the point of getting an electric version? The idea was to go as far back in time as possible.) Now he is fooling around with it, getting acquainted with its feel, heft, durability, and cave man subtlety. In our last ‘lesson’, starting with Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press , we traced together the history and development of these now ‘obsolete’ machines, checking out photos of typewriters going way back to their first usage in 1874. They started to become popular in offices in the 1880s, and as recently as the 1970s were still both operative and entirely necessary.
Remington. Underwood. Yes, I remember those names, the way I remember the Gipper and Ruth. Also before my time, but part of the culture. Like RCA Victor victrolas and those old radios that were as big as suitcases from which the whole world came out — not just DJs and orgiastic blabbers of gassy jabber like today.
Talk about ‘memory lane’. I had never realized that I could trace my life according to my experiences with typewriters. Nor that these particular machines could suddenly come to life again for me in terms of trying to articulate both the good and bad sides of the past and its old ways, its formulas now mostly set aside for attics and dim drawers. Of course telephone booths, drive-in movies, jukeboxes, pinball machines, and the clothes lines that used to fill the backyards of America, sheets flapping like a chain-mail of doves and drying underwear that revealed the size of every ass in the house — all gone.
Life was more tactile back then.
Let me put it this way. I deal a lot with young Russian IT people, and I am pretty sure that young IT people are about the same the world over. They are into the ‘new’ realities, which is something of an oxymoron when you consider that the cyberspace regions they inhabit are not real. But then again they are to the warriors that wander there, the inhabitants who are more at home there than anywhere else. They will tell you it’s better there, like someone who has left rainy England to go live in sunny Australia.
If you do the latter — move to Australia, it is possible, even likely, that the time will come when you miss the old drizzle along the bleak, stony English lanes, sodden green rolling away on either side if not hemmed in by hedges as stiff and rigid as an English aristocrat’s portrait, which in turn bring back memories of some old love you used to meet in one of the pubs along those lanes. For, as the poet states, “Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.”
But if you grow up in Australia, you will not miss English rain. How can you, if you never knew it? Maybe it’s possible, but only for those blessed with a certain intensity of imagination. In that case, one can grow nostalgic in the deepest sense…for what never existed. A paradox, but true. I myself have always been in love the most with invisible women whose voices fill the choruses of the light night radio.
My IT students do not believe that it could ever be possible to rush out into the yard during a sudden shower and bring the still half-dry clothes in from the rain. It was the world of their grandparents. They see no point in putting on layers of clothing during the Russian winter to go grocery shopping when it is simpler just to use the smart phone to order the food and have it delivered. Why push and drag a vacuum cleaner around the apartment or house when you can purchase a robot?
We accepted remote control for the TV and dinner prepared by microwave long ago (or so it seems. Maybe it wasn’t that long ago.). Electric toothbrushes to keep us from having to move our hands up and down. Electric hair dryers. The smartphone that now tells us everything…
So these new realities call for abandoning, little by little, the old realities. Just as old people die and are replaced by new ones. Each batch of people had and have their own sets of tools and toys, and parts of life must always remain simply inscrutable each to each, while, on a different level, every generation dreams the dream and finds what glory there may be amid the greater grief and the inevitable ruins. Il tempo passa per tutti.
The big difference is the way in which the gadgets spearhead our gallop through life, ever faster and faster. They save time, I am told. If so, this is a very good thing indeed, since many of my IT friends claim to work 12-14 hours per day. Or would it be closer to the truth to suggest that such gizmos and all the technology behind them only appear to save time -- but in fact serve more to create labyrinth after labyrinth of tantalizing possibility, as if secretly whispering to their addicted users, “Don’t shut us off now! We have more surprises!? And at 3 a.m. the surprises just keep coming...
We have so many friends, all of them only a click away. It’s pretty awesome if you ask me. And, gee, they are all such great and lasting friends… just a click away. And don’t they just respond so faithfully to our Instagram and Facebook posts? That’s how they prove their friendship, and I knew it when I lived in Moscow myself and received ‘likes’ even from those who lived a few metro stops from me and I saw in real life maybe twice in five years. I never doubted their loyalty….
That’s why watching those documentaries about typewriters last week made me remember all the miserable hours I used to spend trying to get something typed. I was error-prone, you see (as in life). Plus, being self-taught, I never learned how to do it (type) using all my digits, but only the index fingers on each hand (which remains my keyboard technique to this day). Sure, it got so I could fly along at a good clip, but I was never ‘secretary’ material.
Problems, problems.
It would start with just putting the paper in straight, which for me was always a chore. If it was a term paper for school, I would have to add in the footnotes at the bottom of each page (all the ‘ibids’ and ‘op cits’). This meant calculating how much room was needed. Failure to accurately estimate the space would mean your citation running off the end of the page, which in turn meant retyping the whole thing. In retrospect, I believe that my mental illness problems started with typing the same page 15 times. It will do that do you.
The typewriter had a ribbon where the ink that went on the page came from. As the ribbon started to get old, the impression on the hammered page would grow fainter and fainter until you had to pound on the keys like you were trying to break down your ex-wife’s door — in order to make an impression on the parchment. When a new ribbon was installed, you had to be careful not to smear the fresh ink on your fingers, which would of course transfer to anything else you touched — be it your nose or your dick.
Mistakes. Ah, yes, there were plenty. To eradicate them, all we had in the beginning was a special kind of ‘type eraser’ stuck on the end of what otherwise just looked like a plain pencil and which would remove the ink slowly and painfully. To visualize the process, imagine a trapped animal gnawing off its own paw in order to escape the clutches of the steel jaws. If you got impatient and rubbed too hard, you can guess what would happen: you would bore a hole right through the damned paper. And of course have to start again.
Then, as God is always providing us with in times of dire straits, a miracle came along. This was called ‘liquid paper.’ It arrived in small bottles — like women’s nail polish (used now by guys also I am told) and it had the same sharp smell. You just unscrewed the lid, pulled it off, and you would find that a dainty little brush was attached. You dipped it (not too much!) in the magic white ‘milk’ and gently applied it to the page where your error had occurred. If you weren’t too blind to see what you were doing or shaking too much from the previous night’s under-the-table piss-up, and if you laid it on j-u-s-t right, then the error disappeared and you could start again. Unless, you forgot to give it about 20 seconds to dry. If you started typing right away, it would smear just like kissing a woman (or a guy) with fresh lipstick.
The liquid paper would work like a dream… for a while. Until it gradually started to thicken, which it always did. Then it was like…goo. Or the snot produced like a particularly bad cold. Or bubble gum. The result was a turgid, mucked up mess that the typing key could even get stuck in and have to be manually removed. It was especially heartbreaking when something irretrievably screwed up and draft-ruining happened near the bottom of a carefully wrought page of copy. If it was a personal manuscript, OK. You could just scream obscenities and push on. But if it was intended for a finicky prof, you couldn’t have it looking like somebody with black lung disease had just sneezed all over the page. You had to do it again.
My rage-torn room was always full of wadded up discards. It was how I perfected the art of profanity, moving from one word expletives to combinations as deft as a figure skater and versatile as a break dancer. Whole lyrics and soliloquies of the filthiest and vilest language the English tongue is capable of came boiling from my mouth as if I were inventing Hell right there and then in my pauper’s garrett.
Somehow I always got my assignments done, and even wrote quite a large section of a never-completed novel. And lots of other stuff, mostly poetry and love letters to women with cold-hearts. I didn’t feel oppressed or put upon, because the typewriter, as a piece of equipment, was as good as it seemed like it was going to get in those days. And when electric typewriters came along to replace the manual ones, I thought that technology (we didn’t use that word back then) had reached its zenith.
I can remember living in Bath, England and carrying a massive old Underwood up six flights of stairs to my bed-sitter (one room ‘studio apartment’) in Green Park, then sitting up nights with flagons of cider banging away, banging away, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, well into the witching hours of the gloaming, sometimes with a lover already asleep in the bed near my desk, but often alone, writing poetry and dreaming that I would become the next Eliot or Yeats.
Then came the word processors and computers, and almost overnight typewriters disappeared faster than the Knights Templar or a pickpocket in the plaza. The typewriter went the way of silent films and the Brooklyn Dodgers. To be honest, I wasn’t unhappy, not a bit.
Until the other evening with Maxim when together we looked through photos of those old machines — the photos looking as grey and dreary and smudge-worn as the old typewriters themselves. But then… a revelation.
It turns out that some authors still use typewriters, just as some continue to write their texts in pen and pencil. Their explanation was simple — and it is the same one used by people who still prefer real books to electronic ones. They prefer the tactile. The physical element. They don’t want to save the planet or recycle their environment so much as they just want to touch and taste and feel and smell and listen to the Sounds of Life.
It’s not — as the IT people might justifiably believe — that such people are just holding on… and how silly… to a past that is no more alive than an ashtray that someone forgot to empty after last night’s party. Nor is it, in many cases, just a matter of anti-social stubbornness and hidebound hoarfrost.
Think about it — OK, play the romantic for a moment — maybe it’s about people — lovers maybe — who would rather walk home in the rain, arriving completely soaked and yet… somehow… exhilarated, and feeling strangely better for having done so — when the easy solution would have been to grab that taxi sitting nearby. Then ask yourself this simple question based on the scenario I have described: a young couple come in and fling off their wet clothes, glistening in their translucent ivory or ebony nakedness, hair gleaming with rainwater and hurry (maybe) under the shower together before dissolving into each other’s arms in bed…
VS
…..the two in the taxi who come in completely dry and distracted by pressing appointments and tasks, tasks, and more tasks awaiting them in the late hours after work at the business ‘park’, who simply remove their coats, not needing each other now, and immediately start switching switches and punching buttons. And go about their labor and their toil… meticulously, purposefully, silently, sullenly. In the same room, a universe apart.
Which life do you want? Woody Allen (fuck whether or not you like Woody Allen as a human being) captures this perfectly in his film “Midnight in Paris”. The protagonist cannot, CANNOT get his stupid girlfriend to go for a walk in the Parisian rain, and why is that? Because to her, it is ONLY rain, and nothing else. She cannot — because she is too brain dead and materialistic — see the rain, not just as rain, but as metaphor. METAPHOR. But, by disappearing back in time (see the film) he finally finds a girl who will walk with him in the rain. And he never wants to come back to that rainless world and rainless woman that was his ‘holiday’ and ‘fiancee’.
The people who see life as metaphor as always, virtually without exception, are the smartest people and the ones who live the fullest lives.
And so the man who still prefers his typewriter to the keyboard, is not backward or clueless, at least not necessarily. Maybe he is seeing the typewriter as a metaphor for something else — for a way of life which somehow keeps him c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d to something he senses is valuable, maybe even precious, and which holds more meaning for him than any quick-fix alternative. He wants to touch life, feel life, smell and taste life — not just as a RESULT but as a PROCESS.
He doesn’t want 50 Starbucks choices of ‘java’ any more than he wants 50 Haagen Daz flavors of ice cream. He wants to taste simple black, well-brewed coffee maybe with a real shot of cream in it -- a fresh dollop! — and a simple tasty, fulsome lump of a-u-t-h-e-n-t-i-c ice cream. NOT the frozen semen out of a Dairy Queen contraption.
Just as, I would venture, he wants to taste his friendships. He wants to be in the same room with these people and walk down the streets and through the dawn and the darkness with them. Wake up on the same floor with them after a huge birthday or New Year’s Eve party.
This is what the cyberspace people can not understand. O, they may wake up on the floor the next morning too, but basically they miss the point, just as the man or woman who prefers to order food on a smartphone rather than get up and go and get it fails to understand.
This sad person wants only results. They have forgotten — or never known, which is likely the case today — that the journey counts for more than the result.
Go into the street, meet the people of the wind and the rainy day people of the lanes and avenues and come back, yes, straining with your bags of food and yes, yes, yes, muttering because the wind is cold and sharp, and say hello to that old woman walking her dog, that skulking cat on the fence post, that old man on the stairs, and maybe that pretty girl out on the landing.
Say hi to the drunk in front of the metro and drop a coin in his grubby but grateful hand, pause and listen to that teenager playing classical violin in the frosty evening (I have), watch the cop chasing an illegal immigrant down into the metro, stroke the fur of the lonely but free stray dog on the street, say hello to one and all, pull down your vanities and say hello.
When you get home you will feel better, and the beer will taste better than if you never went out. Much better than if they had just brought it to your door. And if you live in a place where there is no elevator and you have to walk up, rejoice. Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo had to walk up the stairs too. There were no lifts.
That’s why the old typewriters were worth their salt. You could feel them. You beat on them, and goddamned if they didn’t mess with you in return. Like they knew you and were laughing at you.
Cyberspace doesn’t laugh. It just consumes.
It appears that young Maxim, as if listening to some old jukebox in a roadside diner, or maybe just the voices of the wind, understands this in the way that roosters know when to crow and wolves to howl at the edges of the forest.
===Eric===
