Yes­ter­day I pro­cured a vin­tage Royal portable deluxe type­writer for an acquain­tance that has con­cluded that he too wishes to cor­re­spond via type­writ­ten mis­sives. He has been look­ing for a man­ual machine in his home of Petaluma, with­out suc­cess for some time.

Royal portable quiet de luxe, des­tined for Petaluma after an oil bath and rib­bon replace­ment at Ace Type­writer here in Portland.

Ace Type­writer — a great shop for type­writer ser­vice in Portland.

This morn­ing I typed out a greet­ing mes­sage to my friend on his new machine, then com­pleted a full let­ter on my work­horse desk­top, a cos­met­i­cally dam­aged and incom­plete but reli­able Wood­stock. On the sec­ond page of my let­ter I hit a patch of dry rib­bon. Con­se­quently, the imprint began to fade, my words dema­te­ri­al­iz­ing like a depart­ing ghost. It occurred to me that words on the page not only have weight, they have depth. That is: they con­vey extra­tex­tual arti­facts of their cre­ator; a his­tor­i­cal sig­na­ture of the moment of their cre­ation and clues about the writer. I rec­og­nize that when I’m anx­ious, angry or sim­ply over caf­feinated, I strike the keys with such vigor that the peri­ods per­fo­rate the paper. ^[1] In moments of inspi­ra­tion I am less likely to cor­rect trans­po­si­tions, con­fi­dent that my reader or copy-editor will excuse minor errors or that I can cor­rect them after com­plet­ing the page. These arti­facts give the text depth and are insep­a­ra­ble from the mate­ri­als of the medium.

Sib­ling machines from the late 1940’s which will type cor­re­spon­dence orig­i­nat­ing in Petaluma and Portland

E-mail for­warded and “re”tweets are indis­tin­guish­able from their orig­i­nals because of per­fect dig­i­tal dupli­ca­tion. There is no cor­po­real com­po­nent to the text. Words are mass­less, with­out his­tory. They may have a prove­nance encoded in hid­den ISP data or trans­mis­sion records, but to the reader the text is the ethe­real, with­out his­tory. It is life­less: denied ori­gin, des­ti­na­tion or demise.

With the progress of voice recog­ni­tion soft­ware, I won­der if dic­ta­tion will soon replace key­board entry. ^[2]If so, it will rep­re­sent the tri­umph of the con­ver­sa­tional over the com­po­si­tional. On the other hand, per­haps it would inspire a renewed pas­sion for ora­tory and rhetoric. Salons and debate soci­eties could be rein­vig­o­rated. High school foren­sics might become as pop­u­lar as ath­let­ics. A new TV series of fol­low­ing the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of a dozen mis­fit ado­les­cent stu­dents strug­gling on a rural high school debate team enti­tled Rebut­tal might even eclipse the hit GLEE…

I’m pitch­ing this to my agent tomorrow.

1. ^[1] I was chas­tised as a stu­dent for pound­ing the keys, a habit I’ve been unable to mod­ify even after 20 years use of com­puter key­boards. My com­puter stroke is nearly as per­cus­sive as my man­ual type­writer work. ↩
2. ^[2] I always found the lit­er­ary and cin­e­matic depic­tions of the office pro­fes­sional dic­tat­ing to a sec­re­tary endowed with steno­graphic skills and shapely calves implau­si­ble. It’s also a strange quasi-sanctioned “per­for­mance”, an erot­i­cally charged form of sto­ry­telling which recalls both Home­ric recita­tion and child­hood bed­time sto­ries. It seemed to me that extem­po­ra­ne­ously com­pos­ing for­mal legal cor­re­spon­dence would be absurdly hap­haz­ard and inef­fi­cient. I sup­pose the sec­re­tary couldn’t just type the dic­ta­tion due to noise and because it would pre­clude ver­bal revi­sions – impe­ri­ous and dra­matic utter­ances such as, “strike that last sen­tence.” Nev­er­the­less, I find it hard to accept this was ever a wide­spread prac­tice. Surely today even our vastly over­paid CEO type their own e-mails. ↩