My new typewriter

A big package came in the mail today: the Olivetti Lettera 35 typewriter (from 1972, I think, so its a new old typewriter I guess) that I purchased on eBay a few weeks ago. Fed up with certain aspects of word processing, I thought I needed a change. Or, at least, any other option than the one that I have taken for granted all my life: interestingly, I am of a generation of people who have probably always composed either on hand or on the computer, in a word processor. I'm old enough to remember the problems of using old word processing programs on an Apple IIe, but still, there has never been a time when I thought that a line I had typed couldn't be delved back into, fiddled around with, and changed quite unproblematically--that is, I have never related to the words as real (or more real than virtual) elements in the world, as is the case with the typewriter. This produces an interesting writing habit: the sentence is no longer the unit in which I write. I'm trying to regain that ability, but in the meantime, it's in short syntagms (which reduce even to the length of words, nay, word-endings or prefixes, and which can be added to, expanded, with parentheticals like this one) or that I compose--and I suspect that this is the case for other people in my generation as well. (It is interesting, in the light of this, to see linguists in the 40's to the 60's talk abotut the general soverignity of the sentence, and the concomitant need to get beyond it to analyze larger and smaller discursive units: in a way, this is precisely what happened, not only through theory, but technology, which, if my situation is is typical, itself decomposed that sentence). The flip side of this is the oft-celebrated fact that word processing lets your words keep up with your thoughts. But does having this sort of immanence actually mean more controlled writing? In my case, probably not. With that in mind, I'm experimenting--the typewriter was cheap, anyway.

We have a reliance on the non-progressive, virtual space in which we write that is, in the typewriter, completely done away with. Composition is linear (more on the level of the line, with its hard carriage returns at the end of each one), irreversible, and therefore (I hope) tends to make one gather coherence at the level of the sentence, or at least in the clause, rather than in the individual element.

Interestingly, if one were to show all the marks I made while writing a page, trying to correct while moving on (and this is excepting line spacing, which varies considerably), there would be one mark I couldn't show, which actually reveals that the virtuality of the word-processing space is limited: say I wrote the word involved , and I started out writing by accident inc... Because the c gets, perhaps, only lightly pressed as I realize I make a mistake (this is another feature of the typewriter: you have to really punch the keys for God's sake in order to write--you gotta mean what you say in a way--and oddly you have to "peck" a lot more) I might still save the word back and write over it unproblematically with a v, to make the proper word involved. In other words, if the word processor is a space (if it is more spatial in the sense that interactive space, space that spreads and alters, is linked to its inherent virtuality), interestingly at the point where it would require a mere doubling of that space (which should just be another additional virtuality) the word processor fails, and is exposed as more of a surface than the sheet of paper in the typewriter.