Typewriter notes

I thought a typewriter would help me write, in that it would slow down my composition and make me think more about the irreversibility of my sentences (the ceaseless push onward, that can't really be erased like handwriting). Currently though the device is serving a different purpose: it has turned into a way for me to take notes.

I hate starting up a computer when I have something to write down. And I like seeing the words, fiddling with them like blocks. So prior to this I would simply use scraps of paper, or small notebooks. This blog I would reserve for lengthier thoughts, ones that had a series of ramifications or relationships to other thoughts--or, as was more often the case, simply needed to be spun out a little in order for them to really become clear. This back and forth has changed a bit since I got a big stack of 3x5 cards over the summer. The little thoughts were now all in one place, at least, stacked up. And so I could work a little more on them there than perhaps I was used to doing--if I ran off a card, I could just take the next one in the pile. Or I could jot something down quicker and know where it would end up. There didn't need to be any hunting down of napkins stuck in between editions of Coleridge or Pope, say, in order for them to be transcribed and collected together in an electronic file.

I knew, however, that if I kept this up, I'd end up in the crazy situation of Niklas Luhmann, who numbered and filed away all his little cards, such that his workspace basically became his externalized brain (Grant and Sand showed me this a while ago).

Now, I simply type whatever thoughts I have out on the typewriter, separating them with a slash mark. So the whole thing becomes a transcription, basically, of a day or two of thinking. Whenever a thought comes into my head, I just walk over to the typewriter and smack it a bit and walk away happy that the fragment is down there, in some basic form. This can become a bit more elaborate, however, than anything I normally scribble on a piece of paper, since the writing puts you in a rhythm and draws the thoughts out of you more than with a pen. Maybe the computer works this way for some people (perhaps older people, who have experienced the world before word processing), but not for me: the act of composition basically is caught up with your thoughts, so that you spend a lot more of your time rearranging things than working off of the device--the latter being for me what is ultimately essential. I don't want the technology to disappear: I like it when its relationship to me gets foregrounded a bit more. The typewriter in that moment provides a sort of gearing down, as it were, so that I have to work a bit more against the machine, exert a little more pressure upon it, in order for more to come out.

Regardless, I am happy to have discovered my ideal way to take notes--capitalizing on that easy slippage of the typewriter into stenography. While many of my friends have found much more sophisticated ways of computerizing their note-taking process, and while I remain still a little envious of them, this seems to me so much more... how to put it? Free, breezy, part of my everyday living. Turning on the computer means entering a space that seems both too ideal and too close to consciousness. With typewriter notes, I get to play with the letters and the words in a more tangible space, a more bodily space.

As more devices take over that bodily space, this difference becomes nil, of course. According to Grant, though (who was tweeting), Lev Manovich asked an amazing question at the recent Digital Arts and Culture conference about why ubiquitous computing has not happened yet--only mobile computers like the iPhone attached to the body. It is perhaps because the gap to be cleared is asymptotic, or can't be crossed merely by a simple notion of the "bodily," however reversible we might make the latter (Merleau-Ponty). There seems to be a difference between the bodily experience involved with the foregrounded device that works against me and the body covered with devices, however much they too try to resist us in new ways. Perhaps here is some sort of contradiction that remains to be negated...