Writing

The writer I wish I were

I became aware of myself as a writer at the age of 11, in Mr. Gray’s sixth-grade English class. Every Friday was Composition Day. It was our challenge to write something there at our desks, on our ruled paper, and read it before the class. Some Fridays, we had an assignment, or what today would be called a prompt. On other Fridays, we were free to write whatever we wanted.

On those Fridays in that long-ago year I discovered three things: I could write under pressure to meet a deadline. I had zero stage fright. And my fellow sixth-graders enjoyed hearing what I had written and often broke into applause.

What did I write back then? I wish I had kept those smudged pages. I can still visualize what they looked like, just as I can see certain positions I found myself in on the chess board no matter how much time passes. I wrote whatever the day’s assignment required, and when I had no one to answer to but myself I wrote about my family. They were always good for a laugh, especially if I added Martians, robots, and outfielders.

In those days, the writers I wanted to be were the writers I read: Ray Bradbury, Andre Norton, C.S. Forester, and whoever wrote the boys’ baseball books starring such stalwart sluggers as Ace Atkins. If I had started writing at the age of 6, they might have been Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon) and Robert McCloskey (Make Way for Ducklings). As I grew up and the conviction I wanted to write grew stronger, I imagined myself writing like Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dickens, and W. Somerset Maugham. And then Margie Percy, John Updike, Franz Kafka, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

When Michael Cunningham sits down to write his next novel, he has a vision of what the novel will be: “vast and revelatory and awe-inspiring. It’s a cathedral made of fire.” But:

Even if the book in question turns our fairly well, it’s never the book you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It’s an aggregation of sentences. It doesn’t remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire. It feels, in short, like an insufficient translation of a mythical work.

Cunningham calls this “one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction.” Another is the knowledge that you’ll never be Ursula K. Le Guin or even Crockett Johnson. Though I believe I would’ve done a creditable job with baby ducks trying to cross a damn road.

Cunningham, in Unsayable: A Life in Writing, which is an autobiography with writing advice or a writing manual with some memoir, knows exactly what I’m trying to say:

Writing is difficult enough without adding the imperative to evolve into the writer you wish you were.

To all of you out there who are writing here in my end-of-the-year writing challenge (I should’ve thought of a better name for this), keep writing. Be kind to yourselves. And read Unsayable, which was just published. The author provides the encouragement we all need…plus drag queens and ghost stories. I would like to have seen Thomas Wolfe try that.

Thank you, Franklin A. Gray, English teacher extraordinaire. When I read his obituary, I discovered that he had also been a radio announcer under the name “The Shadow.” Rest in power.

Thank God It’s Monday 20

Tonight: A brief word about pencils.

But first, our dog Tango, a noted corgi. Early this evening, on the deserted (I thought) campus of Western Washington University, she surprised a six-point whitetail deer and chased it for a quarter of a mile. Spoiler alert: The deer escaped.

Tango’s behavior taught me never to let her off the leash on campus again. But it also, in a weird way, reminded me of my Dad and how we both loved office supplies. When I was in high school and we found out that a local “stationery store” was having a going-out-of-business sale, we RAN to the car. We chased bargains, not ruminants.

Most office-supply stores today belong to a chain and everyone sells the same thing, but with different packaging and different celebrity endorsers. The last time a stationery store in my area expired, it was 20 years ago, we lived in Portland, Oregon, and the treasure I came home with was the colorful stickers we stuck on floppy disks in the 1980s.

Before Dad went to that great office-supply ammunition dump in the sky, he gave me all of the unopened boxes of pencils he had accumulated since he came home from World War II. I ended up donating many to an elementary school; a teacher there told me that his third- and fourth-graders chewed right through them. I sold other pencils on eBay. I still have enough to last me my lifetime.

There’s something about pencils, and their fragrance, that makes you happy. Like skipping stones. You can’t skip a stone and not be happy. You can’t open a box of pencils and not feel happy looking at all that unsharpened potential.

Two writers who have meant a lot to me, Thomas Wolfe and John Updike, wrote with pencils.

Wolfe, who was six and a half feet tall, used the top of a refrigerator as his desk. His preferred tool was a pencil almost as thick as a crayon. He scrawled 20 or 25 words on a page, then swept the page off the fridge and started on the next.

Updike, who liked to sit in a chair, wrote Couples and three of the four Rabbit books with a pencil.

Am I going to write the next draft of my novel with a pencil? How about hell no? I have about the same chance of finishing such a thing as I have of catching a deer.

I didn’t write this post with a pencil, either, but I did use a pencil (a Wolkins “Debut”) to write my to-do list today. And I’m now using a pencil (a red PMC Tailoring Pencil No. 249, proudly made in the U.S.A.) to cross out BLOG.

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.” (G.K. Chesterton)

I believe in starts

I needed a bench to cut wood using my handsaw. I wanted something low enough that I could hold the material in place with my foot but not so low that the tip of my saw would strike the floor of the garage. I mocked up this invention with cardboard, then bought some scrap wood at The RE Store, our local, one-stop, scrap-wood emporium.

Then I was sidetracked by other things—that is, life.

One day I decided I needed a bench to cut wood using my handsaw. While thinking this over in our garage, I spotted a rectangle of plywood that was the exact size I wanted for this project. I had already measured the damn thing and bought the wood. Yes, the Enterprise was once again stuck in a time loop.

Before I could drink enough coffee to gear up for this project, my wife and I went to an estate sale where I discovered a wooden, slatted box from a wine distributor. It was sturdy and it was the approximate dimensions of the bench I had designed in my head. I turned it upside down and borrowed a bubble level that was on sale. The box didn’t wobble and the bottom was exactly level. I bought it. My project was done!

Back around Memorial Day, I decided to cut my novel up with a handsaw. In other words, I required a Big Think. When I picked the book up again last week, I had done my thinking, but I had forgotten which files I was using, and the file names I had concocted in May and June were somewhat opaque here in September. I can’t say if I was back in a time loop or if my brain required a defrag and disc clean-up, but this predicament forced me to engage with each file and understand them all over again. I’ll call that a win.

So my first week of the end-of-the-year writing challenge (I should’ve thought of a better name for this) turned out to be mostly some frantic reorganizing, but by the end of the week, I was writing. A slow start is still a start, and as Joey “The Lips” Fagan proclaimed in The Commitments, “I believe in starts.” He wasn’t talking about tomato plants, either.

Good luck to you as we lurch into Week 2!

Writing tip of the day

If one of your characters is working in a profession you know little about, listen to some podcasts. Podcasts are an insanely proliferating species. If two people are in the same career, you can be certain that one of them has begun a podcast about it and asked the other to make a guest appearance. This is the fastest way for you to gain this information.

Look over their episodes and search for titles such as “How to Be a Success in Your First 90 Days” or “Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid.”

Consumer warning: Most podcasters are not trained broadcasters. They speak too slowly, they say um, you know, and like like like. They’ll wander off the point and waste time. Also, shows about professions often degenerate into festivals of self-congratulation or tales of how we did things in the old days. That’s why God invented the Skip function. Use it!

End-of-the-year writing challenge!

Greetings, writers. And when I say “writers,” I mean you. Yes, you.

  • Even if you’ve never published a thing and you’re still waiting for someone to say yes to your novel.
  • Even if your novel is still a first draft. I feel like my first draft is a drawer full of No. 2 pencils that need sharpening.
  • Even if what you have is a Word file you’ve thrown everything into, like a blender or a dumpster.
  • Even if the shapeless thing you have in your head exists only as scribbles on blue and yellow Post-its you stuck to your refrigerator.

Because we are all kicking it.

I often say that writers have one hobby in common: Complaining. This is not true. Our hobby is time management. We have plenty to do just getting ourselves and the people we love through the day. Archimedes, who was a writer just like us, said, “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world.” (We know this because Archimedes’ wife, Clarice, immediately wrote this down on a Post-it and stuck it to their fridge.) Time management is the lever we use to move the world and find precious time to write.

If what you want to do is write, and if you are still writing, even if it has been years since you embarked on this dream, then you are a success. Ray Bradbury said you only fail if you stop writing. And we know that because Clarice was visiting the Bradburys and she wrote that one down, too.

I have a 75,000-word first draft that I am still trying to revise. I haven’t made much progress since June, but John O’Hara never made much progress in the summer, either. He titled a collection of his stories Waiting for Winter because winter was when he wrote his novels. Like me, this famous novelist spent his summers surfin’, sunbathin’, and cruisin’ through the hamburger stand now.

August is about to end. School is about to start. Here in the U.S., the Labor Day weekend has always seemed to me to be invitation as irresistible as the finale from the William Tell Overture. We have four months until the end of year. I know that the world seems like shit right now, but let’s remember that people still lived their lives and loved who they loved and tried to be creative during both world wars and no end of plagues.

Turn your attention to the writing project that lights you up, even if you can only find 15 minutes a day for it. I want to report substantial progress by the time I climb into my tux for New Year’s Eve. I want you to report the same. Remember the words of writer and windsurfer Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

Stand up on your hind legs and roar!

Can’t anyone here play this game?

Once upon a time, a recruiter contacted me about a communications job at a financial services company. I was unemployed and happy to have an advocate, but I returned from the interview with some concerns. My chief concern was my co-workers. They were mostly women, which I thought was a good idea, but mostly a year or two out of college, which I thought was not. Why would they hire someone as old as me?

My recruiter, who was my age, was shocked, shocked, that anyone would discriminate against older workers. “We are not going to play their game!” she declared. What game we were going to play, she didn’t say. Baseball? Battleship? If she had said chess, I would’ve been all set.

I didn’t get that job, but the male founder and CEO was eventually accused of inappropriate behavior toward his largely female staff, so I guess it all worked out.

I was reminded of this blip on the radar screen of my career when I thought to apply last week for a fellowship.

If you’re a writer, your money comes from publishers. (If you’re self-published, your money comes from your friends and relatives and your more generous connections on Linkedin.1) But you can apply for free money: grants and fellowships. The United States is chock-full of organizations that want to fund your writing.

Most of this money is not exactly free. Even if you outrun the competition, you might then be required to teach a class or organize a community event. That kind of stuff I understand. What I don’t understand, and what stops me, is when they want you to describe your project and provide an artist’s statement.

I am not going to play their game.

Describe my project? Your grant period doesn’t begin for four months or more. I don’t know what I’ll be into by then. What if I finish what I’m doing and start something new? What if I get excited or bored or end up in a cul de sac? What if I follow Hemingway’s suggestion that I start with something I know and go to something I don’t? Hey man, don’t box me in.

My artist’s statement? Does that have something to do with intersectionality or interiority? Using these words makes me feel like a freakasaurus in a clothing store for teenagers and somebody’s mom just spotted me and called mall security.

I like to write! Writing is fun. Sometimes I write something serious. Sometimes I write about my family, or a job, or sex. One of my goals is to write something that includes all three. This paragraph is as close as I’ll ever get to a statement. And I’m choking on the word “statement.”

Sometimes I think these magazines would benefit from a little more oomph. Like…can’t there ever be a murder? Or a sci-fi story? Or just something fun! Like somebody falling in love! Or somebody having an affair! (Naomi Kanakia on The Yale Review)

I’m happy that these arts groups exist. They help a lot of writers. Acknowledgements pages often mention these benevolent institutions. Perhaps if I had spent a chunk of my adult life in academia, I might feel differently about this process, but I haven’t touched the stuff since Watergate.2

Alicia Jo Rabins said, “If you aren’t rejected from 90 percent of the things you apply to, you aren’t aiming high enough.” Rabins wrote a musical about Bernie Madoff, so she’s probably someone we should listen to. I aim plenty high. I’ll let someone else apply for these things. But if someone out there is handing out free money…I hope they’ll think of me.

My title today was of course uttered by Casey Stengel during the New York Mets’ traumatic first season. If Stengel could’ve traded a couple of infielders for some arts administrators, he would have.

Next week: Where my novel is. That’s a game I do know how to play.

1 You indie authors are too easy to pick on. Did you know that half of all self-published books today have been written (I mean, generated) by an artificial inteligence?

2 Just to say something positive about academia, my journalism instructor, Boston Globe columnist Jeremiah Murphy, taught me how to write an obituary and how to meet a deadline, two skills that have served me well in almost every job I’ve ever had.

Can writing be taught?

My answer is no. Last month, at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference in Fort Worden, Wash., I was prompted, challenged, and possibly transformed. But on the day I arrived, I already knew how to write. I doubt that any of my fellow students, all 150 of us, came to the conference to learn to write, either.

But let’s hear an opposing point of view.

The Famous Writers School of Westport, Conn., was not an MFA program or even a low-residency MFA where you do everything online but meet in person once a year. The Famous Writers did business only through the mail. The school imploded over shady business practices in 1972 but lives on in a lengthy entry on Wikipedia.

Those of us who were reading magazines in the 1960s (I was young and precocious) remember their ads, usually featuring an authoritative, mature white male, under headlines such as “We’re looking for people who want to write” and “I FIRE WRITERS…with enthusiasm!”

The 12 famous writers who lent their names to this enterprise did not prepare lessons or grade homework, though that was the promise. A bunch of second-string drudges did that. The true story was broken by Jessica Mitford, who has her own lengthy entry on Wikipedia.

(Among the Infamous 12 were three writers I respect: Bruce Catton, Max Shulman, and Rod Serling. Everyone has to eat. Oh, also Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House and a long-running joke in my house because of the title of his book Try and Stop Me.)

The Famous Writers School was a hustle, and yet somebody learned something. I recently found one of their flyers inside a book I bought at a library sale. The flyer, from about 1969 or 1970, offered these testimonials:

  • Sells fourth book: “Your training has paid off! I’ve sold my fourth book to the New York publisher, Abelard-Schuman.” Eileen Panowski, Los Alamos, NM
  • Sells 11 stories in 6 months: “Just received a check from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. That’s 11 stories in six months.” S. Novak, Wayne, NJ
  • Lands job as society editor: “Thanks to you, I was recently hired as society editor of our local newspaper.” Mary Neatherly, Hardin, Mont.
  • Cracks science fiction market: “After two years of trying, I sold to Fantasy & Science Fiction a few months after enrolling.” R. Lory, Richmond, VA
  • “I can see the good life now,” says a former police officer, William W. Blanks of LA. “Recently I sold three more articles, which means that so far I’ve sold everything I’ve written since enrolling in your School!”

Who were these folks?

Eileen Panowski (1920-2011) wrote six mystery novels for “teen or intermediate” readers. The Apache Gold Mystery (1965) was an Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee. (Source: Nebraskaauthors.org, where they misspelled Allan)

Mary Jean Neatherly (1920-1989) worked as a secretary for the Hardin Herald, now the Big Horn County News. There’s no mention in her obituary of being the Herald’s society editor, but that might be because of the era. The paper didn’t value her contributions because she was a woman writing for other women and she performed this function while also serving as a secretary. She was a member of the Poetry Writers Association of America. (Source: Findagrave.com)

S. Novak received a check from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I’m sure it wasn’t a subscription refund. Unfortunately, EQMM does not maintain a public database of its authors. There’s a Steve Novak writing today, but he is way too young to have received a check from anyone in 1970.

Robert Lory (1936-2020) graduated from the Famous Writers School in 1964. He wrote dozens of novels in the 1970s, including the nine installments of the “Return of Dracula” series. (The title that intrigues me is Dracula’s Brothers. I love an involving family saga.) But check this out: His story “The Star Party” was selected for World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965. His neighbors in that book included Fritz Leiber, Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, and John Brunner. “The Star Party” is the story Lory mentions in his testimonial. (Sources: Wikipedia, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, Library Thing)

William Winfield Blanks (1928-1989), the former cop, wrote two episodes of the 1976 TV series The Blue Knight, based on the novel by Joseph Wambaugh, a former cop. (Source: A poorly written site called Prabook and the Internet Movie Database)

To judge from the Wikipedia write-up, the Famous Writers School failed almost everyone. But a few writers were able to say that they could see the good life. The people pinch-hitting for Bennett Cerf, Rod Serling, and the other authors of this authorial scam really did teach them how to write. Or did Eileen Panowski, Mary Neatherly, and their colleagues already possess that superpower? Maybe all they needed was some acknowledgement.

We will never know.

Don’t any of you send me your copy of Dracula’s Brothers.

What I did on my summer vacation

I go to a writing conference every 20 years. So when I go, I had better make the most of it. The Port Townsend Writers’ Conference at Fort Worden, Wash., was the most.

It’s going to take me awhile to digest this experience. All I’ll say this evening is that my week at the conference was inspiring and surprising. I wrote something I never thought I’d write and made connections with people I never thought I’d meet. Fort Worden is a state park, and I walked six miles a day, over a hill, along a beach, out to a lighthouse, through a cemetery, and many laps around the former parade ground.

I spent so much time with the deer that they stopped running from me. In another week, they would’ve invited me to dinner. Fiber. They know.

Fort Worden was once part of a series of forts that guarded the United States against seaborne invasion. This was a good idea when Capt. Horatio Hornblower was trading broadsides with Napoleon. It wasn’t so good after the invention of the aeroplane. But the Coast Artillery Corps built Fort Worden anyway, along with its friends, Forts Casey and Flagler, a “Triangle of Fire” that would destroy any fleet that menaced Seattle.

The only thing that ever menaced Seattle was Tacoma. The Coast Artillery Corps disbanded all three forts by 1953 and then itself. All that’s left today of the mighty CAC are the empty gun emplacements overlooking Puget Sound and the Coast Artillery Museum at Fort Worden. The museum is closing in September. Budget cuts.

I bought this shirt for half price:

Below is one example of what they built in the 1900s to hold off unnamed enemies. The rooms beneath the fortifications are open to the public. How many teenagers have been deflowered in there?

It’s about a mile around the parade ground. In the next photo, the barracks I stayed in is on the right. The cloud in the gap between the trees, to the right of center, is actually Mount Baker, far to the north of Fort Worden and just east of my hometown of Bellingham.

My barracks at night:

The cemetery, established with the fort, is still in use, for veterans and civilians:

I wrote a lot, learned to refrain from snacking because the cafeteria was closed between meals, talked poetry with the professionals, bantered with best-selling novelists, rocked the room on open mic night, and won the hand of a proud, aloof beauty named Willow. OK, the paw. Willow is a King Charles spaniel, though she might be part Pomeranian. There appears to be some disagreement on this point. I accept her as she is.

I’m happy to be home and ready again to dispense more half-baked wisdom!

And you may ask yourself, “Where is that large birthday cake?”

My birthday season is in full swing and I couldn’t be happier. We ate dinner in our favorite Italian restaurant, where the food was fab and the waitress was stoned. “May I have a knife?” I asked her, because she had neglected to bring one. She replied, “Yes, for your chicken,” as if congratulating me for understanding utensils. Deborah, as if foreseeing this difficulty, had ordered something vegetarian.

We have a picnic with excellent old friends lined up for the Fourth. I have a writing conference lined up for mid-month, a sort of fantasy baseball camp where I won’t have to depend on my eye-hand coordination. Our main activities will be a) talking about writing, and b) complaining about money.

Meanwhile, look who else is having a birthday: The United States of America! Good work, everyone!

In honor of our nation’s birthday, and because I immigrated to this country from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, I want to spotlight my favorite boat, the Constitution, as seen in this 1960s postcard from the Charlestown Navy Yard:

Like most things that were built in another century, it’s a miracle that Old Ironsides still exists. It is the oldest active-duty warship still afloat, in our navy or anyone else’s. (HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, is still a commissioned warship, but the British moved her ashore after she was damaged during the Blitz.) For this miracle we can thank Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and a poem he wrote in 1830 when he heard that the Navy planned to decommission and scrap the Constitution:

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

In 1830, this was incendiary stuff, and the public rallied to save what was quickly becoming a sacred relic.

On July 4, 2024, the Constitution appeared in the WordPress blog wwiiafterwwii. You may wonder why a sailboat launched in 1797 would appear in a blog devoted to 20th-century war junk. OK, it’s a stretch, but the blog’s creator, the anonymous jwh1975, used his post that day to celebrate our nation’s birthday by profiling the Coast Guard cutter Eagle and the Constitution. The Eagle was formerly a Nazi ship, so that’s her connection to the war. As for the Constitution:

On paper USS Constitution was the flagship of Rear Admiral Felix Gygax, commander of the 1st Naval District which had its GHQ relocated to Boston during WWII. Quite obviously it was not a suitable flagship for commanding the high-intensity, long-range conflict against Germany’s u-boats and was not used as such.

During WWII, the Constitution served as a brig and a storehouse for foreign flags and ceremonial swords. We all have a part to play in this life.

Today, the Eagle is used to train sailors in teamwork. The Constitution, however, simply exists:

USS Constitution is a fully commissioned, active-duty warship. The 83-persons crew are active-duty officers and enlisted sailors. Unlike USCGC Eagle which retains a utilitarian training function, USS Constitution has no mission of any sort. Congress funds its continued active service simply because American voters want this.

Happy birthday, everyone, whether it’s your birthday or not, and remember that telling your stoned waitress it’s your birthday usually results in a free dessert. Smooth sailing to you in the coming year. I’ll be back on Sunday, July 26, somewhat older but hopefully wiser. But I’ll still complain about money.

Things that go clack in the night

The last time I took a typing test was in 1985. I was seated at an IBM Selectric and given a sheet of text to reproduce. I rolled a sheet of blank paper into that humming power plant and started typing. After the timer went off and my errors were deducted, I had hit 120 words per minute.

I may be off a bit in the year and the score, but you get my point. I was fast, even on the incredible hulks I grew up with. When I was inspired, I could produce a rolling thunder that drove my family to exile me to the basement. I tried a typewriter here in adulthood. I was already in a basement. My wife suggested the garage.

Computers make us all fast (the internet makes us furious). Here are the top three word-processing time-savers:

“Don’t think. Type.” I’m paraphrasing Ray Bradbury, who said “dream.” On a computer, you can type forever without stopping. On a typewriter, when you reach the end of a line, a bell sounds and it’s up to you to whack a lever so you can start the next line. We worry that computers train us, but look what a typewriter did with one little bell!

The magic of the backspace key. Changes cost nothing. “I can’t write five words but that I change seven,” Dorothy Parker lamented. If you could’ve given her a laptop, she would’ve given you the chair next to her at the Algonquin Round Table.

Global search and replace. With a computer, if you decide some paragraphs are in the wrong place, you highlight ’em, cut ’em, and drop ’em somewhere else. Easy. With a typewritten manuscript, you cut up the pages, throw away the extraneous parts, do some rearranging, and tape the thing back together. Want to get fancy? Run your taped-together monster through a copier to make everything cleaner so you can start cutting and taping all over again.

Does all this sound like I am dancing on the grave of the typewriter? I’m not dancing on anything unless you’re playing Duran Duran. And anyone who has ever corresponded with me knows that I love typewriters. The monthly Typewriter Afternoon at our library leaves me quivering with antici…pation. I am in awe of the intrepid woman who lets the public use her machines.

Typewriters: Letters, yes. My novel, no. Writing fiction is slow enough.

Historical note 1: The science fiction writer Frederik Pohl claimed that he wrote a story in 1936, sold it in 1937, saw it published in 1938, and was paid in 1939. This is not too far off from the experience of writers today, except for the getting paid part.

Historical note 2: In 1990, I took my typewriter to my regular office-supply store in Seattle. It was the last place in Seattle that serviced typewriters. They turned me away. They were done with typewriters. The improbable typewriter renaissance was still years in the future. I sold my typewriter at one of our yard sales, to a college student who wanted to live in a garret and starve and all that other writer stuff. The black plastic carrying case had some of my best stickers on it.

I sometimes think of my Smith-Corona. If I had kept it, by now it would’ve racked up decades of hibernating in a closet. As much as I love typewriters, I would consider it a life-changing inconvenience if I had to return to one. But I can’t deny the joy of hopping from one typewriter to another, from an armor-plated behemoth that has survived the journey from the 1940s to a svelte greyhound from the 1970s.

“To this day I think my best work came from the Selectric. Like others, I would plan an article in my mind or even outline it on paper. Then I would type it in one fell swoop with almost no changes. Today I stare at a screen and then start typing, go back, and edit and edit. I am more apt to try to proofread on the screen rather than the printed page as I used to. I know I caught more problems the old way. The new way may be flashy and modern, but the old way was better.”

This quote is from the essay “Requiem for a Typewriter” by Frank Romano. It appeared in Electronic Publishing in September 1995. I can’t find the essay online (Requiem for a Typewriter is a 2024 album by Bad News), there are many Frank Romanos who write (the Wikipedia listing is for a bass player), and Electronic Publishing is no longer publishing. Robert J. Samuelson wrote a similar essay with a similar title in Newsweek in the same year. It was an inevitable topic back then.

I understand Mr. Romano, but if we could ask him today, would he still claim “the old way was better”?

It wasn’t better. It was just different. And, at least once a month, incredibly fun.

But if you really want to talk Old School: There’s nothing like pencils.

Thank God It’s Monday 13

In 1935, e.e. cummings self-published a book of poetry. Because 14 publishers had said no thanks, he called the book No Thanks and dedicated it to the 14 of them:

cummings, who was very concerned about how his poems were displayed on the page,  produced this image on a typewriter. I know how to do that. You count the letters and spaces in a line, divide by two, and backspace backspace backspace from the center of the paper. It helps to only use lines that contain an odd number of letters.

There’s a lingering bitterness in what cummings did. Bitterness is useless. I get aggravated but I try not to be bitter. The 47 editors who rejected the story I wrote about in yesterday’s post might have done so because it wasn’t the sort of thing they publish. It was too long. It was too short. It was too Jewish. It was not enough Baptist. They had already read three similar stories. They were dealing that day with an audit, a toothache, or a bad love deal. Maybe they just didn’t like it. Whatever the reason, there’s nothing I can do about it…except copy e.e. cummings!