Tag: media

Today, Typewriters Are For Art

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

A woman in a maroon dress with a white sweater sits on a wooden folding chair. She is typing and looking very intently at the vintage typewriter in front of her. The typewriter is in a case, and the case is open. Tacked to the front of the case is a sign. It is illegible, but it says "POEM STORE."
Photo by “Eduardo,” Your Subject & Price, July 11, 2009. Cropped from the original. Rights: CC-BY 2.0 Generic.

“People tell me that I could do much better,” David McCullough said in an interview included in California Typewriter, a documentary about typewriters “and the people who love them.” “I could go faster and have less to contend with if I were to use a computer—a word processor—but I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I would prefer to go slower.” He liked the straightforward mechanism of his Royal Standard Typewriter that he bought, used, in 1965 for about twenty-five dollars. “To me, it’s understandable: I press the key and another key comes up and prints a letter on a piece of paper and then you can pull it out. It’s a piece of paper upon which you have printed something.

“You’ve made that. It’s tangible. It’s real.”

That tangible quality, that reality comes clear in Richard Polt‘s Typewriter Manifesto, which concludes with a series of contrasts of typewriter life and digital life (using the red and black colors of some typewriter ribbons):

We choose the real over the representation,
the physical over the digital,
the durable over the unsustainable,
the self-sufficient over the efficient.

And then the manifesto concludes, “THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TYPEWRITTEN” of course.

Keyboards are keyboards, you might say. It’s the fancy stuff behind them that matters. Typewriters also have had their incremental improvements, electrification being the most obvious and, less obvious perhaps, the improvements on font rendering. The old fashioned levered hammer bearing the inverse shape of letters gave way to ingenious “balls” as in the IBM Selectric and “printwheels” that look like a miniature, heavy-duty bicycle wheel with spokes that bear the letters. (My own old typewriter has this technology.) These innovation allowed for font changes and vastly improved print typesetting. That story about the ingenious QWERTY keyboard layout minimizing key jambs and speeding production of words? I’d say, probably false. A more likely reason for that innovation was probably a simple marketing trick: a salesman who didn’t know how to type could still peck out T-Y-P-E-W-R-I-T-E-R using only the letters on the top row. Read more »

Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Why I’m Quitting Substack

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

An orange background and the Substack logo, jittered in vertical segments.
Based on Castro, Jinilson. Logo of Substack. March 1, 2025. Wikimedia Commons. Rights: CC BY-SA 4.0

This month, I’m closing up the years-long run of my Substack newsletter. I’ve decided to stand up my own newsletter site, despite the hassle, the modest expense, and the loss of what Substack touts as its “network.” The decision revealed to me some of the usually enshrouded assumptions that writers make about their work and the media they choose to release it. The relationship is hardly linear; it’s not just writers cooking up work that media mechanically release to a readership. Over the years, Substack’s evolution unveiled assumptions that complicate and shift the simple linear creation-to-publication process.

I decided Substack’s emerging assumptions about writing and publishing weren’t really mine. The simple model of writers writing and then somehow publishing is too simple; it ignores useful signals that shape a writer’s creation as a piece moves toward a readership (or, as often is the case, toward the desk drawer or wastebasket), and it ignores the targeting or even creation of a readership—the key to “making a living” as a writer. Substack’s evolution as a “publishing service” is an example of how media—and particularly social media—nurture or contort writers and, in the process, shape them to fit publication processes and the readerships that those processes conjure up.

After four years, Substack and I grew apart, so I’m ending the relationship.

My initial choice to set up a “stack” was in no small measure just a way to solve an email problem. In 2022, I had few designs on literary quality, much less delusions of pursuing a life of writing. Through the Covid pandemic, it was my habit to send an email to my students every morning, a message they eventually named the “morning missive.” When I wasn’t nagging at them, which was infrequent, students found them useful and even entertaining, and for me it was a means to start a weekday in a summary of an interesting item I read, some quick take on happenings, a musing quite broadly defined, or sometimes a crabby snap at students slacking off in seminar readings. Most missives related to the theme and content of the course. Read more »