Tag: writing

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 »

Monday, July 15, 2019

“Trapped Inside the Gaze of Strangers”: A Conversation with Aimee Parkison and Carol Guess

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

Andrea Scrima: Girl Zoo, which has just been published by the FC2 imprint of the University of Alabama Press, is a collection of stories that takes contemporary feminist theory on an odyssey through the collective capitalist subconscious. Scenes of female incarceration are nightmarish, hallucinatory: each story exists within its own universe and operates according to its own set of natural laws. But while there’s a fairy-tale quality to the telling, none of these stories departs very far from the everyday experience of institutionalized sexism: the all-too-familiar is magnified just enough to reveal its inherently devastating proportions.

Aimee, Carol, I wonder if we could begin by talking about the collaborative process. How did the idea come about to write a book together?

Aimee Parkison: As an artist, I’m always trying new things. I have a wide range and want to expand and explore. My creative process is vital to the way I experience the world. I like the excitement of a new project, a new idea. I write all sorts of stories, from flash fictions to long narratives, from experimental to traditional, from realism to surrealism. Some of my fictions are character-based and others more conceptual. I often focus on the lives of women and am known for revisionist approaches to narrative and poetic language. My writing is often categorized as experimental or innovative. I’ve published five books of fiction, story collections, and a short novel. I’ve been published widely in literary journals. Among my previous books are Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman (FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize) and a short novel, The Petals of Your Eyes (Starcherone/Dzanc). I admire Carol’s writing and had interviewed her for a couple of articles I was writing for AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle magazine. A year or so after the interview, she emailed me, inviting me to do a collaboration.

Carol Guess: My approach to writing came through music and dance. Years ago, I studied ballet and moved to New York to try to make a career in that world. Obviously that didn’t happen, but my early experience with failure made me determined to be good at something else! I’d always written for pleasure, so I began taking my writing more seriously, initially focusing on poetry. I did my MFA in poetry; I’ve never actually taken a class in fiction writing. I put my first novel together as an experiment. I wanted to teach myself how to write a novel, and so I did. Since then I’ve published twenty books, each one an experiment and a challenge. I’ll ask myself, “What would happen if …” and then set out to answer my own question. Read more »

Robert Caro: (Obsessively) Working

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Robert Caro might well go down in history as the greatest American biographer of all time. Through two monumental biographies, one of Robert Moses – perhaps the most powerful man in New York City’s history – and the other an epic multivolume treatment of the life and times of Lyndon Johnson – perhaps the president who wielded the greatest political power of any in American history – Caro has illuminated what power and especially political power is all about, and the lengths men will go to acquire and hold on to it. Part deep psychological profiles, part grand portraits of their times, Caro has made the men and the places and times indelible. His treatment of individuals, while as complete as any that can be found, is in some sense only a lens through which one understands the world at large, but because he is such an uncontested master of his trade, he makes the man indistinguishable from the time and place, so that understanding Robert Moses through “The Power Broker” effectively means understanding New York City in the first half of the 20th century, and understanding Lyndon Johnson through “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” effectively means understanding America in the mid 20th century.

By drawing up this grand landscape, Caro has become one of the most obsessive and exhaustive non-fiction writers of all time, going to great lengths to acquire the most minute details about his subject, whether it’s tracking down every individual connected with a specific topic or interviewing them or spending six days a week in the archives. He worked for seven years on the Moses biography, and has worked an incredible forty-five years on the years of Lyndon Johnson. At 83 his fans are worried, and they are imploring him to finish the fifth and last volume as soon as possible. But Caro shows no sign of slowing down.

In “Working”, Caro takes the reader behind the scenes of some of his most important research, but this is not an autobiography – he helpfully informs us that that long book is coming soon (and anyone who has read Caro would know just how long it will be). He describes being overwhelmed by the 45 million documents in the LBJ library and the almost equal number in the New York Public Library, and obsessively combing through them every day from 9 AM to 6 PM cross-referencing memos, letters, government reports, phone call transcripts, the dreariest and most exciting written material and every kind of formal and informal piece of papers with individuals who he would then call or visit to interview. Read more »

Monday, August 27, 2018

On Tact

Posted on by Joan Harvey

by Joan Harvey

I am deeply convinced that it is tactless to speak of tact (unfortunately that is what I am doing). —Roland Barthes, The Neutral

By Indischer Maler des 6. Jahrhunderts – The Yorck Project 

A married doctor, a relative of the novelist Amitava Kumar, is having illicit sex with a medical receptionist at a gym across the street from the hospital where he works. (It’s hard not to write “hot illicit sex” but of course the quality is unknown). Kumar’s piece from The Baffler is not about the adultery, but about the decision to expose it, as well as a few other incidents also having to do with the uncomfortable outing of other people’s sex lives and bad behavior. Kumar describes how this story (which he overheard while eavesdropping and recorded in his notebook) was first published in a national newspaper in India where that doctor lives, and the subsequent worry of his sister, who read the piece, that the doctor would find out. Kumar’s reasoning was that in publishing his notes about the day, it would be false to omit this particular note.

We’re all interested in the sex lives of others, particularly when they are transgressive. But clearly in writing this follow-up explanatory piece Kumar had some conflicts about what a writer is justified in saying, and on what subjects he should remain silent. (And the Freudian in me couldn’t help noting that in discussing his prior decision to reveal the doctor’s secret sex life, Kumar made sure that an even larger audience was made aware of it, as if somehow he hadn’t exposed it quite enough the first time round.)

Kumar is doing difficult work for us, showing how he came to justify his choice. This is what happened, he writes; this is how I recorded it, I will tell the truth. But if a somewhat throwaway line in a notebook causes unnecessary pain, is it justified? If Kumar had been completely comfortable with his act he would have had no reason to explore it. Kumar writes “ I might sound brazen here, but what I’m actually calling for is greater vulnerability. Even shame…I respect the ethical bent, but am impatient with it. In fact, I see it as a privilege. It is easy to be righteous; much more difficult, but also preferable, in my opinion, to be real.” Read more »

Monday, July 9, 2018

The wisdom of John Wheeler and Oliver Sacks

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A rare and happy coincidence today: The birthdays of both John Archibald Wheeler and Oliver Sacks. Wheeler was one of the most prominent physicists of the twentieth century. Sacks was one of the most prominent medical writers of his time. Both of them were great explorers, the first of the universe beyond and the second of the universe within.

What made both men special, however, was that they transcended mere accomplishment in the traditional genres that they worked in, and in that process they stand as role models for an age that seems so fractured. Wheeler the physicist was also Wheeler the poet and Wheeler the philosopher. Throughout his life he transmitted startling new ideas through eloquent prose that was too radical for academic journals. Most of his important writings made their way to us through talks and books. Sacks the neurologist was far more than a neurologist, and Sacks the writer was much more than a writer. Both Wheeler and Sacks had a transcendent view of humanity and the universe, a view that is well worth taking to heart in our own self-centered times.

Their backgrounds shaped their views and their destiny. John Wheeler grew up in an age when physics was transforming our view of the universe. While he was too young to participate in the genesis of the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics, he came on stage at the right time to fully implement the revolution in the burgeoning fields of particle and nuclear physics. Read more »

Monday, August 22, 2011

Tips for (Fiction and/or Comic) Writers

Posted on by Tauriq Moosa

by Tauriq Moosa

Putting one word, one letter, after the other in order to make a coherent sentence is something most of us can do: you are currently doing it now, except you are forced to ride the tracks of comprehension as laid down by words I choose. There are some of us, stupidly, who are aiming to make this into our profession, in whatever medium most suits our tastes, personality, and continual interest. Having recently begun a thesis, I needed a way to not view writing as a, sometimes, tortuous process, dealing with multiple medical and philosophical and political documents. I decided to dabble in writing comics or, rather, graphic novels.

It’s quite a strange move for me, considering I’ve only started reading comics recently. But that’s not what matters.

What I’d like to do is convey some tips to those looking into writing fiction, in general, and comic fiction, in particular. Because I don’t think people interested in writing creatively are necessarily interested in graphic-novel writing, I will separate the general and specific tips I’ve picked up.

However, here is a disclaimer: I am not a published or recognised writer. I am a complete amateur. Indeed, I have a number of synopses and plot outlines, but no firmly attached artists or publishers to any of them. Finding artists, when you cannot draw, cannot pay, or are an unknown is one of the most difficult aspects of comic writing. This is my current problem, but then I’m in two minds about this as I will explain later. What I am presenting to you is the end results of hundreds of articles I’ve read and discussions I’ve had with more successful people. So I'm not going to keep writing “…but that's just my view at the moment” or “…but do realise this is one person's perspective…”. You've got you're disclaimer. Move on.

TIPS FOR WRITING (FICTION)

1. Read.

This is the second most insulting instruction you can give to someone interested in writing (I’ll tell you the most insulting one at the end). However, it is not unheard of for writers to be lazy or non-readers. I’m thinking of the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who wrote beautifully and powerfully, but was not himself an avid reader.

By read, I mean read everything. Published authors and editors constantly state that being unaware of the medium is common problem. You could at the very least simply retell an existing story. Or you could be unaware that your “highly original” idea has not only been duplicated, but told by a writer infinitely more talented (this happened to me and an Ian McEwan story).

Read more »

Monday, July 12, 2010

A Diatribe from the Remains of Dr. Fred McCabe

Posted on by Daniel Rourke

by Daniel Rourke

About a month ago in handling the remains of one Dr. Fred McCabe I found rich notes of contemplation on the subject of information theory. It appears that Fred could have written an entire book on the intricacies of hidden data, encoded messages and deceptive methods of transmission. Instead his notes exist in the form of a cryptic assemblage of definitions and examples, arranged into what Dr. McCabe himself labelled a series of ‘moments’.

I offer these moments alongside some of the ten thousand images Dr. McCabe amassed in a separate, but intimately linked, archive. The preface to this abridged compendium is little capable of preparing one for the disarray of material, but by introducing this text with Fred’s own words it is my hope that a sense of the larger project will take root in the reader’s fertile imagination.

The Moment of the Message: A Diatribe

by Dr. Fred McCabe

More than ten thousand books on mathematics and a thousand books on philosophy exist for every one upon information. This is surprising. It must mean something.

I want to give you a message. But first. I have to decide how to deliver the message.

This is that moment.

I can write it down, or perhaps memorise it – reciting it in my head like a mantra, a prayer chanted in the Palace gardens. And later, speaking in your ear, I will repeat it to you. That is, if you want to hear it.

I could send it to you, by post, or telegram. After writing it down I will transmit it to you. Broadcasting on your frequency in the hope that you will be tuned in at the right moment. Speaking your language. Encoded and encrypted, only you will understand it.

I have a message for you and I want you to receive it. But first. I have to decide what the message is.

This is that moment:

This is the moment of the message

From the earliest days of information theory it has been appreciated that information per se is not a good measure of message value. The value of a message appears to reside not in its information (its absolutely unpredictable parts) but rather in what might be called its redundancy—parts predictable only with difficulty, things the receiver could in principle have figured out without being told, but only at considerable cost in money, time, or computation. In other words, the value of a message is the amount of work plausibly done by its originator, which its receiver is saved from having to repeat.

This is the moment my water arrived at room temperature

The term enthalpy comes from the Classical Greek prefix en-, meaning “to put into”, and the verb thalpein, meaning “to heat”.

For a simple system, with a constant number of particles, the difference in enthalpy is the maximum amount of thermal energy derivable from a thermodynamic process in which the pressure is held constant.

This is the moment the wafer became the body of Christ

The Roman Catholic Church got itself into a bit of a mess. Positing God as the victim of the sacrifice introduced a threshold of undecidability between the human and the divine. The simultaneous presence of two natures, which also occurs in transubstantiation, when the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, threatens to collapse the divine into the human; the sacred into the profane. The question of whether Christ really is man and God, of whether the wafer really is bread and body, falters between metaphysics and human politics. The Pope, for all his failings, has to decide the undecidable.

Read more »

Monday, July 13, 2009

Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription

Posted on by Daniel Rourke

by Daniel Rourke

The urban landscape is overrun with paths. Road-paths pulling transport, pavement-paths and architectural-paths guiding feet towards throbbing hubs of commerce, leisure and abode.Beyond the limits of urban paths, planned and set in tarmac or concrete, are perhaps the most timeless paths of all. Gaston Bachelard called them Desire Paths, physical etchings in our surroundings drawn by the thoughtless movement of human feet. In planning the layout of a city designers aim to limit the emergence of worn strips of earth that cut through the green grass. People skipping corners or connecting distinct spaces vote with their feet the paths they desire. Many of the pictures on the right (from this Flickr group) show typical design solutions to the desire path. A delimiting fence, wall or thoroughfare, a row of trees, carefully planted to ease the human flow back in line with the rigid, urban aesthetic. These control mechanisms have little effect – people merely walk around them – and the desire path continues to intend itself exactly where designers had feared it would.

The technical term for the surface of a planetary body, whether urbanised, earth covered or extra-terrestrial, is regolith. As well as the wear of feet, the regolith may be eroded by wind, rain, the path of running water or the tiny movement of a glacier down the coarse plane of a mountain. If one extends the meaning of the term regolith it becomes a valuable metaphor for the outer layer upon or through which any manner of paths may be inscribed.

The self-titled first Emperor of China, Qín Shǐhuáng, attempted, in his own extravagant way, to re-landscape the regolith of time. By building the Great Wall around his Kingdom and ordering the burning of all the books written before his birth Qín Shǐhuáng intended to isolate his Kingdom in its own mythic garden of innocence. Far from protecting his people from the marauding barbarians to the West or the corrupting knowledge of the past Qín Shǐhuáng's decision to enclose his Kingdom probably expanded his subject's capacity for desire beyond it. There is no better way to cause someone to read something than to tell them they cannot; no better way to cause someone to dream beyond some kingdom, or attempt to destroy it, than to erect a wall around it. As we demarcate paths we cause desire to erupt beyond them. The regolith, whether physical or ethereal, will never cease to degrade against our wishes.

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