On Friday, February 18th, the ribbon for my typewriter arrived. Several years ago, while I was still living in Los Angeles, California, I purchased a manual typewriter on EBay.
This particular model is a Smith-Corona Galaxie SCM manual in suitcase/carrying case (if you are a would-be writer, you probably know the type). According to my research, this machine dates back to sixties (Machines of Loving Grace pins the year at 1968).
When I first bought it, I kept merely as a piece of decoration. A pretentious announcement to visitors that a “Writer” (capital w) lived here. It remained little more than decoration for a number of years.
But at last, I ordered some ribbon through Amazon. I did not actually buy it from Amazon, but through another seller on Amazon’s network. Specifically, through an office supply company called EBS that specializes in hard to find office supplies. The exact ribbon I bought was a Smith Corona Typewriter Ribbon Spool – Black – SC-20-SCM Compatible for just $9.75, plus shipping (for a total of $14.38).
And I am so glad that I did.
Composing on a manual typewriter is amazingly satisfying. The only other time I tried was once or twice, just after I graduated high school and was living in the famous Parisian bookstore Shakespeare & Company. The owner, George Whitman, kept an old manual in one of the upstairs rooms for his “tumbleweeds” (as he called the itinerants who slept in his bookstore) to write on. At the time, though, I did not use it much, preferring pen and paper.
Using this machine requires one to slow down considerably. You must forcefully pound the keys, or else the letters will come out to faint to be read. This slowing down makes you very aware of each and every letter, giving you a greater aesthetic appreciation of language at its most basic level – that of the word (apologies to Ludwig Wittgenstein who, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, insisted that the basic unit of language was the sentence). I also have, over the last few months, fallen in love with fonts that resemble that of classic typewriters. Even on my computer, I have been experimenting with this sort of typography.
So far, I have not tried composing poetry or essays on it, but I did write a letter to my good friend, Ryan Leonard.
My intention is to continue to drive towards a sort of nostalgia. One is always seeing new collections of letters from famous writers and poets being released, but the rise of email and Facebook has rendered this form of communication obsolete. My reasons for this small scale resuscitation of it are both presumptuous and selfish. The truth is, I still hope to be somewhat famous as a poet or writer (though my current, meager publications are hardly likely to inspire such renown) and would like to leave some correspondence for future grad students to sift through.
I suppose the next test is to see if Ryan is inspired to write back in turn and, if so, to discover what device he will use (printer, typewriter, pen).
the coffee philosopher 