After the sad news about Godrej and Boyce closing down the last factory to manufacture new manual typewriters, I’m pleased to report that electric typewriters are definitely still being manufactured.

Of course, despite the impact of the IBM Selectric on businesses around the world, there is no question that the electric typewriter completely lacks the romanticism and drama of an old fashioned manual. Fortunately, there are rumors that a company in China continues to produce portable manual typewriters. No word on whether they produce any with English letters.

College professor Pamela Newton wrote this article purporting to explicate a flaw in the Kindle (and in e-readers, in general). The flaw, it turns out, is the difficulty and awkwardness involved in annotating volumes.

While she uses the far more studious sounding “annotation,” as opposed to the dilettantish “marginalia,” it amounts to the same thing.

I have never done much writing on the pages of my books, yet now it seems to the raison d’etre du jour for bemoaning the rise of e-readers.

Basically, the issue is that poetry is a massive failure in e-book formats because ePub and other e-book software have no respect for line breaks. This is not such a big deal when you’re talking about prose, but it’s death for poetry.

As e-books become a larger and larger segment of the book market, the failure of poetry to be included will become more and more of a problem for poetry in America.

Right now, about the only solution out there consist of using PDFs, rather than than “traditional” (what is the best word to use here? I don’t know) e-books. Bookmobile’s Ampersand is an example of this.

The Allen Foundation did recently give Copper Canyon Press a $100,000 grant to search for a solution to this problem. While I have somewhat mixed feelings about Copper Canyon – they are the most prominent publisher of poetry in America, but they are also amazingly conservative in the poets they choose to publish – there is no doubt that, of all publishers of poetry, they have the commitment and profile to actually get this done.

I miss the days before the internet when I couldn’t find everything I wanted. No more searching for an unabridged Count of Monte Cristo or a copy of Richard III. No more days when used bookstores were the only place to find certain books. No more buying copies of Richard Wagner’s overtures to discover that what I was really looking for Carl Orff.

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).

As the careful reader knows, I have developed a certain obsession with automated, online submissions, as used by contemporary literary journals. While I understand their utility, I am still haunted by the notion that, in practice, we lose something. Though it is still possible for editorial staff to use the content management systems to deliver more detailed messages, it is so much easier to simply click “reject” and automatically send some formulaic language to the writer.

No one liked receiving those old letters, with the notes describing the many flaws and deficiencies of our submitted works, but we learned something from them. I don’t get a damn thing from an email that contains the same language as everyone else received.

And of course, the editorial staff can still choose to offer a more detailed critique with their rejections. But how many really do? And how many really do compared to when they had to print out a letter with your name on it and containing the names of one or more of your poems? A letter truly feels more personal, which is what drives editorial staff to write critiques – even if just a hand-written scrawls across and otherwise formulaic letter. But this new method, for all its efficiency, is too detached to encourage that.

The reason I am bringing this up again is simply because I ran into this little article online — http://www.pw.org/content/new_treefree_submission_services – a list and a brief history of some online submission systems. Of those listed, I know that I have dealt with submishmash, though I’m not sure about the others.

Anybody want to disagree with my opinion on these systems?