The physicality of typing
If you've ever sat within 15 feet of my desk at home or work, you know I type loud, and I type loud when I'm excited, in good ways or bad. So, when TMN — an endless source of ideas for this blog — reruns "Foolish Chances with Words," Michael Erard's 2006 love letter to a typewriter, a computer comparison he makes doesn't fit me: "Typing represents to me the work of writing, of striking the physical world, and in so doing, changing it. Writing on a laptop (as I did to write this) is like sweeping powder over glass — a breeze, even a breath, can undo all the work."
Who says you can't feel both? Writing seems more dangerous to me that way, to throw yourself into words that could yet blow away. To believe in writing's physical effects when the reality is virtual is a risk.
But to each his or her own, and debating typewriters vs. laptops isn't the point of this post. It's how Erard addresses the physicality of font that's wonderful to me. "These are the keys on which I pounded out hundreds of thousands of words in letters and love letters and journal entries and papers for school … And this is the typeface that I came to think of as the default font for the essence of my eternal soul."
He shows photos of the keys and font. Later, after an airport accident, he finds: "The drop had bent the carriage so now, at the beginning of each line, the letters struck high, then dropped to find the line, a flaw I was willing to consider as the fundamental wobble of my soul but which I didn't really want thrown back in my face every 10 words."
I imagine the 12-point Verdana on this page isn't "the default font for the essence of my eternal soul," but I like the idea such a font exists. Typewriters easily win on the count, with the machinations and metal bending with use or rusting with time, and a soul detective in a fedora has your love or crime or otherwise attempted expression right where she wants it. With online, we have limits. We have serious limits. We are left in the kind of author truth vs. audience truth fight that always rages around the novel, except with the choices of digi-heavyweights and the technicalities of embedding over us all. The soul hits the wall.
But I think the limits around our defaults make us look elsewhere for possibilites in the physical details of text — following in the probable desires of typesetter eons — and I think we find creative moments.
We form styles around encountered objects or demand their stripping. Linking becomes 3-D punctuation and literal sentence diagramming at once. Standard punctuation takes on more meaning. The list goes on. After years of the thought never crossing my mind, I'm now apparently obsessed with justification and a rewrite game to control line breaks.
The fourth line of the fourth paragraph of this post is killing me. The line's deep in the quote, beyond what I can affect, and the corporeal letdown keeps me glad for the responsive act and attraction of input.
March 30th, 2009 at 9:15 AM
I somewhat disagree that composition has so much in common with preparing a line of coke.
March 30th, 2009 at 11:07 PM
I'm choosing to believe he meant working at a powdered doughnut factory, which is totally comparable.