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The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting
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The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting
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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801445866 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 04/15/2007 |
Pages: | 344 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.19(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Iron Whim
By Darren Wershler-Henry
Random House
Darren Wershler-HenryAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0771089252
Chapter One
Typewriting is dead, but its ghosts still haunt us. Even in our image-saturated culture, the iconic value of the typewriter looms large. Artfully grainy, sepia-toned close-up photos of its quaint circular keys grace the covers of tastefully matte-laminated paperbacks, announcing yet another volume extolling the virtues of the writing life. In magazine and billboard ads, magnified blotchy serifed fonts mimic the look of text typed on battered machines with old, dirty ribbons: pixel-perfect damaged letters that sit crookedly above or below the line with paradoxical consistency. On radio and tv, the rapid clatter of type bars hitting paper signals the beginning of news broadcasts. We all know what this sound means: important information will soon be conveyed. Typewriters may have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but their ghosts are everywhere.
What's remarkable is not that typewriting continues to haunt us, but that typewriting itself was always haunted.
Consider the case of Felix Pender, a successful young author of humorous stories. Pender, a character in "A Psychical Invasion," one of Algernon Blackwood's turn-of-the-century tales of the paranormal, has a problem. Though he is producing new work at an alarming rate, the young Pender is no longer capable of writing anything funny. All his laughter seems "hollow and ghastly, and ideas of evil and tragedy [tread] close upon the heels of the comic."
In the best Edwardian fashion, Pender's difficulties stem from his misguided attempt to learn Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. In order to experience the ludicrous in a manner that he would not normally, and therefore, presumably, to generate some new material, Pender starves himself for six hours, then takes an "experimental dose" of hashish.4 After a slightly disconcerting laughing jag, he goes to bed, wakes late, and sits down to write:
All that day I wrote and wrote and wrote. My sense of laughter seemed wonderfully quickened and my characters acted without effort out of the heart of true humour. I was exceedingly pleased with this result of my experiment. But when the stenographer had taken her departure and I came to read over the pages she had typed out, I recalled her sudden glances of surprise and the odd way she had looked up at me while I was dictating. I was amazed at what I read and could hardly believe I had uttered it . . .
It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could remember, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The sense was so altered. At the very places where my characters were intended to tickle the ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted. Dreadful innuendoes had managed to creep into the phrases. There was laughter of a kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing; and my attempt at analysis only increased my dismay. The story, as it read then, made me shudder, for by virtue of those slight changes it had come somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror disguised as merriment.
Excerpted from The Iron Whim by Darren Wershler-Henry Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Ghosts and Machines 1
Archaeology: Beginning at the End 9
Conclusion: Royal Road Test 10
The Archive of Typewriting 16
Typewriter Nostalgia 22
Assembly: Typewriting's First Impressions 33
Writing the Truth 34
Writing Blind 45
Clockwork Boys and Piano Keys 52
The Last of the "Firsts" 61
Amanuensis: Typewriting and Dictation 73
Taking Dictation 74
The Typewriter Between 78
Transylvanian Typing 81
The Type-Writer Girl 85
Remington Priestesses 95
Burroughs 105
Nothing Is True; Everything Is Permitted 110
Channelling Burroughs 118
Authority: Typewriting as Discipline 133
Pen Slavery 134
Therbligs 144
QWERTY 152
Dvorak (or, In the Navy) 158
The Poet's Stave and Bar 166
Typewriting, Identity, and Truth 177
The Monkeys 186
Barnyard Politics 200
Not an Especially Bright Dog 205
Under difficulties semi colon 211
Bourgeois Paper-Bangers 218
Acceleration: Typewriting and Speed 221
Rail Road Test 222
Ten Fingers Talk 231
On the (Royal) Road 238
Typewriters at War 245
Electrification and the End of the Grid 253
Epilogue: The Typewriter in the Garden 257
Aftermath: Typewriting After the Typewriter 259
Acknowledgements 291
Permissions 292
Notes 293
Index 324
What People are Saying About This
Who connects the typewriter with vampires, ghosts, sex, drugs, and money? Poet, theorist, and culture critic Wershler-Henry, has produced a surprising book that is nothing short of a cultural history of the complex writing machine. Richly researched, the text is composed with élan and wit. A must-read for students of contemporary literature, media studies, and anyone interested in the interconnections of modern life and technology.
I have been waiting years for just such a book on the cultural imagination of the typewriter, and Darren Wershler-Henry makes the wait well worthwhile. The Iron Whim combines historical rigor, theoretical sophistication, and an amazing breadth of literary knowledge from the canonical to the avant-gardenot to mention a palpable sense of mischievous fun. Wershler-Henry, one of today's most provocative scholars and poets, undertakes this medial archaeology with unerring precision: revealing the most surprising arcana to be central to our cultural history and making the most familiar facts of the modern writing machine seem suddenly new and strange and extravagantly unlikely. This book is necessary, intelligent, and fun.
Among the book's many fascinating topicsAmerica's early-20th-century erotic fixation on the Type-Writer Girl; the link between Remington's efforts to develop faster typists and the origins of domestic engineering, via the real-life protagonist of Cheaper by the Dozen; the mathematical formula proving that no number of monkeys could randomly peck out 'Hamlet'; the 2004 flap over the special characters used on a typewritten memo purporting to show that President Bush received preferential treatment in the Texas Air National GuardThe most persuasive is the persistence of the eerie feeling that we're not alone when we sit at the typewriter.
The Iron Whim should delight all who love typewriters and who appreciate the long, if somewhat rattly, contribution they have made to literacy and general culture.
Although he sketches in the mechanical evolution of the machine, and the industrial world around it, Wershler-Henry is never reluctant to leave the historical nuts and bolts behind. His larger interest is in the cultural and theoretical resonances of typewriting, and he considers them in an impressively wide-ranging, virtuoso performance which often has a rather Gothic air about it.
The Iron Whim is a pure delight. This 'fragmented history of typewriting' provides fascinating glimpses into the history, culture, and poetics of the typewriter, that instrument that controlled our writing for so many decades and for which nostalgia is currently at a high point. Himself a poet and critic, Wershler-Henry recounts, with great panache, how the typewriter works of such writers as Henry James and Charles Olson were actually produced. The role of the amanuensis, the dictation process, the production and reception of typed text: all these topics, clearly and vividly detailed, ensure the wide reception The Iron Whim is sure to get. I cannot imagine a reader who would not find this book intriguing and compelling.
Witty and idiosyncratic, this history of typewriting says more than one might think possible about the subject.... Wershler-Henry documents how the typewriter, once a dreaded totem of mechanization, has become an object of nostalgia, in a process that will surely repeat itself as technology advances. After all, as he writes, 'Typewriting died a violent death, and... violent deaths lead to hauntings.