I have a new conduit for my writing and my thoughts: the Samsung NC-10. It is an amazing device. It weighs three pounds, has great specs, and has a 93% keyboard. I have particularly small hands so this is actually an advantage. I find my notes for Lester's class have improved considerably and will help when I start my paper on Witkiewicz. I could sing its praises for pages. For what it is, a portable writing machine, it is one of the finest machines in history.
Yet the volume of writing that I have produced has been minimal - I could attribute this to a dry spell in my creativity, but I think the problem is a deeper one, rooted in the way I approach the machine itself. One difficulty is that I am an incredibly fast typist. So much so that i can outpace the thoughts in my head and type-arrive at them before I have even finished! This blogpost is typed intentionally wrong - or intentionally slow. I find myself going back into the old patterns.
I'm so used to writing on pen and paper. The flow of words and their cursive structure is important to me. However I feel a lot of time is lost by writing in pen and paper because I invariably have to transcribe onto computer anyway. If only it were possible for me to harness that creative energy that the pen and paper present through the medium of typing. I think by slowing down and taking my time with each word, typing perhaps as slow as I write, my approach to type-writing may come closer to the writing-ideal.
I think to myself, 'what a worthless post,' though I do understand the importance of thinking about how we transmit our thoughts onto paper, canvas, train cars, or hard drives. If we go along with McLuhan's famous assertion, 'The Medium is the Message,' what does that say about blogging? To go along with the Ticket That Exploded, is it important to know that the book was typewritten?
This just makes me want to check out Kittler's Grammophone, Film, Typewriter in order to better understand this phenomenon.
Ah, my first rant in awhile! so be it.
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I will loan it to you if you want--the stuff about typewriters and the big N is really great.
ReplyDeleteI always feel like something is lost when I'm writing and typing, and I think this blog post helps me see why.
ReplyDeleteTyping is automatic to me. Half the time I don't even have to think about which password I'm signing in with, my hands follow the familiar path of the keys and before I know it, I'm in.
But script, it takes a different kind of effort. There is a certain kind of elegance to writing things out by hand, which is why when I penpal, I refuse to type anything.
It's like that link I found a while back about how it takes longer for emotions like compassion and admiration to register compared to the more banal and base emotions. At the speed of typing, we bypass a lot of that experience without any thought. We essentially lose the connection, which is why sometimes when I'm writing a blog post, I lose my train of thought so easily. The words are coming too fast for the thoughts behind them to support them, and then I don't know where I am anymore.
Typing, you truly can get lost in the words, and not in the message.