“What Happened to the Dog?” A Story About a Typewriter, Actually, Typed on a 1967 Hermes 3000

Of late I have become an enthusiast of typewriting— the machine I am working on these days is a refurbished Swiss-made 1967 Hermes 3000, and quite the workhorse it is! (Ribbons? Kein Problem.) Of course I do most of my writing on my computer using Microsoft Word; WordPress for this blog; not to mention multitudinous hours spent with ye olde email program. But for laser-level attentional focus–and percussive energy!– the typewriter is something special, and as time goes by, the more I use it, the more I appreciate it. In fact, I now use my typewriter for one thing or another (drafts, notes, letters, recipe cards) almost every day.

Though I have yet to meet him in person, my mentor in the Typosphere is none other than Richard Polt, professor of philosophy at Xavier University and the author of some heavy-weight tomes on Heidegger, and, to the point, a practical manual I often consult, and warmly recommend to anyone thinking of buying a typewriter, or, say, hauling Grandpa’s out of some cobwebbed corner of the garage: The Typewriter Revolution. As “Richard P.” Professor Polt also maintains a blog of the same name. And now he, Frederic S. Durbin, and Andrew V. McFeaters, have put together a pair of anthologies, both just published, the second of which, Escapements: Typewritten Tales from Post-Digital Worlds (Loose Dog Press, 2019), includes a story of mine: “What Happened to the Dog?”

(Well, I guess it got loose, haha.)

>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

From the Typosphere: "Right & Wrong"

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

Typed on the 1961 Hermes 3000, a pair of poems from Meteor:


>> CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

The Typewriter Manifesto by Richard Polt, Plus Cyberflanerie on Technology

 [Viva, Richard Polt! 
He says that if you send him your address he will send you this postcard.]

One of the themes in my work-in-progress on Far West Texas is the nature and pervasive influence of technology, especially digital technology-- but also other kinds of industrial and military technology.

So what's with the typewriter poem? The poem pictured above, "The Typewriter Manifesto," is by philosophy professor Richard Polt. I'm a big fan of his blog and his book, The Typewriter Revolution.

My 56 year-old Hermes 3000
works fine, no need to update the OX!
(Yes, ribbons are easy to score
on eBay)

Nope, I am not a Luddite, but yep, I use a typewriter on occasion. When needed, I also use a Zassenhaus kitchen timer, a 30 year-old finance-nerd calculator (I used to be a finance nerd), and a battery-operated alarm clock. Yes, I know there are apps for all of those, and yes, I actually have downloaded and previously used all those apps on my smartphone but, e-NUFFF with the digital! Too many hours of my day are already in thrall to my laptop, writing on WORD or blogging, emailing, podcasting, maintaining my website, surfing (other blogs, mainly, and newspapers, plus occasional podcasts and videos), and once in a purple moon, making videos. Most days my iPhone stays in its drawer, battery dead, and I like it that way.

[>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]

But kiddos, this not a writer-from-an-older-generation-resisting-innovation thing. Back when I was avid to adopt new technology. I had a cell phone when they were the size and shape and weight of a brick. I started my website in 1999! I bought the first Kindle model, and the first iPad model. I was one of the first writers to make my own Kindle editions (check out my latest). I started podcasting in 2010. I even spent oodles more time than I should have figuring out the bells-and-whistles of iTunes' iBook Author app... and so on and so forth.

From Charles Melville Scammon's
"California Grays Among the Ice"
Whales! Magnificent outside!
Digestive juices inside!

In short, with technology, especially anything having to do with writing and publishing, I dove right into the deep end... and I have seen the whale. And it was not, is not, and will not be on my schedule to get swallowed whole.

(My schedule, by the way, is on my Filofax, a paper-based system, and paper-based for good reason.)

P.S. Ye olde "Thirty Deadly Effective Ways to Free Up Bits, Drips & Gimungously Vast Swaths of Time for Writing." I hereby remind myself to take my own advice.

CYBERFLANERIE ON TECHNOLOGY

Richard Polt's NYT Op-Ed "Anything But Human"

Mark Blitz explains Martin Heidegger on technology.

(The original pretzel-brain inducing essay by Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," with its handful of profound points coccooned within copious noodathipious deustcher Philosophieprofessor flooflemoofle, is here.)

On the express elevator to the top of my To Read tower: Richard Polt's Heidegger: A Introduction

###

Recommended reading on technology:

E.M. Forster "The Machine Stops"

Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants

Jason Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget

Dmitry Orlov's Shrinking the Technosphere

Ted Koppel's Lights Out

Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head


###

For those who can handle an esoteric discussion on technology without firecrackers going off in their wig, there is Dr. John C. Lilly:

S.J. Kerrigan on Lilly and the Solid State Entity
S.J. Kerrigan's documentary John C. Lilly and the Solid State Entity

And here is the Lilly interview with Jeffrey Mishlove, for "Thinking Allowed" (the one where Dr. Lilly wears his earrings and Davy Crockett hat). Um, you will not eat your popcorn during this one.

###

Delighted to have surfed upon Tadeuz Patzek's blog, LifeItself. Patzek is a professor of petroleum engineering, recently chair of the department at University Texas Austin. He is co-author with Joseph A. Tainter of Drilling Down. I read Drilling Down on Kindle this week, then bought the paperback to read it again.

Brief interview with Professor Patzek:

See also the Texas Observer interview with Professor Patzek.
And here is what Patzek has to say about agrofuels in a long and extra crunchy lecture.


###

Nearing the tippy top of the "To Read" pile:
Philip Mirowski's More Heat Than Light: Economics of Social Physics
Douglas Rushkoff's Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus


####

Nearing to the top of the "To Listen" list:
Douglas Rushkoff's Team Human Podcast

###

A FINTECH NOTE-OID ON NACTEDAs

As for financial technology, "A Letter to Jamie Dimon" by Adam Ludwin is best thing I have seen to date on cryptocurrencies.

Ludwin's second most interesting quote:

"Cryptocurrencies are a new asset class that enable decentralized applications."

In other words, "cryptocurrencies" are not currencies as we know them. "Crypto" is too sexy a word for what these actually are. So let's call these puppies NACTEDAs. Rhymes with "rutabagas."

Ludwin's most interesting quote? Buried deep in the middle of his explanation of the nature of NACTEDAs is this colorful explanation of how NACTEDAs are generated or "mined":

"Now we need an actual contest... On your mark, get set: find a random number generated by the network! The number is really, really hard to find So hard that the only way to find it is to use tons of processing power and burn through electricity. It's a computing version of what Veruca Salt made her dad and his poor factory workers do in Willy Wonka. A brute force search for a golden ticket (or in this case, a golden number)."

This is not a point Ludwin makes (he sails on, with utter nonchalance): It is just a question of time-- maybe a loooooooong time, albeit perchance a seemingly out-of-nowhere-pile-on-Harvey-Weinstein moment-- until people recognize the environmental and social justice implications of such extravagant electricity use for generating NACTEDAs.

Can you say, opportunity cost?

As it stands, most people don't or don't want to grok where the magic invisible elixir that always seems to be there at the flip of a switch actually comes from.... which is, uh, usually... and overwhelmingly... coal. And neither do they grok that this flow of power is not never-ending, but a utility that can be cut off. Ye olde winter storm can do it for a day or so. More ominously, the grid itself can fail for lack of maintenance, or any one of one a goodly number of events-- it need not necessarily be some cinematically apocalyptic cyberattack or epic solar flare. Can you say Puerto Rico. Can you say Mexico City after the earthquake. Can you say what happens when you don't pay your bill. Or if the electrical company makes a mistrake. Lalalalala.

In any event, I wouldn't recommend a camping vacation on some random mountaintop in West Virginia any time for... the rest of your life.

####

And herewith, hat tip to Root Simple, Lloyd Kahn demonstrates his low-tech dishwashing method. The duck part at the end is charmingly weird.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Literary Travel Writing: Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution

Consider the Typewriter (Am I Kidding? No, I Am Not Kidding)

Cal Newport's DEEP WORK / Study Hacks Blog / On Quitting Social Media

Typosphere, Ho! "Stay West" on My 1961 Hermes 3000

[[ My first attempt at typing on a typewriter in nearly thirty years ]]

[[ My writing assistant denies any and all responsibility for slipshod typing 
or head-scratching sushi poetry. ]]

THANK YOU, TYPEWRITER TECHS

My refurbished 1961 Hermes 3000 typewriter has arrived in Mexico City. Typewriter Techs, the Riverside, Illinois company that refurbished it, shipped it to California in a box so well padded it could have survived a Mars landing; having discarded the packing materials and box, I then grew some new biceps carrying it on board my flight home. I'd say it weighs about the same as a wet brick. It was a loooooong way from the security screening area to the gate. Jack LaLanne, watch out.

[[ No, not the French scarf company. 
This Hermes was of Swiss manufacture of yore. ]]

The color is just as I had hoped, a foamy celadon (although it looks gray in this photo— too strong a flash). 


[>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]
LIKE TIME TRAVELING

I'm old enough to have had nearly two decades of experience with typewriters, both manual and electric, before I started using a computer in the late 1980s. It was an eerie experience to type on a typewriter again... like time traveling. 

My first attempts at typing on this antique were clumsy, since I am, as are we all, so used to letting fingertips fly over a laptop's keys and making scads of corrections en medias res and whatever whenever wherever and with the benefit of, after penicillin and sliced bread, the bestest thing ever invented: CNTRL Z! 

But I like the deliberateness of typing on a manual typewriter— the goose-stepping linearity of it. That is the whole point, for me as a writer now. (Why? See my previous post, Consider the Typewriter. Am I kidding? No, I am not kidding.)

Madam Mayo says, The Anti-Digital Revolution will be Youtubed! 
And blogged! And, when I get around to it, tweeted!

Git yer iron-knee right here, on a spatula!

But seriously, check out this fine trailer for philosopher Richard Polt's 

excellent and thought-provoking resource The Typewriter Revolution

WHY AN HERMES 3000?

I chose the Hermes 3000 because of Richard Polt's recommendation in The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist's Companion for the 21st Century:

"The 3000 model is a Swiss segment-shifted typewriter with excellent alignment, smooth carriage return, and quality manufacturing, introduced in the fifties. You’ll find it in a wonderfully bulbous body, painted in a color that some call “sea-foam green”... Not the very fastest or snappiest typewriter, but “buttery” in its smoothness, as fans like to say... Users include Larry McMurtry, Sam Shepard, Eugene Ionesco, and Stephen Fry."

A tip of the Stetson to my fellow Texan Mr. McMurtry. As for Monsieur Ionesco, voila l'entrevue:

[[ Watch the interview with English subtitles here. 

No, alas, Ionesco's Hermes 3000 does not make an appearance.

Mais nous pouvons utiliser notre imagination. ]]

[[ My 1961 Hermes 3000  arrived in its original carrying case,
along with, LOL, total yay, a packet of jellybeans!! ]]

[[ Under the jellybeans, a message from Typewriter Techs. ]]

[[ The original 1961 Hermes 3000 instruction manual 
(Ha! Will those websites and YouTube videos still be available 
and playable in 55 years?! You reeeeeeeeeally think so...?) ]]

[[ The warranty, yay, from Typewriter Techs. ]]

I WILL NOT PANIC ABOUT TYEWRITER RIBBONS NO I WILL NOT PANIC

Although we now inhabit a consumersphere rife with such exploitative poppycock as single-serve Nespresso capsules... it is nonetheless easy-peasy to find typewriter ribbons that work for multitudinous models and makes of typewriters. I knew that from reading Polt's The Typewriter Revolution, and a quick Google. Furthermore, Typewriter Techs included this with their shipment:

In case you cannot read the image and/or your brain, like mine, goes into blur mode WITH ANYTHING WRITTEN PLEASEGODWHY ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS, it says:

"ALL ABOUT RIBBONS 

"In the 1950s ribbon sales topped 50 million annually, they were the toner of their day. But unlike toner most typewriters will take the same ribbons. There are several direct replacement ribbons available for most machines. If you cannot find one, don't panic. The ribbon itself is identical, only the spool changes. We recommend you purchase the genetic black., or black and red ribbon and rewind it onto your current spools. This is the least expensive and guarantees a correct fit. You can also contact us we stock a large variety if replacement ribbons.

"Cloth ribbons will hold more ink than nylon. Cotton will soak up the ink, nylon it just lays on top of it. A typical ribbon should last about 900,000 characters or about 180,000 words... That's around 500 pages. A good quality ribbon will transfer the ink without leaving excessive ink on the type bars or pages. If the entire type slug is covered in blue, it's probably not a good ribbon to use again. Black only ribbons can be turned upside down and doubled in life."

YE PAD

A related and most felicitous purchase was the Jackalope typewriter pad. Definitely it cuts the noise.

[[ The typewriter pad. Land o' Goshen,
why didn't I use one of these before?! ]]

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, YE LOVELY TYPEWRITER FABRIC

[[ My writing assistant remains confused yet pugfully blasé. ]]

A most thoughtful holiday gift from my sister's dog (yes, in our family the dogs give presents): this yardage of neat-o typewriter fabric and I do like it draped over the Hermes, just so. Nope, I am not going to attempt anything on a sewing machine, the typewriter is my own personal Mount Everest for the moment. Must get typing. 

More anon.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Cal Newport's "Study Hacks" / Deep Work / On Quitting Social Media

Why Aren't There More Readers? A Note on Curiosity, Creativity, and Courage

On Seeing as an Artist

Consider the Typewriter (Am I kidding? No, I am not kidding)

Perhaps, dear reader, you have heard of Freedom, the app that blocks the Internet so you can focus on your writing (or whatever offline task). It is not cheap; prices have gone up more than a smidge (ayyyy!) since I purchased it some years ago for a mere USD 10. Nope, I don't use it. End of review.

Of course, a more economical alternative for those who work at home would be to simply switch off the wi-fi signal. 

But never mind, there you are, glued to your computer, same screen, same keyboard, same desk, same chair, and whether you're using the Freedom app or you've turned off the wi-fi signal, either can be reversed (that is, the Freedom app turned off, or the wi-fi switched back on) in a matter of the slight inconvenience of a moment. Staying off-line when you're working on a computer is akin to trying to diet with an open box of chocolates within reach! As they say, Don't think about the pink elephant. Or, elephant-shaped chocolates with a cherry in the middle! Or, for a more au courant Internetesque analogy, Don't think about cats! And certainly not cats wearing hats!

[>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]


YE OLDE NONELECTRIC TYPEWRITER 

Yet another strategy for diminishing the pull of the Internet, at least for some writers some of the time, would be to get up from the computer, aka the distraction machine, and hie thee over to ye olde typewriter.

My typewriter went to Goodwill years ago. But now, with a book to complete, I am seriously considering going back to using a typewriter. I am old enough to remember typing up my papers for school and college, that satisfying clackety-clack and the little ding at the end of the right margin... The calm. The focus.

Speaking of analogerie, I am also, as those of you who follow this blog well know, massively, as in an-entire-parade-ground-filled-with-dancing-pink-elephants-and-cats-in-hats-all- under-a-rain-of-chocolates, massively, relieved to have deactivated my Facebook account. That was back in August of 2015. Yes indeed, having eliminated that particular bungee-pull to the Internet, I have gotten a lot more writing done, and I am answering my email in a more consistently timely manner. 

So, typewriters. I spent an afternoon of the Thanksgiving weekend doing some Internet research. Herewith:

Five Reasons to Still Use a Typewriter 
By Gerry Holt, BBC News Magazine

The Hidden World of the Typewriter
By James Joiner, The Atlantic

The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist's Companion for the 21st Century
By Richard Polt
A superb reference written by a professor of philosophy.
His blog is The Typewriter Revolution







WHERE TO FIND A GOOD OLD (AND MAYBE REALLY OLD) NONELECTRIC TYPEWRITER

Why nonelectric? It might be nice to type in the tipi! But also, it seems that some of the best workhorse typewriters are nonelectrics made back in the mid-20th century. The only nonelectric typewriters currently being manufactured are from China and although cheap, they're crap, so if a nonelectric typewriter is what you want, think vintage. 

For a rundown on vintage brands and models, both nonelectric and electric, Polt's The Typewriter Revolution is an excellent resource. On his website Polt also maintains a list of typewriter repair shops.

You could start combing through the cheapie listings on EBay and Goodwill, and if you have the time and can stand the skanky vibes, peruse the stalls in your local flea market. You might even grab a typewriter for free-- perhaps the one gathering cobwebs in your parents' garage... 

But it seems to me that, if you want to start typing ASAP on a good vintage machine, the best strategy would be to shell out the clams to a dealer who specializes in refurbishing or "reconditioning" quality typewriters, and who offers his or her customers a guarantee. I should think you would also want to confirm that it will be possible to source ribbons. 

UPDATE:
Behold! My 1961 Hermes 3000 Pica
from Typewriter Techs

A few US dealers who look like promising possibilities:

Olivers By Bee
Oliver Typewriters Manufactured from 1890-1930s

An Etsy shop for antique typewriters.

Los Altos Business Machines Online Shop
Based in Los Altos CA.

Mahogany Rhino
Another Etsy shop.

Typewriter Techs
Based in Riverside IL.

TYPEWRITER-RELATED SHOPS

Typewriter Decal Shop

Another Etsy shop.

Typewriter Pads for Sale 
(via Polt's The Typewriter Revolution blog)

AND FOR TYPEWRITER ENTHUSIASTS

The Typewriter

ETCetera online
Home of the Early Typewriter Collectors' Association

The Typewriter: A Graphic History of the Beloved Machine
By Janine Vangool
> Check out the trailer for the book-- an outstanding book trailer, by the way.

The Virtual Typewriter Museum

> Your comments and suggestions are always welcome. Write to me here.

The Grandma's Recipe Box Solution for Internet Password Management

Why I am a Mega-Fan of the FiloFax

The StandStand: 
One Highly Recommended Way to Keep on Writing While Standing

30 Deadly-Effective Ways to Free Up Bits, Drips &

Gimungously Vast Swaths of Time for Writing