approximate — if mine is any example — the workings of the human mind? I know my typewriter doesn’t want to. The great thing about my typewriter is its native toughness. Every couple of years it seems to be getting crankier than usual, but then a bent screw falls out of its insides and it settles back down. None of these screws has had to be replaced. In four places, my typewriter is held together with duct tape. My typewriter is from the old school, and doesn’t want to wade through a lot of fancy convolutions. My typewriter is always saying to my mind, “Hey, let’s tighten this up.”
So the next time somebody said, “I actually find I write better on a word processor,” I said, “Uh-huh. That’s what they used to say about drugs.”
But then the whole question of storage and retrieval came up. It was explained to me that you could pump cratefuls of information into a word processor, and those angels would tamp it all down into a little disk, and when you wanted any of it back you just pushed a button and those angels would find it for you.
That is something my typewriter will not do. My typewriter sits in the midst of stacks and clumps and windrows of information-filled paper. If I were to ask my typewriter to retrieve something from all this mess, it would look at me as if I were out of my human mind. I can usually find what I am looking for, myself, but when I come up with it I feel like I have finally caught a rabbit after chasing it through flocks and flocks of chickens.
And there are feathers all over the house. My store of information threatens to overwhelm, without in the least enlightening, the household. I have files that creak louder than the floorboards do, folders that shed worse than the cats. Sometimes I feel bad about this.
So when Joan — who hates a digital clock because it doesn’t have a face — and my son John — who won’t even use an aluminum bat — started saying we ought to get a word processor, I thought, well, no cottage industry can afford to drag its feet. And it’s hard not to drag them when there are papers up to your ankles. Maybe we ought to modernize, I thought.
Then we talked price. And I started yelling, “No! No! It’s right here in the Bill of Rights somewhere, that no citizen shall be required to lay out two thousand dollars in order to express himself! And what happens when people start splashing Kool-Aid around?”
So Joan bought a word processor on her own.
That’s why we have it in our house.
And a script I wrote is filed away in it. Because that way, when I have to make revisions, I don’t have to re-bang out the entire thing. I can just twiddle in the revisions and, presto, let the printer plickplickplick out a new whole.
Only the revised script is due now. And there is something wrong with the printer. Its old ribbon is exhausted, after one run-through, and it refuses to accept a new one. (My typewriter doesn’t give up on a ribbon until it has been reduced to ribbons.) So what am I supposed to do? Take a series of photographs of the script as it appears in segments on the word processor’s screen, and mail those in? The electronicians have been summoned.
As I await these divines, I am feeling less guilty about my mess of papers. One thing about my mess of papers, I can always get my hands on it. In fact I have to dig out from under it every time I get up from my typewriter.
And I am always finding things I never knew I had. For instance, I just found a copy of the Times from December 7, 1968, which I saved because my son was born the day before. And look what else was happening that day:
PUBLIC TO TAPE-RECORD IDEAS FOR NIXON
White Plains, Dec. 6 — Aides to Richard Nixon are planning to try out electronic listening posts in Westchester County and Alabama later this month as a means to let the President-elect hear from “the forgotten American.”
A spokesman at Mr. Nixon’s New York office said today the pilot projects were designed to
So the next time somebody said, “I actually find I write better on a word processor,” I said, “Uh-huh. That’s what they used to say about drugs.”
But then the whole question of storage and retrieval came up. It was explained to me that you could pump cratefuls of information into a word processor, and those angels would tamp it all down into a little disk, and when you wanted any of it back you just pushed a button and those angels would find it for you.
That is something my typewriter will not do. My typewriter sits in the midst of stacks and clumps and windrows of information-filled paper. If I were to ask my typewriter to retrieve something from all this mess, it would look at me as if I were out of my human mind. I can usually find what I am looking for, myself, but when I come up with it I feel like I have finally caught a rabbit after chasing it through flocks and flocks of chickens.
And there are feathers all over the house. My store of information threatens to overwhelm, without in the least enlightening, the household. I have files that creak louder than the floorboards do, folders that shed worse than the cats. Sometimes I feel bad about this.
So when Joan — who hates a digital clock because it doesn’t have a face — and my son John — who won’t even use an aluminum bat — started saying we ought to get a word processor, I thought, well, no cottage industry can afford to drag its feet. And it’s hard not to drag them when there are papers up to your ankles. Maybe we ought to modernize, I thought.
Then we talked price. And I started yelling, “No! No! It’s right here in the Bill of Rights somewhere, that no citizen shall be required to lay out two thousand dollars in order to express himself! And what happens when people start splashing Kool-Aid around?”
So Joan bought a word processor on her own.
That’s why we have it in our house.
And a script I wrote is filed away in it. Because that way, when I have to make revisions, I don’t have to re-bang out the entire thing. I can just twiddle in the revisions and, presto, let the printer plickplickplick out a new whole.
Only the revised script is due now. And there is something wrong with the printer. Its old ribbon is exhausted, after one run-through, and it refuses to accept a new one. (My typewriter doesn’t give up on a ribbon until it has been reduced to ribbons.) So what am I supposed to do? Take a series of photographs of the script as it appears in segments on the word processor’s screen, and mail those in? The electronicians have been summoned.
As I await these divines, I am feeling less guilty about my mess of papers. One thing about my mess of papers, I can always get my hands on it. In fact I have to dig out from under it every time I get up from my typewriter.
And I am always finding things I never knew I had. For instance, I just found a copy of the Times from December 7, 1968, which I saved because my son was born the day before. And look what else was happening that day:
PUBLIC TO TAPE-RECORD IDEAS FOR NIXON
White Plains, Dec. 6 — Aides to Richard Nixon are planning to try out electronic listening posts in Westchester County and Alabama later this month as a means to let the President-elect hear from “the forgotten American.”
A spokesman at Mr. Nixon’s New York office said today the pilot projects were designed to
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