In which I continue to puzzle over typewriters

Several years ago, I came by an electric typewriter at a garage sale. It cost almost nothing, but it also didn’t have a ribbon, so for years it sat in a case in my closet. Finally, this summer, I got around to getting it up and running. A writer and her typewriter, together at last! (Were this a movie, there would be a nice montage of me learning which keys need to be repaired. It’s a good thing I don’t have occasion to use the letter z too often.) I’m someone who grew up writing by hand, and who now primarily writes by laptop keyboard, so it was strange how much those first strokes on the humming Smith Corona felt like a homecoming…or perhaps a unification?

Writing about the typewriter (was he writing about a typewriter ON a typewriter?), Marshall McLuhan says this:

Because he is an audience for his own mechanical audacities, he never ceases to react to his own performance. Composing on the typewriter is like flying a kite. (261)

Using the example of E.E. Cummings, McLuhan explains the more tangible writerly acrobatics that the typewriter encouraged—he doesn’t completely credit the typewriter with the free verse revolution, but it’s given some pretty significant credit. (Cummings also once wrote that "Progress is a comfortable disease," so I'm somehow not surprised that he gets brought in here as an example.)

I continue to be fascinated by this format/content relationship, especially as it pertains to writing, and I have to admit that McLuhan’s summation of “the medium is the message” is about the catchiest way to communicate the connection that I’ve read thus far. He also does an admirable job, I think, of tracing these concepts back to the root. I—numb to the real impact of the medium as apparently I am—would never have focused so much power with the alphabet itself, naked even of any vehicle. I find it challenging to conceptualize the phonetic alphabet the way McLuhan does, though I think it might have more to do with the contrasting forces at play in his theory than with what he’s actually saying. Here I’m thinking mostly of the strange wave-like pattern of our advancement; the way the electric age is in some ways a…not a regression, exactly, but perhaps a corrective action? A way of imploding us back together? Whatever it is, it’s not quite on the typical axis of understanding.

But, back to my pet puzzlement of the moment:

One of the game-changing aspects of the typewriter is supposed to be the way it compresses and combines the composition-to-publication process. I suppose that was true when McLuhan was writing (which, as I had to continually remind myself, was in the 1960s), but the forward motion of the intervening years has made it even more true. I’m typing this post into a Word document before I paste it into the ‘new post’ box on Blogger, but I wouldn’t have to; I could leave myself with a single click between my thoughts (as they appear on the screen) and the wide and instantaneous realm of the internet.  

So, that much is technically true. But what does it matter? It can be challenging to be conscious of one’s own writing process, but I think I can work out this much about myself:

I’m more likely to write a really terrible, rough-from-the-edges-to-the-core draft if I’m writing by hand; I’m more likely to draft something from start to finish, without pausing to correct anything, if I’m writing by hand.

Put me a keyboard in front of me, and the stakes are somehow heightened. I agonize more about individual words as they come; I am more aware of my writing as it will eventually exist in front of an audience. Why is that true, when I could just as easily hand my notebook to someone, or lots of someones? 

It must be something about connectivity--the handwritten page might be more connected to me--my personal handwriting, one of the closest extensions of my own self--but the typed page seems more connected...or more connectable, to everyone else who knows the orderly lines of the alphabet. 

Frankly, this whole business is getting a little eerie. But, if I’m to get to the point of Understanding Media (and doesn't it seem more and more of an uphill climb?), then those moments of awareness are necessary. To borrow from McLuhan’s amputation metaphor, I guess I’m ready for a bout of phantom-limb syndrome?