Tap Tap

More on the topic of typewriters :

The Guardian blog responds to the news of McCarty's auction with a piece about other authors and their typewriters. Julian Barnes says :

I think you need the technology that suits the way your brain works. Sometimes you need your thoughts to go down your arm in what feels like a direct feed via pencil or felt-tip to paper, sometimes you require a more formal "sit up and address a machine".

When I tried writing on a computer, it felt an inert business. I had no relationship with the machine; whereas my IBM 196c makes a nice hum, as if it's saying quietly: "Come on, get on with it" or "Surely you can improve on that."

I also found that, while the myth of the computer was that it made everyone write at greater length, and under-correct, because on the screen and in neat print-out it looks more finished than it is, I found that I was constantly over-correcting, ending up with something too tight and unflowing for a first draft.

Another piece on the blog lists Will Self, Don DeLillo and Frederick Forsyth as more authors who use a typewriter.

Says Self :

Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire fucking thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.

And Fredrick Forsyth definitely has a point when he says :

I have never had an accident where I have pressed a button and accidentally sent seven chapters into cyberspace, never to be seen again.

Worth browsing is the site myTypewriter.com :

Authors A-Z is an ongoing project featuring the lives, works, and typewriters of the most outstanding authors around the world. Created in 2004 by Kevin McGowin and Charles Gu for myTypewriter.com, the project is both a celebration and an exploration of writers and their writing machines. Consisting of more than 80 contemporary authors from Mark Twin to Ayn Rand, Authors A-Z is a growing project documenting the important role of classic typewriters played in the formation of literature master pieces.

May i just add the note, I used typewriters for many years ... and was Typex's best customer!

BTW, the image at the top is a sculture using old typewriters by Jeremy Mayer. More can be found here.

Postscript :

Worth reading also is George Tannebaum's post Tools vs Toys [via] :

Today, of course our tools are more sophisticated than typewriters. We can do sophisticated motion graphics and editing at our desks or on a plane. We can make type dance like Isadora Duncan on LSD. We can compose and record music. We can buy a $49 video camera and shoot stuff.

These are all things Mr. McCarthy can't do on his Olivetti. But they don't make us better than McCarthy. Because Mr. McCarthy's trade involves ideas.

So far no one has built a desktop app that produces those.

Pignapped

(Warning - non-halal post.)

What do you do if you feel that the results of a literary award are :

... a stitch-up ...

(the winner announced before the shortlist is out) and the author you really feel deserves to win a particular literary prize doesn't? How about running off with the prize and holding it randsome as a protest and so that the judges are forced to reconsider their choice?

And what if the prize includes a Gloucester Old Spot pig to be named after the winning novel?

What would P.G. Wodehouse himself have done? What would his hero Bertie Wooster have done? Julian Gough tells the story of a pignapping, and the whole event is caught on video too :



The book Gough wanted to win is a wonderful novella called The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett which I so thoroughly enjoyed, that it seems a good opportunity to slip in a mention.

It's the story of how the Queen, out walking her corgis one morning, comes across a strange little van parked in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. It turns out to be a mobile library, patronised by the members of her household staff. She goes in to apologise for the trouble caused by her dogs, but finds herself taking out a novel ... and after she returns it, another ... and then another. And pretty soon a total hopeless bookaddict is born.

The queen's public duties suffer as her passion for reading grows. Worse still, she finds herself asking difficult questions about her role as monarch.

(Read an extract from the novella.)

Rumblings of the Pyschic Bowel and Other Writerly Ruminations

Some rather telling quotes from authors who have been featured in the book pages this week:

To look Asian but to speak with a British accent completely threw people. I liked that; it felt as if I was just under the radar. You couldn't place me through accent or class or ethnic things.

Peter Ho Davies on living between cultures in an interview with Liz Hoggard in today's Observer. His mother is Malaysian Chinese, his father Welsh, and he grew up in Coventry in the British Midlands. His excellent debut collection of short fiction The Ugliest House in the World won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen award, and two of the stories were set in Malaysia. (Though Thor wasn't impressed with his factual accuracy, remember?) Now his long-awaited first novel The Welsh Girl is out.

What do I think about linking the Virginia Tech killer to violent fiction? Actually, my reaction might surprise you. You think I'm going to instantly lay down a distinction between real-life psychopaths and those of us who write about them for a living?... But I do actually think there's something rather strange regarding those (like me) who write about such things - or, for that matter, those who want to read about them. After all, to write repeatedly about people dying horrifically is an odd way to make a living... but then I'm in a queasy collusion with my readers. So I'm prepared to spread the blame about a little.

Yes, you guys must take some of the blame for Dublin born author John Connolly's warped imagination. Connolly's new novel The Unquiet, is in the bookshops now. Read the whole interview in the Independent.

It seems to me that any kind of creativity, whether it be writing a novel or inventing something, is a slow accretion of knowledge, working through mistakes, failures, of figuring out what is right for you, what doesn't work ... Every single one of my short stories was a way of finding my more natural voice, which I think is the voice of Careless.

Deborah Robertson who tells Deborah Hope in the Australian how she made the transition from writer of short stories to first-time novelist. Robertson won the Aus$20,000 Nita B. Kibble prize for women writers against a field of more experienced writers, including Gail Jones. Her novel, Careless, has also been entered for a whole slew of other awards including the Miles Franklin and the Orange.

I think it's like a lot of the creative talents; the talent does have to be there, but it also needs to be cultivated in the right way. Part of this is steely determination, a lot of it is a willingness to hunker down deep inside yourself and listen to the sound of your own, psychic bowel - no matter how unpleasant it may be.

Author Will Self talks to Sarah Kinson in the Guardian about why he writes and dispenses some good advice for writers. He is currently working on a novel called The Butt which is an allegory of the way that liberals in the US and Britain responded to the invasion of Iraq.

Mrs. Malaprop and a Circumcised Car

I get a little mention at the end of Rehman Rashid's column in the New Straits Times today. Rehman reckons that portions of his previous piece in which he talked about bloggers:

... previously appeared, to deleterious effect, in a posting on Sharon Bakar’s estimable Bibliobibuli weblog

(Here's the piece.)

Ashamed to say that I wasn't sure what "deleterious" meant and had to look it up! (Was I being praised or having my knuckles slapped? Apparently the latter!). Which is actually the point of Rehman's article today in which he celebrates a love of words.

For I love and respect words. I love their precision and subtlety. And I love the sound of them; the way they form in the mind to trip off the fingertips or tongue; their rhythm, cadence and melody. I would be lost without them to flow across the contours of my feelings, giving them form and meaning, rendering them recognisable, palpable, and sometimes manageable.

I must confess that I like a writer bold enough to use the full palette of the English vocabulary with as much relish and abandon as Rehman.

Anthony Burgess and Will Self are other authors I admire for their linguistic appropriations.

The New Statesman even awarded an IgNoble Prize to Self:

... vocabulary builder, for the largest, most colourful and most dynamically obscure collection of words, phrases, neologisms and archaisms ever assembled, such as crulge, gubbertushed, and pastorauling.

Academic Suzanne Keen writes of Burgess' vocabulary:

... his love of odd words, old words, off-the-beaten-track words, his fascination with foreign tongues, etymologies, and dialects, has the effect of encrusting his fiction with a scumbled surface of language ...

I suspect Malaysians who read and love language are often so scared of being considered "bombastic" (a word I'd never even heard before I came to Malaysia! What does that tell you?) that they tend to limit themselves to the mundane and the cliched. There is a tendency here to stylistic safety and sameyness (does that word exist? Who cares!). Hurray for the writer who dares to purloin, snaffle, appropriate, coin, jiggle and juggle words.

Johnson (my crazy friend and noisy ex-colleague from teacher-training days) talks with relish about all the big words she'd managed to squeeze into her Reading University Masters thesis.

When her tutor tried to get her to simplify her vocabulary she pointed out that she'd carried these much loved words around with her for years, afraid to use them in the Malaysian context ... and now couldn't she ... just break out a little and slip them in?

Her tutor gave way.

The "vitruperation" about Rehman's "lexical choices" did indeed echo around the blogosphere ... and surprised me. I was pissed off by (and upset with) with Rehman's blanket condemnation of bloggers, but was amazed at how quickly - and with what vehemance - the comments targeted his writing style.

I was too lazy to write about it at the time, but being the pedantic English teacher that I am, I wanted to pick Jeff Ooi up on this post (clearly aimed at Rehman) and drum into him what a malapropism actually is!

A phrase like "monomaniacal nimrod with piscatorial propensities" (an example Jeff borrows from Zorro-unmasked) is yes, hilariously overblown, but it is not an example of a malapropism. (Luckily Jeff's more skilled at detecting other ... ahem ... textual abnormalities.)

And if the dictionaries are to be believed, there is no such verb in English as "malaprop". But then if we are encouraging inventive word play and the coining of new words in this post, we should let that one go! (Maybe award it a bouquet of jasmines!)

Another Johnson anecdote nicely illustrates what a malapropism is. (Indeed we called Johnson Mrs. Malaprop after Sheridan's famous character because she was always confusing words that sounded alike. It happened I think because her head was always half a mile ahead of her mouth.)

One day when we were driving out to school to watch a student in my (then) new Peugeot, I had to execute a rather sharp u-turn.

What Johnson meant to say was" "Does your car have a tight turning circle?"

What actually slipped out was .... "Has your car been circumcised?"

Enjoy your love of language, Rehman. And thanks for adding "deleterious" to my vocab this morning.