Does Pynchon have a Mac ?
Sometimes I feel like a real asshole bringing my computer places to do work. There's this really great café a few blocks from my sister's apartment where a lot of local writers/blogger-types go to write. It's a nice environment; but I still feel weird when I walk in and instead of seeing a few heads look up to smile, I see blue glowing faces transfixed on a screen. Glowing with pride is one thing. Glowing beauty another. But I dont want to be a blue glowing face ! Dont get me wrong - this isn't an anti-technology tirade. I love technology ! Technology rocks !
But I wonder if there exist any really great writers in our era - and if they do exist, do they use computers ? There's something very discomfiting about that idea. Maybe because I'm used to reading writers who scrawled on napkins or over the pages of old books because they couldn't afford paper. I'm used to reading poetry that has the tempo of a typewriter. I am a shameless antiquarian. There's no reason why typewriting should be superior to the use of a computer -- so maybe I'm wondering if anyone hand writes. Like -- imagining Pynchon in front of a computer is just wrong. I recently read an article in the Atlantic called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The subject is getting a bit tired, I have to admit. But, well, it IS making me dumber, that's for sure. Anyways, an interesting excerpt :
"Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter-a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
And the telegraphic aphorisms are really what characterize Nietzsche's style! If our machines form our thoughts, I'm very tempted to stop using. I find that my ideas are becoming increasingly scattered, and I'm at risk right now of being a perpetual dilettante. I have an inexhaustible curiosity that requires immediate satiation, which means I spend WAY more time on wikipedia than a human ought to. It's like a drug, an addiction I've developed for convenience. But at the end of the day, although these things save us time, we never take advantage of that huge sum of saved time. Instead we just surf the web. It will take something drastic like pulling a Thoreau to get it out of my system. Which won't be happening because the whole Walden thing is just kind of annoying.
But I wonder if there exist any really great writers in our era - and if they do exist, do they use computers ? There's something very discomfiting about that idea. Maybe because I'm used to reading writers who scrawled on napkins or over the pages of old books because they couldn't afford paper. I'm used to reading poetry that has the tempo of a typewriter. I am a shameless antiquarian. There's no reason why typewriting should be superior to the use of a computer -- so maybe I'm wondering if anyone hand writes. Like -- imagining Pynchon in front of a computer is just wrong. I recently read an article in the Atlantic called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The subject is getting a bit tired, I have to admit. But, well, it IS making me dumber, that's for sure. Anyways, an interesting excerpt :
"Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter-a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
And the telegraphic aphorisms are really what characterize Nietzsche's style! If our machines form our thoughts, I'm very tempted to stop using. I find that my ideas are becoming increasingly scattered, and I'm at risk right now of being a perpetual dilettante. I have an inexhaustible curiosity that requires immediate satiation, which means I spend WAY more time on wikipedia than a human ought to. It's like a drug, an addiction I've developed for convenience. But at the end of the day, although these things save us time, we never take advantage of that huge sum of saved time. Instead we just surf the web. It will take something drastic like pulling a Thoreau to get it out of my system. Which won't be happening because the whole Walden thing is just kind of annoying.