Trying Optimism in 2013

I’m not one for resolutions generally, but maybe I can present a little more pipe and a little less grumble in 2013.

Vintage Typecast on Progress

Here’s a little something tapped out by an ancestor of mine. I suspect it was made by my grandmother when she was studying to be a secretary at the Lasalle Junior College in Newton in the late 30s. She used to brag about how her typing teachers wanted her to cut her long fingernails, but as long as she kept earning perfect scores on her typing tests they let her keep them.

I may have posted this image before, but I can’t find it. The other day the paper fell out of some storage boxes when we were tidying the barn and almost got trod upon, and I’m thinking it might be time to go through those boxes and preserve what’s worth saving.

I don’t have too much else from this era, but I do have a collection of handwritten civil war letters between a field surgeon  and his wife during the civil war which may be worth the project of scanning and sharing. I’ve also got a couple of binders of typewritten stories, journal entries, and poems my father left behind after a particularly bleak winter in Maine. A few of those might be worth putting up, as well. Some of the poetry is lovely.

Anyone else out there in the Typosphere have a collection of vintage documents to go with their machines?

Corona Special Birthday Surprise

Coming to grips with new-fangled technologies.

Those glasses were empty when I started, I promise

Next to a younger (and fatter) descendent.

Fountain Pens, Retro-Tech, and Rebellion

AHA! I’ve broken out The Fountain Pen again! It’s a relic from early in The Marriage, from a year when each of us was delighted, on Christmas Morning, to discover we had bought the other a pen. We were each going to be writers, you see.

Actually, come to think of it, this was before  the marriage—what you could call the pre-marital honeymoon and cohabitation phase.

My Good Lord, were we ever so young?

I bought her a tortoiseshell Parker from Staples. She out-did me with a Schaeffer from the Levenger catalog, a semi-translucent Lucite barrel with brass bands and a 14k gold nib. I’ve used it so much over the years that the tip is visibly worn on one side. This is a small sign of age, compared to what my body shows: grey hair at the temples, laugh-lines around the eyes, spectacles on the face with a corresponding restriction on my driver’s license. This pen has, in fact, remained constant through tremendous change: seven different addresses, six different employers, three novels in countless drafts, summers of sailing and winters on skis.

Now I find myself coming back to the tools of that time. Including this one.

While so much else has changed. Back then, we lived an isolated, 19th century style life in one of the smaller towns on the lower Cape. In a rebellion against the suburban landscape, we survived without a car, riding our bicycles where we needed to go, or walking if there was snow on the sidewalks. There was no Internet, not in the town where we lived, not at a price we could afford. What there were, were plenty of A.O.L. floppy discs coming through the mail, handy to re-format and use as backups for the WordPerfect documents I wrote on The Wife’s laptop, a machine that had cost her $3000 several years earlier, in college. (For several decades there, it seemed that a new computer always cost $3000.) This laptop was a revelation to me, as was the bubblejet printer that could output any font in any size—bringing home to me for the first time the full significance of the Kitchen Table Publishing Revolution. And then for some reason I never entirely embraced it. I wasn’t ready to abandon my Olympia and Remington desktop typewriters. (Later on I did abandon them, to my even later regret.)

We lived our lives in a sort of bubble, getting our news from newspapers purchased at the Superette a couple of miles away, or from the magazines we picked up at the Post Office just down the street from the Superette. Serious entertainment would come from the books we bought in binges from second hand shops in Provincetown or Wellfleet, when friends were kind enough to take us there in cars—or lend their cars to us. (Have you ever wondered if people read Shakespeare for fun? That used to be us, sitting by the fire, arguing over who got to be King Lear and who had to take on all three daughters.) Lighter entertainment came through the TV we had, which was one of those wood-encased models on wheels (the wood would later catch fire) coupled to a VCR. If we walked for two miles in the opposite direction of the Superette, we could reach the Video Empire, which, despite the grand scale implied by its name, was actually a tiny little rental shop in a four-store strip mall. This is where we encountered the BBC renditions of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, and considered ourselves cultured. But on the nights when we didn’t have the energy to pedal to the rental place, we could always pick up one snowy channel whose signal somehow made its way across Cape Cod Bay from Boston. This is how we discovered Judge Judy, as well as a particularly egregious TV adaptation of Conan the Barbarian. Pickings were slim. So other nights we just watched our bootleg recording of Young Frankenstein, which eventually caught fire.

But now look at us. We live in a small house in an isolated Cape Cod town. Well, that hasn’t really hasn’t changed. We have a car, too. But we drive it as little as possible thanks to the tremendous cost of gasoline and repair. So transportation hasn’t changed much either. Instead of the 1890s, we embrace the values of the 1930s. It’s a big step, even if we’re still completely out of our time.

But we’re connected. There are six computers in the house, and a few of them were manufactured just last decade. More importantly, we’ve got a router, and a broadband connection—and this changes life entirely. Now, we can purchase goods from around the world and have them delivered a couple days later. We can watch movies and television programs on demand. The answer to any question we have comes to us through our “Glowing Mother”, The Wife’s nickname for Google piped on to an LCD.  We can follow political revolutions as they unfold, absorbing photos, videos, and reports delivered by citizen journalists and activists around the planet. We can know it all. And if anyone was listening, we could tell it all.

Yet I’m sitting here scratching away with a fountain pen, just as I was all those years ago. Is this the sign of some mental defect? An unwillingness to adapt? Or worse, could this be a sign of intransigence, resistance, incipient luddite revolutionism?

There was a banner in my High School gym that exhorted, “Lead, Follow, or Get Out Of The Way.” Whenever I saw this, I was happy to step to the sidelines, ignore the game, and hang out in my own little mental workshop. Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here, not playing dodge ball. And I was always proud of this rejection. I could rebel by doing nothing. I was your modern day Thoreau.

But today—isn’t this what everyone is doing, with their tablets and their smart-phones? Today, isn’t it the crowd that’s tuning out the big game and plugging in to some kind of interior monologue?

Granted, they’re not alone. They’re texting, reading watching—communicating. But they’re taking themselves out of the local struggle and plugging into an echo-chamber of increasingly-fine-selected special interests. They’re skimming personal-tailored newsfeeds to reinforce their preconceptions and world views, just the way Dick Cheney insisted on having the TV in his hotel room pre-tuned to his precious Fox News. They are alone without being alone. They ignore the game and rebel, but they’re paying subscription fees to participate in the revolution.

I suppose this is what the free market is meant for. Every decision about where to spend our time and money is a sort of revolution, a rejection of what we’d supported before. A bigger market means more options, more chances for satisfaction. This keeps the money flowing, since a system with more options makes it more difficult for people to withdraw from the system entirely. The free market means you can disagree and still be welcome. So long as you spend money, you’re still one of us.

Even pirated music has to come across subscriber-supported lines. Even the pirate’s modem is plugged into electric utilities.

Even this fountain pen, with its gold nib—mined, no doubt, in some miserable hole by long-suffering hands—the use of such an object is a participation in a system, and represents my membership on the team of consumers. Come to think of it, I am on my last ink cartridge, and must soon head to the corporate store, or click Buy Now on the corporate website to acquire more. I’m not opting out. I’m paying in with everybody else.

But no. With this pen, there is some rebellion. It’s in the longevity. This pen has put down half a million words by now. It’s crossed out just as many. It was purchased once, as a token of love, and used hard for a decade and a half. I may have bought cartridge upon cartridge, but I’ve bought no other fountain pen in 15 years. And there’s a rebellion in this monogamy which just turns me on, somehow.

Antique Typecast - "Rejected"

Another bit of ephemera from the family box of old documents.

 

I'm not as up on my historical presidential politics as I would like to be, but a quick googling of the Nine Old Men makes me think this document has been sitting around since the 1930s. Which makes the age of my previous typecast suddenly likely to be a bit greater.

It seems my ancestors were opposed to the New Deal. Again, I'm not sure if this was composed by some ancestor, or just copied out of a newspaper or magazine. I like that the level of political discourse is such that you couldn't fit it on a bumper sticker (or several) though.

Yard Sale Reflections

Two days of yard sale selling have me more convinced than ever that we need to think long and hard over every purchase before we make it. We had a decent take, just about $80 for what were essentially two half-days of exceptionally casual salesmanship. But, as anyone who has ever sweltered through one of these things knows, the yard sale is not about the money you bring in so much as it's about the junk you don't have to haul to the dump. And when all was said and done, we were able to pack the left-overs into the station wagon for a single load to the dump swap shop, where no doubt a couple of the items will be picked back up, lived with for a couple of months or years, and then returned.

Plus we had the added pleasure of sitting under a tree for a couple of sunny days and chatting with strangers.

There's something humbling, though, about seeing goods you've accumulated over the years laid bare across a driveway. Particularly after you've hauled lots of this junk from one house to another half a dozen times. Lots of it is chipped, dented, or covered in dust. If it was pristine or at the least well loved, no doubt it wouldn't be shoveled out for sale like this.

 We polish it off as well as we can in a couple of minutes, but we don't take any longer, since, after all, we're only asking a dollar or two. Attempts to clean things off stem more from a sense of self-respect than marketing. Because the folks who stop to consider our junk are not approaching it with the discerning shopper's care for the best deal. They're thinking more along the lines of, "Would I really want this object in my house even if it cost nothing at all?"

And as the purveyor or such an object, the yard-saler is thinking, "What does it say about me, that my irregular, oddly numbered set of Ikea flatware and my stack of five year old home decorating magazines can't even fetch a fiver? I've lived with these things for years. Do my memories come so cheap?"

What it really feels like, when many of these customers wander through without making a purchase, is not that they are so interested in scoring a good deal on second hand housewares or jigsaw puzzles with no guarantee on their piece-counts, as in touring a museum of the recent past of an ordinary life. Many of them are gruff, uninterested in chit-chat. "We'd never get stuck with this kind of garbage," their condescending silence seems to say. And some of them hurry away, as if we had stolen their time.

We did make a couple of good connections, though. The sorts of sales that confirmed our tastes as something worthwhile, and that gave hope our discards could live on for some time.

I sold a folding typewriter from the 1910s. The feet had flaked away and the platen seized up, but the woman seemed to appreciate it's value as an historical ornament. (Working, it would have been an amazing artifact, capable of producing documents mechanically with a footprint smaller than a laptop computer. But it didn't work, and I had not looked at it in a year, so its value as an ornament was zero to me.) Gussie sold some sort of howdy-doody doll to an old man who had met the original ventriloquist and was going to give the doll a place of honor in his home. Another fellow scooped up an abacus for a dollar, and announced that he had found the perfect wedding gift for his sister, who was a math teacher.

Trash to treasure. The yard sale life cycle system works.

I purchase very little with the modest allowance that The Wife allows me. This year I bought an e-reader second hand, and half-price, from someone who had ended up with two. I got this computer on Craigslist from a man who pieced it together from parts he got at the dump. Maybe once a month I treat myself to a bottle of scotch. A pair of shoes lasts me two years, at which point the soles have worn through.

I'm a bad, bad American. But part of my problem is this: I've had hoarders in my family. My grandfather filled acres with junk cars and rolls of old carpet; wooden boats which he refused to sell slowly sunk into the soil.

I've probably spent more time throwing away my family's purchases than I've spent making my own.

So that shiny new widget on the department store shelf, with its hard clam-shell packaging and optional two-year service plan, always comes to me with a vision of the future, from so much of the crap I've kept before: a dust-covered relic in a storage unit, no longer worth the rent of its cubic-footage, just waiting to be hauled away at great effort and expense to the yard sale or the dump.  The tragedy inherent in a credit-card swipe is a pile of garbage resting on a mountain of debt.

If we really think about the things we buy, we can minimize this pain. And maybe we can live lives that revolve around people again, instead of things.

Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun

This year’s Christmas stocking was filled with a few mid-century golden era science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov. I hadn’t heard of any of these and had assumed they’d gone out of print, but a quick search on Amazon convinces me I’m mistaken: The Naked Sun, Pebble in the Sky, The Currents of Space.

It’s nice that folks are still buying and reading these books. There’s an implicit optimism in Asimov’s sci-fi which has gone around from exciting to quaint to imperialistic to gauche and has come back to just plain fun.

I just finished The Naked Sun, which, written in 1956, was the most recent of the three. It involves a plainclothes detective getting sent to the “outer planet” of Solaria to solve a murder - a crime unheard of on a planet with no want, 20,000 souls, and 200 million positronic robots.

SF was just starting to push into sociology at this point, so if it seems like Asimov is approaching his subject with big clumsy mittens on, it’s important to remember where he’s coming from. Earth: overpopulated to the point where people have to live in layers and layers of underground tunnels, so that they develop a pathologic fear of open spaces. The alien planet, Solaria: underpopulated and with so much robot labor available that people never see each other in person; rather they “view” each other with the aid of holographic cameras and projectors. Maintaining extensive estates with your robots is a point of such pride that physical contact with another human being becomes so taboo that it affects a physical response.

Oh my, how could someone commit a murder on a planet where folks can’t stand to be within a dozen meters of each other? Gosh, how are Earthmen who have become terrified of open spaces ever going to flourish in the galactic community again?

55 years on, we have to suspend an extra layer of disbelief - the disbelief that these would be the sorts of problems we’ll have in the distant future. We’re not going to worry about those singularity-driven artificial intelligences pulverizing the solar system into computronium. Terminators and Y2K? Nah. We’re all about psychological hang-ups and loopholes in the laws of robotics, up in the year four-thousand-some-odd. And we’re still running police departments from behind desks littered with papers while we smoke our pipes and cigars.

Unfortunately it’s impossible to read these books without seeing the flimsy cardboard props and painted backdrops of 1950s movie sets: the gritty underground governmental offices of an over-crowded Earth; the idyllic, robot tended estates of the sparsely populated outer planets. Except for the robots and the FTL rocket travel, Asimov doesn’t break the bank on special effects, here. The characters are all classic movie tropes too. There’s the hard-nosed but practical detective and the misunderstood widow-cum-murder suspect whose passions could never succumb to the sterile culture she was raised in. Strangely enough, the positronic robots, which are referred to as “boy,” by characters throughout the book, never seem to rise above the rank of scarcely noticed negroes. Spoiler: I kept waiting for their revolt, for the revelation that they were complex enough to be people just like us. But this isn’t the book for that kind of revelation.

I’m making all kinds of fun here. But I can’t help feeling that the reason all these tropes and cliches don’t ruin this little outer-space murder mystery is they’re effective. (“I can’t stand reading Shakespeare. There’s so many cliches!”) I mean, sure, all this stuff has been used before, right down to the mystery plot. But it hasn’t been used in space. And if our lives can carry on in space with the same sorts of drama that we’ve got going on here and now, well, then, maybe there’s a chance for us out there.

After all, who doesn’t like to think that human life will carry on outside our gravity well? And who doesn't want to own robots?

Fer Chrissakes, it’s 2010 already. I should own two.

* * *

Asimov wrote over 400 books, most of which are still in print, without ever dwelling on violence or more than hinting at sex.  Diplomacy wins out over space battles and slimy alien pods, here.   This is probably another reason why we feel compelled to make fun of him even while we can't stop buying his books.

* * *

Is it me, or do genre book covers get progressively worse in later editions?  The earliest cover (the one I have) hints at the themes of the book and leaves the rest to imagination.  The second has nothing to do with the plot, but at least it titillates a bit - and titillation is something I can support (in moderation).

The last cover, from the 80s I would guess, hits you over the head with an ideological hammer.  "Hmm, let's see.  A man.  I get that.  A robot, that I can understand.  A robot disguised as a man?  Some kind of ambiguous cyborg?  Is there a soul in there?  Oh noes me circuits are blown!"

Not to mention that Asimov never even touched on themes of robot/human ambiguity in the book!

* * *

Oh hey -  this paperback edition, which was printed in 1958, cost 35 cents.  Which is about $2.75 in today's dollars.  But last time I checked, a mass-market paperback at Barnes and Noble was around nine bucks.

What's up with that?