The Celebrity Power 12
To my great satisfaction, I have enlisted into the ranks of lo-fi technologies, the super heavy weight mechanics of the durable Sears Celebrity Power 12 Electric Typewriter into my growing arsenal of old world devices. It helps me get work done around HQ and excites the tactile senses long left dormant from too much time behind the pulsing rays of the PowerBook. The experience of ruminating on the type-setter is one of pure weight. Weight of work and weight of thought. The Power 12 demands a skillful and physical assault when putting down the word. It moves ferociously against you and is unforgiving in it’s placement of type. My first creed looked like the work of a mad writer on a week long bender. My epileptic type rendered odd sentences born from a place without grammar. Which really isn’t any different than what this post your reading might look like, except that I have the benefit of a very passive machine, a delete key, and an application schooled in the ways of Spell Check. What discipline it takes to put together a coherent neat missive that doesn’t look like abstract typeset artwork!?!
The permanence of the typewriter dictates that the weight of your thoughts must force your brain to get it right the first time. I must write over 50 emails a day and engage in myriad other forms of online communication that are typed in a fast and frenetic manner and depend heavily on the help of modern technologies to clean up my sloppy messes. But the typewriter, with its unbending permanent glyphs, reduces me to an illiterate child of the word in minute. My mother gave me a manila envelope when I was in college with some of the papers she had written when she was a nun at Saint Catherine’s College. Each 20 page epic about some esoteric religious movement of the late 1700’s was perfectly typed out on yellowing parchment. She told me that half the paper’s grade was based on how well it was typed. There was no room for personal interpretations of type standards. You either got all the spacing and punctuation right or you were cast down a well and given grades lower in the alphabet. Plus, when you got your rough draft back you had to type the whole thing over again. Damn. However, having spent some time at the machine now I can see what a privilege it must have been for her (right mom?). The trance like machine gun rhythms that crack in the night air call out your friends Mr. Cigarette and Mr. Danials to come join you for a literary adventure – “Where do you want to go boys? Where should we take this mystery machine tonight.” The mechanical rhythmic talkback of the Power 12 actually helps focus the mind. It’s more of a conversation with the typewriter – a conversation you can’t pay only half a mind to. The only problem is that this conversation is a loud one that upsets the neighbors a good deal. It’s hella loud.
The Sears Power 12 also demands the use of a complimentary lo-fi technology that I can’t rave about enough. It’s a little thing called the U.S. Post Office. Ha. What a joy it is to prepare letters and packages containing a days worth of punching at the parchment and deliver it to the hard working men and women who are always happy to take your letters and rap endlessly about new postal technologies, requirements and the newest stamp designs. After a day of grazing through the email and pushing pixels, It’s a good trick to leave the office with something physical in your hands – something that smells like ink and paper – something you can seal with wax and put a piece of yourself into.