Fun with Authors

I just received an update on my Facebook account from one of my favorite radio programs, A Way with Words. It linked to a nice slide show from Flavorwire showing famous authors doing amusing (sometimes silly) things. Paging through the images makes me feel better about my own odd habits. Maybe I should adopt a few more to help with my success?

Happy Mother's Day

The Blimp

In my part of the country, May brings thoughts of the Indy 500 and auto racing. I've never been a fan of motor sports. I'm not sure of the reason. It might be due to the fact I grew up close enough to the 500 track to hear the practice laps. Maybe that made the idea of the race too passé. Then again it might be a version of the same affliction that bothers the locals in just about every tourist destination, a simultaneous love and loathing of the hoards who flock to your town to spend money. The restaurants are filled, the streets are crowded, the stores are emptied, and the price on gas gets gouged an extra percentage. All of that can leave a taste of resentment on the pallet. 

The one thing I do remember fondly, though, is hearing the droning of propellers and running to my suburban back yard to watch the Goodyear Blimp passing overhead. I remember it donned in lights, flashing advertisements aimed at whoever else was drawn out by the sound of its passing to look up into the nighttime skies. Apparently the ad campaigns weren't very effective because I don't remember anything they were selling. I always imagined I might see the blimp signal to me; send a message that I should meet it in some remote field. I'd spend the rest of that evening imagining what it would be like to slip out the back door after everyone had gone to bed. I'd creep away to my rendezvous and before the sun came up I'd be gone on an adventure. The message never came, though, and May followed May until the idea of a fantastic escape died under the weight of daily life. 

Eventually, I got a toy blimp as a present, complete with a motorized, backlit sign with transparencies that could be colored in to create messages. It hung on monofilament in the bedroom window and occasionally I'd turn the battery-powered motor on to watch the messages I created scroll by. To this day I miss that blimp and when I've got a spare moment, sometimes I find myself browsing the internet in search of a replacement.

The blimp represented leaving everything behind and having nothing ahead but the horizon and scattered stars. The blimp of my memories was huge and silver, its seams ending in a bright red nosecone. The gondola that hung beneath seemed tiny compared to the envelope of helium that kept it aloft. There'd only be room for myself and maybe the dog, but together we'd find a better place and start a fantastic life there. I'm always slightly disappointed when I see the new blimp, smooth and painted in corporate colors, lacking the flickering a sign with which to signal the world. It seems smaller, though I'm not sure if that's not just an artifact of growing up. Still I can't help but running outside when I first hear that droning sound of engines, and my mind turns toward the horizon.

Quote for Friday

Write drunk; edit sober.


~ Ernest Hemingway

The Royal #10



The Royal #10 Typewriter

 Ed and Lynn, a pair of good friends who are just back from a Hawaiian trip, made me a gift of an old Royal #10 Typewriter yesterday. It’s a solid old machine, minted in 1933 and weighing in at a good 25 pounds of solid metal, rubber, and glass. It’s a beautiful machine for an era when it took just under 20 hours to fly from coast to coast, construction of the Golden Gate Bridge had just began, and Europe began its slide into World War II. It also was the year Dashiell Hammett wrote The Thin Man, Agatha Christie wrote The Hound of Death, James Hilton wrote Lost Horizon, and Ellery Queen wrote the American Gun Mystery.


The old Royal has weathered the nearly ninety years it’s been existence with a kind of grace that can’t be ascribed to modern consumer products. The iPod I purchased less than a year ago is scratched shows evidence of every grain of grit it’s encountered. The Royal has a few sticky keys and needs a good cleaning as well as a new ribbon, but it’s no worse for nearly reaching its 100th birthday.



I think we had the same typing teacher...

 There’s something about a machine that’s been around as long as my Royal. It has a kind of gravitas, a force of personality that transforms everything it comes in contact with. It even changes the atmosphere, perfuming it with the scent of old machine oil and ink and putting me in mind of my seat in the back of typing class at high school. Apparently, this is an experience that takes me back to the Great Depression. While writing this piece I found a photograph of young men taking typing lessons and if you look at the fellow in the back row, closest to the camera, he's using a Royal #10. This machine takes you back to a more physical time, a time when it took more effort to do anything than it does now. Even typing your name requires reacquainting yourself with the right wrist position and getting a feel for keys that have to be struck with a little force. It has a sound, and I’m not talking about the hushed warble of plastic computer keys. The Royal hammers your thoughts into the paper, indelibly with mistakes embedded in the end result. It clatters and sounds like it ought to eject a hot casing at the end of each line of text. An old typewriter is noir. It embodies all the hard edges and tough truths, mistakes that can only be covered over and periods that will punch right through a manuscript.

The Royal is the latest step in my assembly of a good, old fashioned detective-style office. It goes well with my old, tube-type radio, wing back chairs, and reproduction Craftsman Style desk. Once I make some hard decisions about furnishings, I’ll be painting and putting up wainscoting and eventually getting a single-light door with my name painted on the glass and a brass mail slot. All I need is a brick wall view and neon light seeping in through the blinds and I’m an alcohol addiction and a partner short of turning into Mike Hammer or Sam Spade. I’ll have to resist taking clients and focus on my writing. As Hemingway once said, "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

H. P. Lovecraft Quote

"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”


- H. P. Lovecraft

In Memory of Us

Tonight I write to bid a fond farewell to something dear. The something in question is us. For so long we’ve been together and shared so many things. Remember the time we played scrabble for hours, just the two of us arguing whether “behoove” is a word or not over a board full of letter tiles? Or how about the hot August afternoon when we walked to the public swimming pool and got caught in a thunderstorm. And there was the Christmas when we sat in the back room while the adults drank coffee and talked until midnight? Remember watching Saturday Night Live together, something we never got to do but on Christmas and New Years when we stayed up late? We have so many memories, so many moments the two of us shared.


I mourn the loss of these little moments, these slivers of time and tiny events. I mourn them because they’ve been wantonly murdered and replaced by a stand in, a doppelganger. The name of the interloper varies. Sometimes it’s IM, sometimes simply text, occasionally Twitter, and in its more formal moments it’s called Facebook. Please don’t think of me as a Luddite and don’t mistake my obituary as coming out against technology or social media. I keep two blogs, have a Twitter account, and maintain no less than two Facebook pages. What I’m mourning is the loss of the face to face, private, relationship between two people with all its depth and nuance. A tweet can’t sign and a Facebook account won’t whisper a secret, you’ll never stay up late comforting a friend via text message.

Over the Christmas holiday, while having a meal at a local restaurant, I noticed a group of friends out celebrating the season together. They sat around a table, half of the celebrants glued to their iPhones texting away while the season spun away from them. As I looked on I wondered what they were missing, what tiny moments came and went without leaving its gift of memory. What connections weren’t made? What could have transpired but didn’t for the sake of a glowing screen and the preference for electronic reality over flesh and blood.

My New Years wish for all my friends is that you find yourself stranded with a long-time acquaintance in some out-of-the-way place without internet and with zero bars of signal strength for every electronic communications device you possess. May you be blessed with dead batteries and no ear-buds for your MP3 player and iPod. May you be temporarily fogged or snowed in, stuck in a quiet, nearly deserted airport lounge together. May you talk for hours, discover new things, share reminiscences, and when you part, may you be much closer than any text or status update can convey.