Tool of the Trade

Don't have much time to blog today, but I wanted to share with you the device you could get letters written to you from if you contribute. There's something about this machine that changes my writing, that makes it into something else. There's something about the way this machine and my fingers interact, about the immediacy and the physicality of words landing on the page that isn't replicated on a computer screen. It doesn't quite make sense to me that different tools can produce different types of writing — it's all still made up of words, after all — but, nevertheless, they do seem to do so.

By the way, this machine wouldn't be in the condition it is had I not bought myself a birthday gift last year of a tune-up from Portland's Ace Typewriter & Equipment Company, an anachronism in a town full of anachronisms. A while back, my friend Christina spent a day shadowing the father and son team as part of her research into a bigger project about second hand society (By the way, she wrote a great piece for the New Yorker about Portland's last book scout). I got to read a version of that piece and know that Ace isn't intentionally anachronistic the way so many throwback enterprises in Portland can be; instead, the father and son team running the store are just plugging away at their business as they have for decades.