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Thursday, December 16, 2004 |
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Somewhere in the mounds and heaps of journals I've unearthed from file cabinets and cardboard boxes I hope to locate the germ of something new. These records, which go back to 1978--the last year I ever consigned my writing to the fire, a critical-mass ritual up to then--comprise actual diary-like passages, attempts at poetry, feuilletons, and a surprising number, I find, of unmailed letters--to ex-boyfriends (2), ex-husbands (2), ex-friends (2), aunts, cousins, patrons, even my mother. Especially my mother. I was constantly wooing her, much as I woo my children now using this venue. It's likely I only embarrassed her, as I embarrass them, because nothing ever came of all that wooing.
The scribbles and scrawls are sprawling and childlike, only a touch less controlled than my current illegible longhand. Or else I've typed. Page after page of single-spaced verbiage, beginning with my little Olympia manual, my first typewriter, bought at a Chico yard sale in 1977, with its unique, black-block typeface. I find pages I typed on a venerable Remington the size of a small refrigerator; alphabets laid down by the spinning ball of an IBM; observations recorded in the field--literally a field, usually--in my '69 VW Beetle, on my last and most cherished typewriter, the laughable ancestor to the laptop computer, my little Skywriter (a Smith-Corona model?), a tiny, very flat machine meant to be dragged around by news reporters. After I'd been using mine for 12 years or so, I saw Tom Hanks, a collector of old typewriters, telling Jay Leno one night all about the Skywriter he'd just added to his collection, and he was so delighted, and no one laughed with him when he talked about how hard it must have been to try and sleep on a plane next to someone working on one of these, and Leno sighed deeply and changed the subject. |
