TypeTown #20: "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
🇨🇺 Ernest Hemingway, John Ashbery, Claes Oldenburg, and the Boston Typewriter Orchestra
Hola and bienvenidos.
After a couple of weeks in Cuba, we slip smoothly back into the TypeTown groove with a literary giant we’ve somehow avoided so far.
Ernest Hemingway lived on the Caribbean island across the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
A survivor of two airplane crashes in two days, his life was complex, remarkable — and tragic.
Strap yourselves in.
Away from his literature career, he…
married four times;
served as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I (where he was wounded by mortar fire);
worked as a journalist in Toronto, Chicago, and Paris;
ran with the bulls in Pamplona;
and covered both the Spanish Civil War and the Normandy landings in person.
He also conjured seven novels, six short-story collections, two non-fiction works, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954), and spent decades honing his ability to knock back an extraordinary volume of booze before committing suicide with his favourite shotgun in 1961.
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
He was famed for his ‘iceberg’ writing style, where the prose appears sparse but gives just enough detail for the reader to see everything they need.
It’s a hard trick to pull off.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Today, a Royal and a Corona 3 owned by Hemingway still sit in Finca La Vigia, his home just outside Havana. His Underwood Standard Portable was on display in Chicago’s American Writers Museum in 2019.
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
Some get closer than others.
READ» Hemingway in Cuba - Anywhere
READ» Know Who You’re Googling: Ernest Hemingway - The Big Smoke
READ» Typewriter Tuesday: Ernest Hemingway - American Writers Museum
An enduring Harvard reference
Yesterday marked what would have been John Ashbery’s 95th birthday.
Hailed as one of the greatest poets of his time, the Pulitzer Prize winner died in New York in 2017.
A Harvard student in his youth, he was renowned for bursts of inspiration that saw him compose his verse “as fast as he can type”. But it didn’t always work like that.
“My writing process consists of sitting around my apartment in the afternoon, wondering if it’s gotten too late to do any writing. Around 4 or 5 I make myself a cup of tea, which I sip while reading poetry. After a while I either start to write or call it quits for the day. Usually I listen to some contemporary classical music while this is going on. I usually do it several times a month (say 10?) if other things don’t intervene.”
When the muse struck, however, the results were extraordinary.
In a fitting gesture to his legacy, Ashbery’s Royal typewriter now lives permanently in Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room.
“I am often asked why I write, and I don’t know really — I just want to.”
READ» 2015 Poetry Month: An Interview With John Ashbery - Huffington Post
READ» ‘The steam and chatter of typewriters’ - The Harvard Gazette
READ» Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery - The New Yorker
READ» John Ashbery - Poetry Foundation
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No erasing this impact
Earlier this month, Swedish-born American sculptor Claes Oldenburg died in New York aged 93.
Famed for creating enormous replicas of everyday objects, Oldenburg had four versions of Typewriter Eraser, Scale X installed across the USA — in West Palm Beach, Washington, Seattle, and Las Vegas.
An honourable TypeTowner if ever we saw one.
READ» Claes Oldenburg, Who Transformed Everyday Objects Into Towering Sculptures, Dies at 93 - Smithsonian Magazine
READ» Claes Oldenburg: Radical pop art sculptor dies at 93 - BBC News
READ» Claes Oldenburg profile - Guggenheim
READ» The Giant Art of Claes Oldenburg - The New Yorker
Worth pausing the platen
📬 Boston typewriter orchestra makes music in new key, bringing old sounds of office to life - CBS News Boston
📬 Why (and How) I Use a Typewriter - The Saturday Evening Post
📬 Vintage typewriter given new life in Inglewood art project - CTV News Calgary
And finally… typewriters in the wild
In this magazine feature profile of Jeremy Mayer written by, ahem, TypeTown…
On these magnificent gates in Hastings, England…
And in this fabulous set-up in Copenhagen’s 25hours Hotel Indre By…
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Until next time
PS: New here?
TypeTown is a fortnightly celebration of the typewriter’s place in modern (and not so modern) culture.
Somebody might appreciate my series of tributes to the prehistory of typewriters....
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2019/09/why-havent-we-returned-to-chordal.html
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2020/02/miss-jameson-and-her-optophone.html
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-astonishing-hammond.html
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-not-so-astonishing-sholes.html
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2020/03/remington-or-hemington.html
Hello Neil,
Thanks for this. On the subject of Hemingway, I hope you'll look at my recent Substack piece, "How's That Novel of Yours Doing?" https://terenceclarke.substack.com/p/hows-that-novel-of-yours-doing. Also, I'd welcome your subscription. Many thanks. Terry Clarke