TypeTown #35: "At the typewriter you find out who you are."

🗞 Tom Robbins, Harlan Ellison, Leslie Nichols, and more...

Apr 02, 2023

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Welcome, friends to Sunday, fun day.

Here’s hoping, at least.

Over the last few weeks, artificial intelligence got a whole lot smarter.

For those of us concerned about what it means… to our careers, our future, our kids’ future… we’re guessing an old Tom Robbins quote strikes a beligerent chord to many.

“If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.”

Robbins, now 90, started his writing career in journalism.

Here he is, goofing around back in the 1960s while working as copy editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

When he went home, attention turned to his first book.

“A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don’t know how to write sentences.”

𝙳𝚊𝚒𝚕𝚢 𝚁𝚘𝚋𝚋𝚒𝚗𝚜@DailyRobbins

Tom Robbins hard at work on his first novel, ‘Another Roadside Attraction’ — South Bend, Washington. 1967.

9:56 PM · Jan 22, 2017

36 Reposts · 320 Likes

Eight novels emerged between 1971 and 2003, creating enough literary heft that he’s since been presented with three lifetime achievement awards and hailed by Writer’s Digest as one of the 100 best writers of the 20th century.

“At the typewriter you find out who you are.”

Robbins was fine with manual typewriters.

But he hated electric machines with such a passion that he took a two-by-four to his own.

That resulting scene of typewriter destruction made it into his third novel, Still Life with Woodpecker.

Art imitating life.

“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”

Get playing, folks.

It might be our last chance.

READ» Tom Robbins Gets the Blues - Seattle Met

READ» Tom Robbins profile - January Magazine

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“I am an artist, and should be exempt from shit.”

How do you like your desk?

A sparse space that gives your mind the freedom to wander where it may?

Or something more approaching Harlan Ellison’s set-up, where there’s not even enough room to set a drink next his Olympia SG3?

For this literary firecracker, cluttered-chic certainly worked.

In a 60-year career, Ellison bashed out more than 1,700 published works.

His credits included short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic book scripts, teleplays and essays.

He won eight Hugo Awards, five Bram Stoker Awards, and was even nominated for a Grammy.

In 2011, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

And in this NSFW three-minute rant, he cements his place as a hero to writers everywhere.

Read the links below to see how he sold his Remington Rand back in 2010.

READ» Harlan Ellison and His First Typewriter - Photography History

READ» Jamie Ford Buys Ellison’s First Typewriter - File 770

Face time…

This week TypeTown stumbled across Leslie Nichols, a typewriter artist who uses her machines to create incredible textual portraits.

“I’ve always used words to play with…, (then) I was given a typewriter as a gift. I started doing writing on the typewriter, and I’m not a very gifted writer, so I started doing drawings with the letters on a typewriter… and that’s just snowballed.”