I’ve known writer and editor Ed Park for some 25 years, thanks to our mutual interest in eccentric mystery writer Harry Stephen Keeler. He’s just published Same Bed Different Dreams, a delightful and multilayered novel about Korean (alt-)history, a Korean war vet who writes SF, a tech company called GLOAT, the assassination of President McKinley, and the Buffalo Sabres hockey team, among other things.
Ed was recently interviewed on Mark Hurst’s “Techtonic,” a show on WFMU that’s appropriately suspicious and critical of the influence of Big Tech on our lives. You can listen here (I recommend clicking on “Pop-up Player”). At 34:10, Ed describes his use of a typewriter.
(Transcribed on my Royal FP with Patrician type.)
Mark is certainly right: typewriters are technology too.
Ed kindly shared this portrait of himself at his Lettera 22, along with a couple of typescript pages for Same Bed Different Dreams.
No, Ed did not compose his entire 500+-page novel on a typewriter, but it is a valuable part of his drafting and brainstorming process. As he says, you don’t have to be a Luddite to appreciate a variety of technologies and benefit from the opportunities they offer us.
I always love reading drafts and manuscripts, getting a glimpse into the writing process. Thank you for the recommendation of Ed’s book!
Somewhere I read that even the Amish are not against technology per se, but they very carefully and prayerfully evaluate whether a given technology will be good for them and their community. Seems relevant here.
Yes—the same was even true of the Luddites, who selectively destroyed the particular machines that were reducing traditional weavers to penury. See https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/132931.