The Typewriter: A Graphic History
Janine Vangool’s lovely coffee-table book, The Typewriter: A Graphic History of the Beloved Machine is finally available. Vangool, who loves typewriters even more than I do, runs UPPERCASE, a design studio in Calgary, Alberta which, among other things, publishes UPPERCASE magazine. The new book pictorially documents the typewriter from the late 19th century to the 1980s (when […]
Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Reporting & the “New Journalism”
The birth of what Tom Wolfe called “The New Journalism,” according to the manifesto he wrote in 1972 as an introduction to an anthology with that title, can be dated to Gay Talese’s profile of retired boxer Joe Louis published in Esquire in the fall of 1962. Wolfe isolated this passage as an example: “Hi, sweetheart!” […]
A Modern Classic: Olympia Report Electronic
In 1983, faced with writing my first book, I decided to replace my manual Underwood typewriter with an IBM Selectric, the iconic classic electric model of the era. Then I discovered a new electronic model, the Olympia Report Electronic. It had a relatively feather touch, although it was far from feather-weight (imagine eight or ten laptops) and, […]
Where Creative & Nonfiction Meet: Advanced Feature Writing
Q: Why is conducting an interview like this? A: To find out, register for Advanced Feature Writing, part of Ryerson University’s Magazine & Web Publishing program. I’ll be teaching this advanced course beginning in September. Here’s what we’ll do: look at inspired examples of creative nonfiction develop more sophisticated techniques for generating and focusing story […]
Adventures in Office Supplies
James Ward is the creator of the blog “I Like Boring Things” (http://iamjamesward.com/) and founder of the annual Boring Conference, which celebrates the “ordinary, the obvious and the overlooked” (One guest speaker talked about the sound that vending machines make; another expounded on sneezing.) He’s also the author of a new book called Adventures in Stationery: A […]
The Challenge of a Chinese Typewriter
Creating a typewriter in China was a challenge, since the Chinese language is not based on a simple Latin alphabet, like ours. Instead, each word is an individual symbol and there are thousands of symbols. The MingKwai (“clear” and “quick”) wasn’t the first Chinese typewriter: it was preceded by ones developed in 1898, 1915, 1919 and […]
Renata Adler’s Gimlet-Eyed Prose
“…On a recent Saturday night, a small band of Dickensian characters—two tall, pale women with thin, reddish hair; one short, stout, bustling brunette; and four men, rather unsteady on their feet—set up a portable loud-speaker system on the sidewalk and began to preach. Several boys and girls who had been sitting quietly on two of […]
William Zinsser’s Legacy of Language (October 7, 1922 – May 12, 2015)
“There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.” Sentences like that make William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, first published in 1976, among the most influential books on writing. Or how about these two: “Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in […]
Joseph Mitchell’s New York Story
The brilliant, modest, conflicted, ultimately tragic Joseph Mitchell is the subject of Thomas Kunkel’s new biography, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (Random House). Among the greatest literary journalists, he chronicled Manhattan’s margins — bums, barflies, con men, carnival characters, rogues and ruffians — and his sentences often read more like Faulkner than the […]
Springsteen the Journalist
Everyone knows Springsteen wrote about the American obsession with cars, the freedom of the road (young person leaves town for the greater world beyond his own) and, more specifically, the drag racing/muscle car culture of Asbury Park, NJ in the late ’60s & ’70s. (Born to Run; Thunder Road; Backstreets, Cadillac Ranch, State Trooper…) In a 2010 Rolling […]