Progress run amok: No typewriters?

May 22, 2010

Pamela Bumsted sent the link to Boing! Boing!

The Writers Room is kicking out the guy with the last typewriter.

Writers Room logo on Facebook

Writers Room logo on Facebook

The Writers Room is a non-profit that offers cheap working space to writers.  In the old days, that meant a desk and a chair where a writer could use a legal pad and write longhand, or put a typewriter down to type a manuscript.

In 2010, there was just one guy left using a typewriter.  Everyone else had switched to computers.  Boing Boing said:

Greenwich Village’s Writers Room, a low-cost place for writers to rent workspace, has banned mechanical typewriters from its premises, giving Skye Ferrante, the sole remaining typewriter user the choice of switching to a laptop or going elsewhere. He’s not going to switch. Ferrante’s been using the Writers Room for six years, and is distressed at the news that he’s got to leave.

Skye Ferrante at his typewriter - now banned from the Writers Room

Skye Ferrante at his 1929 Royal typewriter - now banned from the Writers Room - photo by Hagen for New York Daily News

What’s this world coming to?

According to the New York Daily News (which probably has typewriters anymore only in its museum, if it has that):

“I was told I was the unintended beneficiary of a policy to placate the elderly members who have all since died off,” said Ferrante, a Manhattan native who’s writing children’s books. “They offered me a choice to switch to a laptop or refund my money, which to me is no choice at all.”

Ferrante was peeved, but not completely surprised.

A growing number of scowls had replaced the smiles that once greeted the arrival of his black, glass-key typewriter.

“The minute the sign came down, I realized there was antagonism from some of the new members,” he said. “They gave me an attitude when they saw me setting up the typewriter.”

Ferrante’s connection to typewriters runs deep. He owns at least five of the old-school machines, his devices of choice since his teens.

“There’s a different commitment when you know you’re making a mark on the page, when you strike a key and bleed ink on the page,” he said.

After being contacted by the Daily News, Writers Room officials told Ferrante he can continue working on his typewriter until the end of his term on June 30.
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/05/20/2010-05-20_untitled__typewriter20m.html?r=ny_local&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nydnrss%2Fny_local+%28NY+Local%29#ixzz0odMP9rdB

Heck, they might as well ban pens, pencils and paper.
Progress is okay.  This time, though, they’ve taken it too far.

Leave a Comment » | Current History, History, Technology, Typewriters, Writing | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Santayana on science, “timid reappearance in modern times”

November 22, 2008

At its second birth science took a very different form. It left cosmic theories to pantheistic enthusiasts like Giordano Bruno, while in sober laborious circles it confined itself to specific discoveries — the earth’s roundness and motion about the sun, the laws of mechanics, the development and application of algebra, the invention of the calculus, and a hundred other steps forward in various disciplines. It was a patient siege laid to the truth, which was approached blindly and without a general, as by an army of ants; it was not stormed imaginatively as by the ancient Ionians, who had reached at once the notion of nature’s dynamic unity, but had neglected to take possession in detail of the intervening tracts, whence resources might be drawn in order to maintain the main position.

Nevertheless, as discoveries accumulated, they fell insensibly into a system, and philosophers like Descartes and Newton arrived at a general physics. This physics, however, was not yet meant to cover the whole existent world, or to be the genetic account of all things in their system. Descartes excluded from his physics the whole mental and moral world, which became, so far as his science went, an inexplicable addendum. Similarly Newton’s mechanical principles, broad as they were, were conceived by him merely as a parenthesis in theology. Not until the nineteenth century were the observations that had been accumulated given their full value or in fact understood; for Spinoza’s system, though naturalistic in spirit, was still dialectical in form, and had no influence on science and for a long time little even on speculation.

Indeed the conception of a natural order, like the Greek cosmos, which shall include all existences–gods no less than men, if gods actually exist–is one not yet current, although it is implied in every scientific explanation and is favoured by two powerful contemporary movements which, coming from different quarters, are leading men’s minds back to the same ancient and obvious naturalism. One of these movements is the philosophy of evolution, to which Darwin gave such an irresistible impetus. The other is theology itself, where it has been emancipated from authority and has set to work to square men’s conscience with history and experience. This theology has generally passed into speculative idealism, which under another name recognises the universal empire of law and conceives man’s life as an incident in a prodigious natural process, by which his mind and his interests are produced and devoured. This “idealism” is in truth a system of immaterial physics, like that of Pythagoras or Heraclitus. While it works with fantastic and shifting categories, which no plain naturalist would care to use, it has nothing to apply those categories to except what the naturalist or historian may already have discovered and expressed in the categories of common prose. German idealism is a translation of physical evolution into mythical language, which presents the facts now in the guise of a dialectical progression, now in that of a romantic drama. In either case the facts are the same, and just those which positive knowledge has come upon. Thus many who are not brought to naturalism by science are brought to it, quite unwillingly and unawares, by their religious speculations.

— George Santayana, Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Vol. 1, Reason in Common Sense; Chapter 1, “Types and Aims of Science.” Dover Publications, New York, 1980; from Charles Scribner & Sons 1905 edition.  This section carries a sidebar with the notation, “Its timid reappearance in modern times.”

(Text provided by the Gutenberg Project, here.)

Santayana on the cover of Time Magazine, 1936. Copyright by Time, Inc.

Santayana on the cover of Time Magazine, 1936. Copyright by Time, Inc.

Which philosophers have made the cover of Time since Santayana?

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Posted by Ed Darrell