Here it is Wednesday again, time for another blog of Miscellaneous Musings. I’ve never tired of writing it; I can always find a new topic to discuss even though it is only three or four paragraphs long. There’s something about stringing a few thoughts together and putting them into a reasonable form that I find appealing. The modern world tries to require us to write with the latest electronic gadgets, namely word processors and I admit to using one. Some of my favorite authors refuse to use them, however. Jim Harrison who wrote The Legends of the Fall plus a whole raft of good poetry writes with cheap ball point pens; Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides writes in longhand on a legal pad; and my favorite tale of an author refusing to write electronically is Cormac McCarthy who has written all his books on a portable manual typewriter, the same machine that brought nearly a quarter of a million dollars when sold a few months ago at auction for an organization’s fund-raiser. He was able to replace it with one that a friend purchased used on Ebay for $20. Shelby Foote who wrote a great Civil War trilogy that Ken Burns used to base his PBS Civil War series on insisted on using dip pens. Nibs wore out and were scarce so when he located a large supply of them he bought the whole works.
A great example of the low-tech method of writing was Thomas Jefferson’s use of a goose quill to write the Declaration of Independence. I purchased a replica of that document while on our east coast tour this past fall because of the poetry of its words. As much as I admire people who use old methods of writing, I admit to being a slave to the computer. A requested Christmas gift I received from Mrs. Claus this year was a Barnes and Noble Color Nookbook on which I can download hundreds of books and read them on its screen. It is a form of computer containing a powerful storage system. The first book I downloaded? Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I have been wanting to re-read it for some time. It’s a daunting task because it is so long, but there is a reason why it has been called the greatest novel ever written, and I want to experience it again.
In the early 19th century a group in England called Luddites reacted violently to labor saving devices being set in place at factories as part of the industrial revolution. They reacted because many of them lost their jobs because of the efficiencies that came about.
That term Luddite is used occasionally today to describe someone who is against change. I’ve been called many things in my life, but because I’m writing this on my laptop I can’t be called a Luddite with my electronic writing habits.
