the old man and the mac.
via kottke.org (albeit a different part of the article):
Writing on a computer lacks this materiality. Of course this is not true as data recovery makes clear. Even a deleted document leaves a trace burned into the hard drive. Yet the immediacy of the typewriter biting into paper is not there, to say nothing of the pleasure of the act of handwriting. Cutting and pasting digitally lacks the obvious physical effort of scissors and glue.
Materiality is one of my favorite things about brainstorming, writing, revising. The physical books, the piles of paper, the folders, the tape, the pencils: how do we replicate the generative effects of their physicality? Working in a near-paperless office, I often find myself needing to generate pages just to make my brain work better.
Historically, though, I have to wonder if some of our most prolific and important authors have been those who otherwise (pre-technologically) skirted the material awkwardness of writing: Milton, whose daughters read to him and recorded his poems as he composed; Homer (if Homer and blah blah), with his grounding in the oral tradition; Bakhtin, with his bookless exile and his near-total recall of literary history. I’m sure there are more. Of course, their “freedom” from the physical accessories of writing was imposed by disabilities or limitations. Our freedom from pulpy accoutrement is imposed by innovation.
