Retro Future

A workstation of the future, as imagined in the 1970s.

Nothing becomes obsolescent faster than predictions and projections for the future. This marvelous photo comes courtesy of Retronaut (“see the past like you wouldn’t believe”) an online “bulletin board” of wacky, nostalgic, and absurd images from that vast, inexhaustible territory we call the past.

365 Days of Obsolescing

Initially begun as a 30 day project  documenting things that are obsolescing in my life, I’ve now gathered steam and am continuing on until I run out of objects. Everyday I will photograph things hanging around in my studio (or bring them from my apartment) that I am classifying as either obsolete, or becoming obsolete. In a nutshell — clutter. — Deanne Achong, The Obsolescence Project

It seems fitting, given Obsolescing’s retrospective focus, that I’m informing you of Deanne Achong’s brilliant blog, The Obsolescence Project, after it’s already ended. For 365 days (with minimal breaks for flu, a wedding, and other of life’s interruptions), Achong, a Vancouver-based artist, has documented a different “useless object” each day.

Day One, February 1, 2012, the blog begins with a light meter and a straightforward, bare-bones caption:

Day One – Light Meter

Light Meter I bought at a garage sale a few years ago. Love the leather case. I did use a light meter like this when I first went to art school.

On Day 365, the Obsolescence Project concludes with a picture of a fossil, an ending that takes us back to distant beginnings, where the ephemeral also endures.

Day 365 – Fossil

Achong follows a simple formula, which evolves over time: simple close-up photographs accompanied by short captions. The objects portrayed range from true treasures (fine china, old leather-bound books) to true trash (broken lamps, old power cords). Yet hers is a leveling eye. The sharp gaze of her camera lens exalts the lowly and humbles the proud. The obsolete parade by without value assigned, certainly not monetary value (though she will sometimes reveal what she paid — or didn’t — for something, especially if a treasure was plucked from a trash bin). Achong’s aim is not so much to reveal an object’s beauty, though her photos accomplish that, as to reclaim the trivial, broken and outdated.

The Obsolescence Project is in one sense a year-long artist’s manifesto, in which Achong considers her own magpie tendencies:

As an artist, I have kept a lot of stuff. Thinking one day it might have some kind of value. Not eBay value (although there’s that too) but become an idea for a project. Possibly I’ve imagined these things might magically assemble themselves into another type of object, present themselves to me as a story or at least a lead on a narrative that I want to pursue. I’m not giving up that hope, but I am hoping that by documenting their presence, I might detach from them and make the leap towards shoving (some of ) them out the door.

As our guide to this successive collection, Achong is inquisitve and wry, never authoritarian. She muses, rather than asserts. She usually shows her pieces from a variety of angles, then writes about its personal associations — where she acquired it, what she thought she might do with it. As her approach developed over time, she did research as well, so the curious reader will learn interesting facts about an object’s origin and history or even, say, how many Viewmasters appear for sale on E-bay.

Though this phase of the Obsolescence Project has now ended, this is a perfect time to go back and review the whole. Following Deanne’s process as she shapes the blog and discovers in the daily practice of photographing and writing exactly what she is doing, is fascinating and rewarding — a privileged glimpse of an artist at work.

On that last day, last February, I was  happy to read  that the Obsolescence Project will not itself become obsolete. Achong is taking a break after her (nearly) daily documentation over the course of a year and then plans to move on to Phase II — content and focus not yet announced.

I can’t wait! Brava Deanne!

Is the Diary Dead?

by Christine Nelson

People seem to assume that because I’m a manuscripts curator I must be constantly wringing my hands over the demise of the handwritten artifact. But I don’t feel there’s any inconsistency in cherishing the records of the past while embracing the tools of the present. A couple of years ago I curated an exhibition about diary keeping (http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/TheDiary/default.asp), and this week the New York Times asked me to muse on the future of the diary. Are we losing the capacity to be honest? (wait, were we ever honest?) Have we ceased to value privacy? (wait, were diaries ever purely private?) Will we still have valuable personal records in 2050 (wait, aren’t we writing more than ever? and aren’t more of us writing?) No doubt there is still room for debate.

From the Morgan show: An entry from the diary of a young Charlotte Brontë. Credit: Graham Haber

Christine Nelson, the Drue Heinz curator of literary and historical manuscripts and head of interpretive strategy at the Morgan Library and Museum, is a longtime friend and supporter of the Obsolescing blog. 

More Typewriter Tales

Ryan Ashley and his typewriter Jolene hang out their shingle at Clark Park Farmer’s Market

A young man sidles up to me at Clark Park’s Farmer’s Market and tells me that when I’m finished buying my eggplant he will write me a poem. He is dressed like a street performer, a juggler or mime: striped shirt, suspenders, a battered felt hat on his head.  But he is an itinerant poet in the old tradition of the troubadours. He’s traveling the country by train, setting up his folding table and hand-lettered sign, propped up on his typewriter case. He’s like Lucy in Peanuts when she’s dispensing psychiatric wisdom: “That will be 5¢ please.” What I am drawn to of course is not so much the quixotic nature of his profession but the tools of his trade. His companion and instrument in this venture is a sleek Smith Corona that he has christened “Jolene.”

(“You name your typewriters?” I ask.

“I named this one,” he answers.)

Jolene, it turns out, is one of four typewriters this poet,  Ryan Ashley, owns. He found this one at a flea market, purchased her for $45, and spent another $100 restoring her to her current sheen and efficiency.

When I ask him what he likes about his typewriter, he rhapsodizes like a man in love, describing her contours, her smoothness, and the pleasure of pressing the keys. He loves the resistance he feels, the precise pressure required to get results. He concludes that litany with “It’s analog!” he says, as if that single word encapsulates all the typewriter’s virtues.

Then he moves from the tactile to other senses. “I especially like the sound,” he says. “It is an instrument,” The taps and clicks that accompany his own compositions, he calls “music to my ears.”

So when it comes time for Ryan to write his poem for me, I ask him to write one for Jolene instead. Here is what he taps out.

In the minute or so it takes for Ryan to compose this ode, a couple of bystanders are drawn to the spectacle, the sight and sound, of this busker playing percussion  as the lyrics formed on slanted lines across the page. (The handcrafted effect enhanced by Ryan’s not lining his paper up straight)

Watching them watch him, I think about hurdy-gurdy players with their trained monkeys, snake charmers, bear baiters, ventriloquists who speak through their dummies. Has a typewriter become like some exotic pet or mesmerizer’s instrument of enchantment? (Or of seduction: Later I read Ryan’s blog and saw that he took Jolene out bar hopping that night, where Jolene served as babe magnet. Hmmm. I see a New Yorker cartoon in there somewhere)

Ryan and Jolene are traveling, making poetry and friends across the country, as  Ryan keeps a blog of reflections and poems about his adventures and encounters. For the vagabond poet, I think, the chance interactions, the unexpected intimacies and revelations that his itinerant poetry act brings about mean more than the verses themselves. Poetry is a vehicle. A means of connection. Those poems just come. That press of inked letters on fragile paper records a moment’s inspiration, handed out freely (though he’s happy for my $5 donation). He passes them on, and like an old-time troubadour, moves on.

A Boy and His Typewriter

Writer at Work

At 13, my friend Linus is the most tech savvy kid I know. A young artist – visual and literary – he feels at home in a wide range of media. He’s been making movies, editing on iMovie and creating special effects with Adobe software since he was 8. The stories he writes tend toward the futuristic, often dystopian fantasies filled with inventive gadgets, hovercrafts, hidden cameras, remote communications devices, and evil robots. Even when words are his main medium, he draws on the technology available to him to envision and enhance the imaginary world he’s building. It’s fun to watch him move fluidly from building a virtual skyscraper in a Google illustration program to writing an action-packed paragraph and back again. For the others in the group, Linus is the go-to guy for all computer-related problems (or smartphone or iPods as well).

A few weeks ago, though, Linus turned heads when he walked into the cafe where our writers’ group meets lugging a large yellow box. He heaved it onto the table, unfastened the metal latches and revealed the object within: a vintage Smith Corona typewriter. “Isn’t that heavy?” I asked. “Hey, it’s portable,” he said, quotation marks hidden in his grin.

It was amazing how quickly the outmoded machine in the middle of our table became the talk of the Green Line Cafe. Linus soon found himself fielding a barrage of questions and expressions of admiration, interest, curiosity. Every one who came over to gawk had a story to tell, mostly about the typewriters in their youth. What was funny (to me, who got through college and grad school and even started a professional writing career in the B.C. era — before computers that is) was that most of the gawkers and reminiscers couldn’t have been much more than 30.

“Hey, I first started writing on one of these,” said a guy in a black t-shirt with multiple figures who resembled Marvin the Martian cascading down a flight of stairs.  ”And then I actually used a Word Processor. Ever see one of those?” He talked to my 13-year-olds like a classic geezer lecturing the young about the lazy ease of their existence. “It had a big black screen.” He widened his hands to demonstrate the unimaginable unwieldiness of his first computer. “Plus, the letters were bright orange. Bright orange! Freaky!”

Unhindered by memories, the kids just wanted to get their hands on this cool new toy. They reached over, grabbed for a turn, punched at the keys. Linus fended them off. He wrapped his arms around his precious machine and warned his friends about its fragility. I was impressed how much he knew about the history of typewriters. He recited the origin story of the QWERTY keyboard, designed to slow typing down. Too quick and the keys would cross, stick, break, he demonstrated. The kids and I then mused about cultural habits, and how our tools don’t always evolve along Darwinian lines, how custom can trump efficiency. We’ve inherited that keyboard, long after it outlived its usefulness. It has become a language of sorts, one we learn with our fingers. Our children’s fingers learn it too, even as they touch-type messages with their thumbs on electronic simulacra of pressable keys.

There’s more than one way to write a story

When I asked Linus what he liked best about typing — the process or the product, he answered without hesitation. He loved the act. The click and clack. The dance of the slender metal arms as they reach for the page. He hated the result. Too messy, he said. “If you make mistakes you can only type over them.”

I, on the other hand, found myself drawn to the look of the page. A typed sheet of paper has appeal. It has, for lack of a better word, personality. Not something I ascribed to it back when I was typing college term papers (in fact I cringed that my own WhiteOut caked bibliographies might reveal too much personality).

Again and again I’m reminded that loss is a lens that sharpens our view of the past. Linus, his view unclouded by past associations, can see his vintage machine as an object of wonder, more toy than tool, though I toy that’s treated with a measure of awe. Watching him play with his typewriter, I see its wonderfulness too. I admire anew the intricacy and inventiveness, the combination of delicacy and force present in a tool I once took for granted. Rich in history. Potent with possibility. Brand new.

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In this scene from the first season of BBC historical drama Downton Abbey, the serving class confronts its future.

What is this scary object found hidden in a housemaid’s closet? Why was she hiding it? What upheaval will it bring?

Does it bite? Will it explode?

The Long Goodbye

“Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit,” writes Leah Price in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Her essay, Dead Again, traces predictions of the book’s demise back to the early 19th century. Long before e-readers and other digital technologies:

Théophile Gautier’s novel “Mademoiselle de Maupin” had already declared that “the newspaper is killing the book, as the book killed architecture.” This was in 1835. And Gautier was only one-upping Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” which, four years earlier, depicted an archdeacon worrying the book would kill the cathedral, and a bookseller complaining that newfangled printing presses were throwing the scribes out of work. (The novel is set a quarter-century after Gutenberg’s first Bible, when a thriving industry of manuscript-on-demand was forced to readjust.)

At long last, a New York Times writer acknowledges what we at Obsolescing have been saying for a long time: predicting and lamenting the book’s demise is an age-old habit. Cultural and social critics thrive on recycling that tired trope: looking back with regret and forward with doubt and fear (and occasionally excitement).

Personally, I was thrilled to learn that waning technology is a key theme in Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Now I’ve got to go read it!). But Price, a specialist in Victorian literature at Harvard, also offers a compelling analysis of novelists who look forward into a bleak, book-less future. She delightfully catalogues the fantastical (sometimes eerily prescient) technologies 19th and 20th century science fiction writers invented to destroy books (and tyrannize the freedom of the human imagination), from Aldous Huxley’s “feelies” to Ray Bradbury’s firemen. And she exposes the paradox in these dystopian visions: while books may vanish, the libraries that house them nearly always survive.

Writers foresaw space travel, time travel, virtual reality and, endlessly, the book’s demise; what they never seem to have imagined was that the libraries housing those dying volumes might themselves disappear.

The insight that sticks with me appears early in the essay:

In hindsight, we can see how rarely one technology supersedes another. Television didn’t kill radio any more than radio ended reading.

One might quibble that television fundamentally changed radio — and movies too — but how old technologies answer and adapt to the new is a topic for another essay. The larger point Price makes is more important.  Progress is rarely the juggernaut we fear. Our technologies don’t come to us like a line of tyrannical despots, beheading predecessors in order to claim dominance. Rather than usurp, they draw on and respond to what’s come before.