Option #1: Art & Writing After reading Heineman's interview with "Chris Melissinos," Kirschenbaum's chapter, "Word Processing as a Literary Subject," and Pequeño Glazier's chapter, "Jumping to Occlusions," in the Required Learning Materials, please do the following: 1. Identify and explain two specific ways that technological developments have changed our understanding of what art or writing is and how it can be created. 2. Looking carefully at Kirschenbaum's chapter, "Word Processing as a Literary Subject," and Pequeño Glazier's chapter, "Jumping to Occlusions," describe one way artists and writers are resisting how digital technology is changing their fields. Then try to relate this resistance to an unintended consequence of the use of digital technology in these fields. What information from the resources leads you to this conclusion? 3. Do you think that technological determinism or social constructivism plays a stronger role in how digital technologies shape the arts? Briefly explain your answer. 4. Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format. 5. Provide references for all sources in MLA format. Copyright © 2013. University Alabama Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 1 Jumping to Occlusions A Manifesto for Digital Poetics fret which is whirled / out of some sort of information -Charles Bernstein, The Sophist Precipitation: violent passages: from which we each emerge: rending: stuffed: awkwardly shaped by the heat of such and such a system -Caroline Bergvall, "Fourth Tableau" Poetry has entered the electronic landscape. Even if such a landscape suggests images of electronic video games or machine-readable iambs swooning under a science fiction lexicon, the fact is that the electronic world is a world substantially of writing. Though this writing often seems eclipsed by its mode of transmission (e-mail, chat rooms, the World Wide Web, and Flash as primary instances), it is not unlike all previous writing, which has also been eclipsed by modes of transmission (the book, the stone tablet, the scroll). We write in words-but also in the grammar and politics of code (HTML, JavaScript, and more). Electronic writing, like previous instances of writing, equally engages the double "mission" of writing: that is, writing is about a subject-but it is also about the medium through which it is transmitted. "Transmission," then, suggests both the circulation of texts and the cross-purpose ("trans" = across or cross + "mission" = purpose or intention) of inscription. How does transcription have a cross-purpose? The language you are breathing becomes the language you think. Take for example in UNIX (and UNIX is the wellspring from which the World Wide Web was drawn) to "grep" or "chmod," things done daily, possibly hundreds of times a day.' When you grep ("globaVregular expression/print") a given target, you search across files for instances of a string of characters, a word. To chmod ("change mode") is to use a numeric code to grant, in an augenblick, permission to read, write, and/or execute a given file to yourself, your community, and your world. These are not mere metaphors but new procedures for writing. How could it be simpler? Why don't we all think in UNIX? If we do, these I This essay was released in two different earlier versions. In the Web version of this essay, images and sound form components of the writing, sound icons being used at various points in the text to indicate the availability of a sound component. Web versions may be found at the Postmodem Culture Web site (http://muse.jhu.eduljoumalslpmclv00717.3glazier.html), or for those who are not Muse subscribers, a courtesy copy is available (http://epc.buffalo.edulauthorsl glazier/essays). The version of the essay included in this book contains substantial additional text not available in previous Web or print versions of this work. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:53 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 761781 ; Loss Pequeño Glazier.; Digital Poetics : Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2013. University Alabama Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 32 JUMPING TO OCCLUSIONS ideas are a file: I am chmoding this file for all of you to have read, write, and execute permission-and please grep what you need from this! What I am saying is that innovative poetry itself is best suited to grep how technology factors language and how this technology, writing, and production, are as inseparable as Larry, Moe, and Curly Java. Why poets? Numerous poets working within innovative practice have explored language as a procedure to reveal the working of writing. Poets endeavor, as Emily Dickinson has written, to "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant" because "Success in Circuit lies" (506). That is, rather than focusing on the information of the text, poetic practice has explored the conditions that determine that information, the procedures, processes, and crossed paths of meaning-making, meaning-making as constituting the "meaning." Unlike information itself, which can vary limitlessly, such mechanisms often reveal something about writing that might not otherwise be apparent. Innovative writing in electronic media has for its charge the processes of meaning-making, hoping to extend Dickinson's success from "in Circuit" to the circuit board, exploring the procedures, loops, and processes of digital writing. Such a focus on making's relation to the machine has been a preoccupation of poetry throughout the past century, present in numerous engagements. How can materiality influence the meaning transmitted by a text? If one looks at works from the Mimeo Revolution, for example, one can see the intrinsic relation between text and its means of transmission. There were several features that seemed to typify mimeo: rough textured, elementaryschool-thick pages, pages printed on one side, and uneven and faded courier or gothic type. These are not merely incidental facts about this publishing means, but are facts related to the content that is transmitted by such texts. Specific works from this movement illustrate this point. If one looks at Adventures in Poetry 3, one gets a sense, from the black-and-white graphic on the cover, the 8 I h-bY-II-inch size, and the signature three staples at the left margin, that a particular spirit defines the magazine. This spirit is reinforced by some of the snappy, direct works, such as Berrigan's "Black Shoe Face" presented in its pages. Many of the magazine's details, such as its unnumbered pages, its inclusion of poetry, line drawings, and short, colloquial prose, bespeak a sense of mission for this mimeo production. (Similar details can be seen in magazines such as Tom Veitch Magazine, which also includes the use of multicolored pages, the use of underlining instead of italics, blocky iconographic images, and contents such as "The Hippy Termites.") Such a mission seems to be characterized by a literary spirit that calls for a directness, an urgency, and a nonacademic posture toward literature. What I argue for is an approach that looks at the writing on the screen. Just as the mimeo brought its "style" of writing, and the perfect-bound offset book brought its typical page size and length of text-factors which influenced the writing of texts for these technologies-the World Wide Web factors its texts. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:53 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 761781 ; Loss Pequeño Glazier.; Digital Poetics : Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2013. University Alabama Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. JUMPING TO OCCLUSIONS 33 On the Web, the actual language (HTML) and scripts that enable the circulation of texts are writing, and the way texts are displayed is an activity of writing. Further, the Web we read is the Web we write on. Writing enters the Web not only as technique but as "transmission."3 This fusion is unavoidable. Charles Bernstein has commented that "language is the material of both thinking and writing. We think and write in language, which sets up an intrinsic connection between the two" (Content's 62). This same kinship applies to writing and the computer. Recent poetic theory is particularly relevant to electronic space. Robert Duncan, writing about Charles Olson, suggests that one of Olson's messages was adjusting the scale of the poem's activity to new contexts. This has particular relevance to an electronic poetics, where assumptions about specific formal qualities must be converted from assumptions about the print medium. The breakthrough? As with any development in technology, writing does not stay the same, but the writing technology becomes an expanded way to perceive under the aegis of the writing activity. This scale, Olson suggested, extended "from Folsom cave to now-the waves of pre-glacial and post-glacial migrations out of Asia, the adventuring voyages out from the Phoenician world, the Norse world, and then the Renaissance, as coming 'home,' 'back' to their origins. 'SPACE': I spell it large because it comes large here .... Large, and without mercy" (Duncan, "Introduction" 80). Olson's historicizing of poetic space suggests movement into larger scenes of activity. This movement can also be seen as extending into electronic space. The sense of "home" here resonant with a home page that can be fragile, fleeting, "historic," obnoxious, pretentious, or revelatory but that stands as a point of application juxtaposed against the merciless immensity of online space. 4 With Olson's work, Duncan writes, "the opening up of great spaces in consciousness had begun, and in the very beginning, it its origins, he moves in, as he knows he must, to redirect the ideas of language and of the body, of Man, of commune, and of history" ("Introduction" 80). This "consciousness" includes a consciousness of the space of the page, and writers of Olson's circle, Duncan and Robert Creeley among them, addressed the physical space of the page. The question then becomes how, on the Net, writing intersects with its materials. What specifically is the difference between a paper poetry and an electronic one? The paper press certainly offers parallels. The avatar of small circulation, fine press, has clearly been concerned with its materials. Those who work in fine printing can speak of sensuous relations between text and materials. (The "press" in fine press insists on "impression"; the act of physical impression carries through to tactile qualities in the printed object.) Thus fine press also engages transmission; what is transmitted is the tactile record of the act of impression. The term "small press," in contradistinction, more clearly insists on transmission.5 "Press" here refers to the machinery of re- EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:53 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 761781 ; Loss Pequeño Glazier.; Digital Poetics : Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2013. University Alabama Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 34 JUMPING TO OCCLUSIONS production and the social institution of disseminating information. It is small, non-corporate, a pequefiismo, privileging content over profit. Its machinery becomes a part of the materiality of the text, grepping writing through such called for material facts as 8 Ih-bY-I I-inch paper, black-and-white reproduction, and (before the microcomputer revolution) a fairly standardized set of fonts. Electronic texts also have material properties-the size of the electronic "page," the structural tropes (frames, tables, layout), the quality of HTML mark-up, the factors of plug-ins and file formats, the action of programming6-and the materials of this technology have a direct effect on the actual path of writing. In the electronic environment, the materials shift into a different grid of properties, propensities, and resistances. In addition, as fonts rage wistful or out of control and the writing "canvas" becomes unlimited, texts become constituted as physical pieces of a never complete and constantly reconstituting whole (the network). Ron Silliman introduced his influential anthology of new writing, In the American Tree, citing a statement by Robert Grenier that "'PROJECTIVE VERSE' IS PIECES ON" ("Language" xv). Silliman was suggesting that his anthology extended Olson's theory of Projective Verse as realized in Creeley's breakthrough collection of poems Pieces (New York: Scribner's, 1969). (Pieces also insisted on poetry's possibilities, as pieces of text, outside externally mandated form.) This statement has resonance in new terrain and might be re-stated: electronic verse is pieces online. Thinking of Creeley's "form is never more than an extension of content" (Charles 79),7 what avenues of content have been opened by such vastly different possibilities for "form"? The medium gives the poem added potential for "making"; hence electronic poetries are positioned to enter and extend a number of investigations of language into a new poetic terrain where words are mutable and embody transmission. These are words that do not merely name; they approach an added potential for "activity." As Charles Bernstein has written, speaking of visual poetry: "For words are no more labels of things than the sky is a styrofoam wrap of some Divine carryout shop. And letters are no more tied to words or words to sentences than a mule is tied to its burden. Letters in liberty. Words freed from the tyranny of horizontality, or sequence" ("Response" 3). These words have equal significance in the electronic realm. Bernstein's allusion to Marinetti's great Futurist declaration, gestures toward the advancement of writing's physicality. Electronic texts provide the subsequent step, projecting writing into charged space, where words themselves extend beyond sequentiality. From context to "dystext," pieces or fragments of text. This is a Texas-sized shift in potentiality, a dance outside the linear, outside the line, an interesting and real place for writing; as they say in Texas, "real cowboys don't line dance." Analogously, the real poem extends beyond the line. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:53 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 761781 ; Loss Pequeño Glazier.; Digital Poetics : Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2013. University Alabama Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. JUMPING TO OCCLUSIONS 35 Thus we look at online hypertext. (Here we investigate link-node hypertext that is generic and Net disseminated, as opposed to proprietary "closed" hypertext or other hypertext systems.)8 Importantly, electronic poetics are not tied to the linearity of the page; this is not an end of linearity but an emergence of multiple linearities. The connection between these multiples is the link, a signal word or conjunction of letters, Bernstein's mule unharnessed, free to jump into a lateral or completely irreverent context or medium (graphical, sound, video). Links bring to the text the riddle of discovery experienced by the anthropologist stepping onto the soil of a previously undiscovered culture: once the imprint of such a footstep is on the sand, the culture is no longer "native." Once a link has been taken, it is no longer a link but a constituted part of the already traveled narrative; the link loses its potentiality, but in doing so, it opens up the possibility of other links. And what if some of these links fail? What we have is not a failure of the internal system but a triumph of internal workings over any possibility of external order. As Gregory Ulmer puts it: "There is no 'central processor' in hyperrhetoric, no set of rules, but a distributed memory, a memory triggered by a cue that spreads through the encyclopedia, the library, the data base (connectionism suggests that the hardware itself should be designed to support the spread of memory through an associational network)" (346). Hypertext allows sequences beyond sequence; however, a serious point of difference must be taken with some Web utopianists: despite tendencies in this direction, the point is not that everything is linked through these sequences. The constitution of any such whole could only be a misrepresentation of stability-another pursuit of the mirage known as the encyclopedia. The arrangements of the internal orders of texts do not add stability to the text, rather they add a perplexing layer of instability; it is the "failure" of the links, whether they connect or not, that gives them their activity. It is through this activity that electronic writing departs irreversibly from the world of print. This post-typographic and nonlinear disunion is no news to poetics. The argument that "Pound's significance lies in his having anticipated the end of 'the Gutenberg era,' the age of print" (Davie 5), rings true in works of many experimental movements and authors who problematized the medium in which their work appeared or the act of writing itself. These include such movements and authors as the following: Futurism, Gertrude Stein, and Dada; the textual webs of Jorge Luis Borges; Gabriel Garda Marquez and Julio Cortazar; following World War II, the exploration of system in Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser's serial works; Larry Eigner's articulation; Robert Creeley's numeric determinations; Jack Spicer and Ed Roberson's split pages; Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Robert Grenier, Alan Fisher, Robert Sheppard, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Claude Royet-Journoud; the radical typographies of Susan Howe and EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:53 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 761781 ; Loss Pequeño Glazier.; Digital Poetics : Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2013. University Alabama Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 36 JUMPING TO OCCLUSIONS Johanna Drucker, David Antin's improvisations, Jerome Rothenberg's ethnopoetics; redeployments of language by Maggie O'Sullivan, Caroline Bergvall, Karen MacCormack, Nicole Brossard, Michele Leggott, Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack, and Hannah Weiner; and the procedures ofJackson Mac Low and John Cage, all which point in different ways to various forms of nonlinearity. It is the play ofpieces that forms the tropes of an electronic web. Speaking of Charles Bernstein's work, Marjorie Perloff writes that it "playfully exploits such rhetorical figures as pun, anaphora, epiphora, metathesis, epigram, anagram, and neologism to create a seamless web of reconstituted words" (Dance 231). Bernstein has called this weaving "dysraphism." "'Raph' ... means 'seam,''' Bernstein explains, "so for me dysraphism is mis-seaminga prosodic device!" (Sophist 44). (John Cage's mesostics, with their keywords running through the middle of a poem, seem to dramatize this because they have an almost literal central "stitch" threading text along a vertical axis.) Bernstein's "sensitivity to etymologies and latent meanings is reflected in the poem itself," Perloff writes, "which is an elaborate 'dysfunctional fusion of embryonic parts' [and] a 'disturbance of stress, pitch, and rhythm of speech' in the interest of a new kind of urban 'rhapsody'" (Dance 230). The weaving of disparate elements into such a larger "whole" is a prosody. As Ron Silliman writes, "When words are, meaning soon follows. Where words join, writing is" ("For L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" 16). Gertrude Stein expressed a similar idea in her performative observation from How to Write: "A sentence is made by coupling meanwhile ride around to be a couple there makes grateful dubiety named atlas coin in a loan" (118). Such coupling can occur through many methods: various forms of automatic writing, Jack Kerouac's spontaneous improvisations, the cut-up techniques of William Burroughs, Antin's collage and talk texts, Cage's mesostics, Mac Low's deterministic procedures, the sound-text experiments of Henri Chopin or Kurt Schwitters, the procedures of text generation programs, among many others. One could even add to this list earlier "conventional" poetic techniques-Chaucer's use of the tale, Blake's images, and the white space of William Carlos Williams. Additionally relevant is the work of an international group of Concrete and visual poets active in the 1950S and 1960s. Poets such as Eugen Gomringer, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Emmett Williams, Dick Higgins, Bob Cobbing, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, among many others, carried out essential investigations of non-semantic arrangements of text in visual fields; these poets broke valuable ground for the visual possibilities of e-poetries. These are all methods used by poets to investigate the poetics of juxtaposition, the weaving of texts. It is through this weaving that writing approaches its potential on the Web, a writing based on juxtaposition. What are links but faults in the monolinear imagination?9 In his "Parapraxes" essays, Freud has written about parapraxis, faults in reading, writing, EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:53 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 761781 ; Loss Pequeño Glazier.; Digital Poetics : Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2013. University Alabama Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. JUMPING TO OCCLUSIONS 37 and speaking, "slips of the tongue," as more possible when the mind shifts into an associative disposition. 10 (For example, at a recent videodisk viewing of cave paintings of Lascaux, 1 was struck by an enlarged detail as identical to a common image of open-heart surgery.) Though Freud would, as is his penchant, like to suggest that conclusions may be drawn from parapraxis, what is important is that he has documented it as a logic of association. Thus we can say that the ability to read linked writings calls on skills of association and depends not on conclusion but occlusion, or an aberration of the eye, literally and homophonously. (If the machine is meant to calculate, writing begins when its error is engaged.) This is a space where the minor matters: with monolinearity blocked, peripheral vision may again resume activity. An electronic poetics alters the "eye" ("I") and also extends the physicality of reading. With the keyboard, literal manipulation is engaged with fingers determining different referentialities of the text-a sight more active than repetitious page turning. Again a fusion of parts extends into a plethora of directions, reminding us of Robert Duncan's reference to the traditional work of a poet as juggling a number of objects and Gertrude Stein's "a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing" (Tender 9). Writing's acute (hence "hyper") activity of movement and transmissionthe thousands of Poetics list subscribers or the millions of transactions a year at the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) (http://epc.buffalo.edu)-witness the merging of writing and transmission. When oral, the voice projects across the room, beyond rooms, and as a "system to pointing," its poetic is one of deflection. Texts move not only within themselves but into socially charged externalities: a webbed interference of junk mail, frets of information, systemic failures, ephemera, disunion-there is no resting place, only the incessandy reconstituted lexia dissolving each time a pathway is chosen. As to the "resting place" in question, 1 am frequendy asked what factor was so motivating that it caused a poet to enter the world of greps, chmods, kernels, and shells-not to mention to suffer the ignominy of being referred to as "one of the UNIX guys" and create the Electronic Poetry Center. The reason? Not only could we not get our early online texts correcdyarchived, we could not even convince the archival site to classify the texts as poetry. The administrators there insisted that the work we created did not look like poetry to them, and so our work was listed under "Zines." What more reason could there be needed for founding an online site? Further, beyond classification is language itself. With dimly veiled rancor, 1 have been asked, what is it about computer-related writing that interested me? Did 1 take up e-literature because 1 could not get a job as a programmer or as a sonneteer? 1 explain some of my reasons: For one thing, having grown up with two languages in San Antonio, 1 was always fascinated by how languages have a permeable seam between them. Indeed, poetic language is a seam through EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:53 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 761781 ; Loss Pequeño Glazier.; Digital Poetics : Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2013. University Alabama Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 38 JUMPING TO OCCLUSIONS which seep multiple parts oflanguage, multiple languages. Like all language, computer language is not limited to use within its primary field. Indeed, its metaphors, its hype, and its vision is seeping into language at all levels, most opportunistically in advertising. Its relevance to poetry, especially when ironic, is quite natural. As might be evidenced in the poem that concludes this chapter, "Mendum," or in a poem such as my "Windows 95" (Leaving Loss Glazier I), poetry is the line where the impact of technology is explored. Thus, to those questioners who ask how I got "here," I explain that indeed I came from a background of poetics. When I discovered that, like my language-within-a-Ianguage experiences in the Southwest, I discovered the language-within-a-Ianguage structure of computer-based writing. It was a natural interest-and an affirmation that within the twisted barbs of any language, lie the strands, roots, and metaphors of language matter that make the field of poetry such a fertile one to plow. An electronic poetics is a poetics. Like any other poetics that recognizes system-be it breath, a controversy of texts, or a nexus of interests-system is a determining factor. A poetics also involves a particular engagement or set of engagements, with its issuing "authority" and technology. The public life of a poetics has, perhaps, been nowhere more visible, with its incessant transmission, than in the electronic poetries. An electronic poetry is a public word, projected across a public world, across systems, itself as system. I I MENDUM italicized-''faulty text" see ambient transmission ... Implacable pressure individual word nor factor of its essay's plangent technological writing finds its shortened by speed's excess prescribes the next case sensitive frame interval back to LIT so that's science vita as temporal release Presumed oneself lost as at anagram of lexis should not moebius strip chain of linked emend hot links simmer on grill have turned set spills Norwegian routing so trajectory across EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:53 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 761781 ; Loss Pequeño Glazier.; Digital Poetics : Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2013. University Alabama Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. JUMPING TO OCCLUSIONS the Atlantic call it bullish poets television effect figurations desert have gotten lost (a whirling disk) both netted and offline turn on its immunely dancing platforms last year Southampton asymptotic in olive phone calls ring your Fonseca Marrakech relation to decadence in anthology. Never thought to find in effect "you get what you ASCII for" to Royaumont gardens an illustration another nine Dutch poets revisiting Bergen in its custom prescribes that swoop across the road as continents transmit say a gathering to honor Pacific write against this point cross-current, visible vs. physical extended serial sequences, beyond text and voila! hence antho-, ana-, authogot faults "mendum" gears affix for public consumption into Veracruz La Malinche's words ring of books then radio drift, deep inflected tones fit forget to send even-rendered domain. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:53 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 761781 ; Loss Pequeño Glazier.; Digital Poetics : Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media Account: s4264928 39 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. ONE WORD PROCESSING AS A LITERARY SUBJECT ot long after he began work in earnest on the mechanical tabulating machine that would be called the Difference Engine, the nineteenthcentury British inventor Charles Babbage found himself a regular guest at the table of Samuel Rogers, a poet who lived in a lavishly rebuilt house in London’s St. James overlooking Green Park. The two had struck up a friendship through Rogers’s brother, a banker, with whom Babbage had financial dealings. Rogers’s breakfasts had long been an institution among London’s literati, a place where Coleridge might talk with J. M. W. Turner as Walter Scott passed a pot of jam to Byron. Babbage, of course, was no poet, though from time to time the idea of writing a novel had crossed his mind as a means of financing his long-deferred work on another project, the Analytical Engine—the device whose design foresaw many of the principles of a universal machine that would be articulated by Alan Turing a century later. At one such breakfast, however, Babbage the polymath found himself discoursing not on his engines, or mathematics, astronomy, or indeed any of the numerous other topics with which he was acquainted, but on composition. How did a poet work, he inquired: Did one start with a fast, rough draft of the whole and then go back to revise, or is the process sentence by sentence, line by line, laboring over each until it was just so before moving on to the next? His host employed the latter method: Rogers ventured that he had never once written more than four (or maybe it was six) lines of verse in a single day, so fastidious was he about the perfection and polish of each. It was said that Robert Southey, by contrast, flew through his drafts, turning out poetry and prose at prodigious rates and going back to revise only after N 14 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 15 he had a thick sheaf of pages. And so it goes, a bit of literary table talk of the sort writers have been engaging in for centuries. Still, here we have the individual generally credited with anticipating the concepts of modern computation chatting with some of the foremost literary figures of his day about the nuts and bolts of writing and revision.1 Word processing would seem an obvious literary subject, for table talk or other wise. Many of us must imagine that its present-day ubiquity was somehow preordained, the trajectory of its uptake as smooth as the convex curve of a classic CRT screen. And indeed, word processing’s standard narrative possesses an overwhelming sense of inevitability. Typically one of the very first moves journalists or technical writers would make in introducing readers to the topic was to align it with the long history of prior writing technologies. References to Sumerian cuneiform or monks in scriptoria or Gutenberg’s printing press suddenly abounded in the computer industry. “Thousands of years ago, people put their thoughts down on clay tablets,” began Byte magazine’s December 1984 review of WordPerfect. “Modern authors have the word processor.”2 These contemporary descriptions sound a lot like today’s TED Talks and other Silicon Valley disruption scenarios: “A word processor is, quite simply, the most amazing thing that has happened to writing in years,” begins the author of a column in the August 1983 issue of Writer’s Digest.3 Ray Hammond, just one year later in the preface to a handbook about word processing addressed specifically to literary authors and journalists, agrees: “The computer is the most powerful tool ever developed for writers.” 4 The freedom and flexibility that word processing apparently afforded— what Michael Heim experienced as bliss—seemed so absolute that it was hard to conceive of the technology as even having a history apart from the long series of clearly inferior writing utensils leading up to the present-day marvel. Yet, however inevitable the development of word processing might have seemed in the history of writing writ large, serious literature— belles lettres—was another story. Hammond acknowledged that among creative writers, “computers have a terrible image, one which at best bores writers and at worst terrifies them.”5 The exception should not be surprising. John Durham Peters reminds us that according to the best evidence we have, writing was invented as a mnemonic device for bookkeeping and calculation, not as a surrogate for speech. And he notes that books—let alone anything we might care to characterize as belles lettres—have never been the mainstay of printing, which gravitated overwhelmingly toward instrumental texts EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 16 TRACK CHANGES like bills, records, indulgences, and reference works.6 Likewise, scholars such as Peter Stallybrass and Lisa Gitelman have demonstrated that the mainstay of printing in the West since Gutenberg has been so-called “job printing” (a nineteenth-century term), as opposed to codices and books, with perhaps the exception of the Bible itself.7 And according to John Guillory, it is the intra-office memo (not the novel or the sonnet) that stands as the “humblest yet perhaps most ubiquitous genre of writing in the modern world.”8 Approaching word processing as a specifically literary subject therefore means acknowledging that we seek to concern ourselves with a statistically exceptional form of writing that has accounted for only a narrow segment of the historical printing and publishing industry. Moreover, for the literati, word processing was invariably burdened (not buoyed) by the associations carried by the gerund in that compound term, which could function as a foil for nothing less than humanity itself. “The writer, unless he is a mere word processor, retains three attributes that power-mad regimes cannot tolerate: a human imagination, in the many forms it may take; the power to communicate; and hope,” opined Margaret Atwood in a 1981 address to Amnesty International.9 When conceptualist Kenneth Goldsmith—who has built a reputation on his verbatim transcriptions of traffic reports and newspaper dailies— declares, “I used to be an artist; then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor,” he implies that he is merely part of the zeitgeist; but in fact the comment provokes us precisely because of word processing’s associations with mechanization, automation, and repetition; bureaucracy, productivity, and office work.10 Novelists, dramatists, poets, and essayists nowadays set preferences and manage files more often than they change ribbons and zing carriage returns. Yet neither the designers of word processors nor the inventors of the typewriter envisioned literary writing as the inevitable application for their machines. The typewriter was initially conceived and marketed as an aid to the blind, deaf, and motor-impaired, and for taking down dictation. Hammond calls it a “desperately limited tool . . . totally linear in operation, frustrating a writer’s attempts to mold a piece of writing as a whole.”11 (For Hammond the computer is much closer to working with paper and pencil than a typewriter is, a conclusion we have also seen in Robert Sawyer and Adam Bradley’s observations about WordStar.) Nonetheless, typewriters would enjoy early and notable associations with literary culture and cre- EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 17 ativity, as catalyzed by Twain’s celebrity and most fully embodied by T. S. Eliot’s typing of The Waste Land a generation later, a poem in which a typist (that is, a type writer) figures prominently.12 Hannah Sullivan has shown how typewriting during this period was quickly assimilated into individual authors’ workflows, though still functioning primarily as a site of revision and correction as opposed to free-form composition (most writers continued to draft longhand).13 Some writers learned to type up manuscripts for themselves, numerous others employed secretaries and assistants—an often gendered dynamic that, as we will see in Chapter 7, was reproduced decades later with the advent of word processing. Typewriting also became an important part of the representational fabric of modernism through figures as diverse as H. N. Werkman, Gertrude Stein, and Bob Brown.14 Darren Wershler, who has given us perhaps our best book on typewriting, enumerates the iconic imagery that quickly took hold: close-ups of the hammers and keys, inky letterforms steadily stamped behind a ribbon, or else (aurally now) the staccato chatter of the mechanism to signify productivity.15 The totality of this image complex was as absolute as it was in some sense unexpected—as Adam Bradley astutely notes with regard to fiction writers, “it is a testament to their success in harnessing the typewriter’s capacity as a tool for creative expression that we most often think of typewriters in the nostalgic light of the hard-boiled writer cranking out pages by dim lamplight.”16 (Ernest Hemingway took to staging photographs of himself at his typewriter in which he appears to be looking into the face of his muse like a toreador staring down a bull.) Yet Bradley also reminds us that the association between typewriting and literary productivity “was a mastery achieved only over time, and with many casualties among those authors unable to adapt.”17 Cinema has furnished some especially vivid portrayals of those casualties. Consider the typewriters (equally monstrous and mundane) that tortured William Lee in Naked Lunch (1991) or John Turturro’s character in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (also 1991); or the way in which Stanley Kubrick used a typewriter to record the deteriorating mind of Jack Nicholson’s character in the film adaptation of The Shining (1980). (The scene where Shelley Duvall confronts her husband’s prodigious output of pages, all containing repetitions of the same phrase, is a restaging of Truman Capote’s famous put-down of that other Jack—Kerouac—“It is not writing. It is only typing.”)18 It would seem that word processing can’t help but make for a poor cinematic prop by comparison, facilitated as it is by mass-produced EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 18 TRACK CHANGES machines made of plastic, not metal, the bold rattle of the keys replaced by muted clicks and clacks, the backlit screen but a pale counterpart to the existential whiteness of the page.19 “The idea of taking every thing and cramming it into this little electronic box designed by some nineteen-year-old in Silicon Valley . . . I can’t imagine it,” David Mamet once declared.20 Computers thus seem far removed from the most iconic renditions of literary authorship: more fax machine than fountain pen, we might say. “I am surprised by how much I like my computer,” admits Anne Fadiman. “But I will never love it. I have used several; they seem indistinguishable. When you’ve seen one pixel you’ve seen them all.”21 By contrast, evidence that the typewriter is now a consummate literary subject (and object) is seemingly everywhere today: typewriter appreciation pieces, some thoughtful, many merely wistful, are a mainstay of journalists and essayists;22 the Internet routinely spawns lists of famous authors and their favorite typewriters;23 hipsters carry typewriters into coffee shops and set them up next to their espresso (and then post pictures to social media);24 Steven Soboroff’s collection of typewriters belonging to everyone from the Unabomber to John Updike regularly tours and is exhibited for charity;25 Tom Hanks, a well-known aficionado, bankrolled an iPad app called the Hanx Writer that imitates the look and especially the sound of a typewriter on a touchscreen;26 and when Hanks wrote an op-ed for the New York Times to launch the Hanx Writer, he lamented that audiences at Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy (in which he had recently starred in his Broadway debut as tabloid journalist Mike McAlary), got only the subdued clickety-clacks of word processors in the on-stage newsroom, rather than the hardboiled racket of vintage typewriters.27 As tellingly as any of these, when Manson Whitlock’s New Haven typewriter repair shop closed after his death at the age of 96, the story was covered in the New York Times. “I don’t even know what a computer is,” he was quoted as saying in 2010.28 The ubiquity of computers and word processors has clearly allowed us to retroactively buff and varnish the typewriter’s aura of authenticity. Thus typewriter collector and scholar Richard Polt has collected numerous such instances as I have been describing into an attractively produced book entitled The Typewriter Revolution, whose opening manifesto enjoins readers to hold public “type-ins” and other wise promote typing’s tactility as an alternative to the seductive distractions of the “data stream.”29 Just as importantly, however, we should acknowledge that vectors of influence can be bidirectional and recursive, and other wise follow strange loops—a phe- EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 19 nomenon evident in the work of artist Tim Youd, who stages public performances in which he retypes, word for word, page by page, classic American novels on vintage typewriters in a place associated with the book in question.30 For each such project, Youd sources the same original make and model of typewriter that the author used to write the book. The novels are then retyped in their entirety on a single page of typing paper—that is, when Youd gets to the end of the page, he simply replaces it in the rollers and starts typing on it again from the top. The results are striking: dark, abstract Rorschach blots that bear some resemblance to Concrete Poetry, though the physical page itself is left in tatters, a latticework held together only by what cumulative negative space has remained intact in and around the inky palimpsest of typewritten letterforms. While this work might seem like the ultimate expression of typewriter fetishism, I would suggest it is just as much marked by word processing for the way in which Youd’s retyping reimagines books as data, reflecting an aesthetic (and anxiety) that is all about the “processing” of words, the commodification of canon and tradition, and the sheer vastness, scope, and density of written text in the present. od looked down at the writers and said, ‘I haven’t done anything for these people for a long time, hundreds of years, so I’m going to make up for it,’ ” Frank Conroy is quoted as saying during his tenure as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.31 Of course attestations of divine providence tend to lack historical nuance, to say nothing of technologies such as the typewriter, correction fluid, acid-free paper, and the ballpoint pen (biro).32 How, then, should we fix and formulate a literary history of word processing in a larger history of writing technologies? The first narrative to resort to is that of technological progression, or perhaps what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin would come to call a “remediation”: a new medium defi ning itself by assimilating and appropriating the associations and affordances of a previous medium.33 Many observers of technological change have been tempted by this pattern. When Margaret Atwood, no naïf she, suggests that the Internet is still only “at the early typewriter stage,” we are clearly meant to assume that it will one day attain the word processing stage.34 In this progression, then, the word processor follows the typewriter, which followed the ballpoint pen, which followed the fountain pen and goose quill, and so on. Some of the relevant technological history would also seem to encourage such a view. A 1960 program named G EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 20 TRACK CHANGES Expensive Typewriter ran on the TX-0 or “Tixo” computer then installed in MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.35 The joke was that the state-of-the-art TX-0 (whose commercial incarnation, the PDP-1, would cost upward of $100,000, stand six feet high, and weigh over half a ton) was really nothing more than a (very!) expensive remediation of what typewriter historian Bruce Bliven Jr. had just a few years earlier called that wonderful writing machine.36 Undeniably, literary authors often understood their word processors as exactly this kind of remediation, at least initially. Doubtless they would have been encouraged by the fact that there is a basic visual continuity between a personal computer and a typewriter—a keyboard and a screen behind and laterally perpendicular to the keyboard, much as a piece of paper comes curling out of the rollers. The conversion narrative wherein a writer testifies to the power and potential of word processing—never to touch a typewriter again—thus became one of the most commonplace by-products of how the technology was assimilated. “I’ve got a magic typewriter,” declared science fiction novelist Larry Niven in a 1980 issue of Writer’s Digest. “The word processor program moves blocks of type around (any size); writes over a line that isn’t perfect, leaving no trace; erases words or lines or paragraphs in a second or two; and when I’m ready it prints as pretty a manuscript as you ever saw, with justified margins and no visible corrections.”37 The prolific fantasist Piers Anthony switched to a computer in 1985 only after his wife, a computer engineer, convinced him that the keyboard could be reprogrammed to re-create the custom Dvorak layout he insisted on using with his manual typewriter.38 Then there is Jorie Graham: “I still use it like a fancy typewriter.”39 José Saramago: “What I do on the computer is exactly what I would do on the typewriter if I still had it, the only difference being that it is cleaner, more comfortable, and faster. Everything is better.” 40 Amos Oz: “The word processor is, for me, nothing but a typewriter, only you don’t have to use Typex to erase or correct a mistake.” 41 Joan Didion, commenting on the IBM Thinkpad she was using at the time of a 1996 interview, likewise stated, “I just use it like a typewriter.” But she immediately complicates her own response, adding, “Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.” 42 Not all writers choose to use a computer, even today. The list of those who do not is long, and includes some of our most celebrated: Paul Auster EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 21 and Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates, to name but a few. “I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter,” DeLillo once declared in an interview, choosing to speak (intentionally?) in short, staccato sentences: “The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape. It’s an aesthetic issue: when I work I have a sculptor’s sense of the shape of the words I’m making. I use a machine with larger than average letters the bigger the better.” 43 So pace Didion it is the typewriter and not the computer that allows him to “sculpt” his prose. And like Henry James, he relishes the aural dimension of the experience. Wariness and critique of media and technology is of course one of the hallmarks of DeLillo’s fiction. But Cormac McCarthy, who has enjoyed the benefits of a long-term residency at the Santa Fe Institute (one of the world’s premier centers for advanced scientific research), has likewise done all of his writing on a light-blue Lettera 32 Olivetti that he purchased in a pawnshop in Knoxville for $50 in 1963. (It fetched a quarter of a million dollars at auction when McCarthy replaced it with another Olivetti.)44 Meanwhile Paul Auster’s Olympia typewriter is perhaps one of the most iconic writing instruments in the world. Since acquiring it in 1974, he tells us in the book he eventually coauthored with Sam Messer, “every word I have written has been typed out on that machine.” 45 That may be true, but it is also a fact that Auster writes first in longhand and types his prose only afterward. And he regards this division of effort as fundamental. The reasons are resolutely somatic: “Keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.” 46 The typing that then follows is a mechanical act, but no less essential to the process: “Typing allows me to experience the book in a new way, to plunge into the flow of the narrative and feel how it functions as a whole. I call it ‘reading with my fingers,’ and it’s amazing how many errors your fingers will find that your eyes never noticed.” 47 As for upgrading, Auster is adamant: “ There is no point in talking about computers and word processors,” he states, and goes on to relate his horror of pushing a wrong button and losing an entire day’s work—or worse, an entire manuscript (“I knew that if there was a wrong button to be pushed, I would eventually push it”).48 Similarly, Joyce Carol Oates also hand-writes and then types—but not with a word processor.49 Although she typed her earliest books directly, the typewriter EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 22 TRACK CHANGES has since become for her “a rather alien thing—a thing of formality and impersonality.”50 Her practice dovetails with Auster’s description of his typing, wherein he acknowledges the bodily toll it takes— strained back, aching neck—because the only way to get clean typescript after revisions is to start over again from scratch.51 But though they parallel one another in their workflows—first longhand and then typewriter—Auster and Oates regard their relationship to these instruments differently, and have adopted them for different reasons. Ironically, Oates—known not least for her prodigious output—is routinely accused of just the kind of extreme productivity that word processing’s detractors once feared would overtake the literary establishment.52 But while some writers have foregone computers altogether, many more use them alongside other writing technologies, including longhand, verbal dictation (itself once recognized as a form of word processing), and the manual annotation and correction of hard-copy drafts. Kazuo Ishiguro maintains two writing desks, one whose surface is slanted for longhand and the other with a decade-old computer unconnected to the Internet.53 Annie Proulx writes first drafts by hand and then revises on a computer;54 Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa typically composed directly on her Macintosh but edited her final drafts by hand.55 Toni Morrison told a group of creative writing students at Swarthmore that she writes exclusively with pencils on legal pads, but in a more in-depth exchange in the Paris Review it emerges that computers and even voice dictation figure in her process as well.56 Michael Ondaatje is notorious for the dense handwritten drafts he produces, but he also dictates the text to a digital recorder from which it is transcribed by an assistant into a digital document, which Ondaatje then proceeds to edit further.57 Similarly, J. K. Rowling is often touted for working longhand because she wrote the first Harry Potter novel that way in an Edinburgh coffeehouse—and she still does write longhand—but since her second novel she has also worked with a computer.58 The reality, of course, is that every writer’s individual habits and practices are deeply personal and idiosyncratic, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to extract patterns in support of generalizable conclusions—beyond the intense intimacy and commitment that the act of writing invariably demands. Some writers dictate aloud. Some write longhand and then type their work on a typewriter or computer. Some compose at the keyboard but then print out their work for handwritten revision. Others don’t need the hard copy. Some writers print every thing out, mark it up, and then retype EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 23 it themselves. Others hand it off to an assistant. A few still revise by (literally) copying and pasting strips of text.59 Some writers find the computer alienating, intimidating. Others see it as an intimate, profoundly unmediated experience. Some writers value the slowness of the pen. Some value the speed of the keyboard. Some chafe at the labor of retyping, others embrace it. Some writers are enamored by the small rituals of the process, the changing of the worn-out ribbon, the bright bell of the carriage return. Others are unsentimental. Some writers require an absolutely specific instrument—or setting, or time of day, or slant of light, just so. Others write on anything and every thing, anytime, anywhere. Work your way through “The Art of Fiction” and its kindred features in the Paris Review—what George Steiner, in his own “Art of Criticism” interview, describes as “the largest collection of insight into this of any publication”— and you can find accounts describing all of these and more.60 The one inescapable conclusion is that our instruments of composition, be they a Remington or a Macintosh, all serve to focalize and amplify our imagination of what writing is. ord processing hovers uneasily between the comfortably familiar and the encroachingly alien. Rather than a reimplementation or remediation of typewriting, I prefer to think of it as an ongoing negotiation of what the act of writing means. (To the point is one recent marketing slogan for Microsoft Word: More Than Words.)61 The very term “word processing” is increasingly difficult to utter unselfconsciously. Even “computer” is beginning to seem cumbersome alongside “laptop” (a specific form factor for a computer) or the trademarked brand names of individual products. “I wrote that on my iPad” sounds natural; but gesture toward the same device and say you’ve just written something on a computer (or a word processor) and it sounds wrong, the sort of locution one might expect from someone who still has a landline and answering machine. Nowadays we walk around with supercomputers in our pockets—but we still prefer to call them by a vestigial name from a prior telecommunications epoch. What does it mean, then, to recapture our sense of what word processing once was at a moment when we text each other with our . . . phones? The big histories of the Information Age now emerging are of little help with this question. There is scarce mention of word processing in books such as Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators or James Gleick’s The Information.62 W EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 24 TRACK CHANGES Perhaps this is because the technology lacks a single obvious “genius” figure to personify it. Yet I suspect it is also because word processing is widely perceived as belonging to the realm of application instead of innovation. To this way of thinking a word processor is merely an arbitrary instantiation or just one particular configuration of the universal machine that is a modern digital computer. The technorati have often shown surprising disdain for word processing on exactly these grounds. Ted Nelson, for example, visionary author of the book Literary Machines (1980) and founder of the Xanadu project, has frequently inveighed against programs like WordStar and Word that are based on the WYSIWYG model. For him, these represent the triumph of a fundamentally conservative vision. “A document,” he laments, “can only consist of what can be printed.” 63 Jay David Bolter, a classicist who was an early advocate for computers as writing tools, rendered much the same verdict, concluding that word processing was “nostalgic” in its respect for the aesthetics of print.64 In this view, the promise and potential of newer, more experimental modes of electronic writing— including nonlinear hypertext, a term Nelson himself coined and has popularized throughout his career—is at odds with a technological paradigm whose highest achievement lies in mimicking the appearance of something that might have come from Gutenberg’s own press.65 Scholarly interest in the history of electronic literature has similarly gravitated overwhelmingly toward those authors who sought to reimagine our definitions of the literary through branching, multimodal, and interactive narratives or poetic compositions. “A story that changes every time you read it,” in the words of one of the form’s most accomplished practitioners, Michael Joyce.66 The most important platforms for this kind of experimentation were HyperCard (first released by Apple in 1987), Storyspace (initially co-designed by Joyce with Bolter and John B. Smith, and developed since 1990 by Eastgate Systems), and then the Web itself.67 Interactive fiction— so-called “text adventures,” which had a brief commercial vogue in the early 1980s through the success of a company named Infocom—have also increasingly been explored by scholars.68 Lori Emerson, among the best of recent academic critics, has carefully detailed the ways in which poets like bpNichol, Geof Huth, and Paul Zelevansky each leveraged the programmable capabilities of the early Apple II line of computers to craft innovative on-screen textual compositions.69 The texts thus produced are indeed striking, harbingers of a new aesthetic intimately tied to the procedural capabilities of digital media but also knowingly reaching back to Concrete EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 25 Poetry, Surrealism, and other well- documented movements. Yet the Osborne 1, which debuted in 1981 (the year the Apple II became the bestselling computer on the consumer market), was likewise an important platform for writing, as we have already seen. One motivation in my labeling of word processing as a literary subject is to balance the preponderance of critical and historical attention already devoted to those relatively few writers who, as Emerson relates (after John Cage), viewed the computer as a labor- making device— allowing for bold but sometimes rarefied experiments—rather than as the far more commonplace labor-saving device it was for most users. And yet, as we will also see, the boundaries between such supposedly polarized uses and users are porous; academic focus on the avant-garde has risked obscuring our recollections of a much wider, albeit more quotidian, history of writing on screens. Researchers in literacy, composition, and rhetoric have been exploring and assessing the impact of computers on writing for at least the last four decades. I have already mentioned the contributions of Daniel Chandler and Christina Haas, who together with such pioneering scholars as Gail Hawisher, Eric Johnson, Andrea Lunsford, Joel Nydahl, Cynthia Selfe, John Slatin, and others helped launch the field that has produced the most sustained, thoroughgoing investigation of exactly how word processing and other digital writing modalities—right up to present-day Wikis, blogs, and social media—shape the art and act of composition. The resources these scholars put in place are crucial to understanding the emergence and evolution of the technology. In 1983 Bradford Morgan, an English professor at a remote technical college in North Dakota, founded the Research in Word Processing Newsletter.70 The first issues were produced on a CPT 8000 dedicated word processing machine that was available to him on the campus, and then mimeographed for distribution. Another colleague, James Schwartz, soon joined Morgan to produce the Newsletter—known especially for its bibliographies of popular and scholarly work about word processing— each month for the remainder of the decade. The existence of such a publication seemed “inevitable,” according to Morgan.71 In the introduction to the first issue he wrote, “The word processor not only saves times [sic], conserves labor, and solves problems, but it also reinforces the traditional mission of writing programs.” The subscriber list grew to hundreds, including academics, journalists, and creative writers (Piers Anthony among them). Likewise in 1983, the University of Chicago Press published the first edition of the Chicago Guide to Preparing Electronic Manuscripts, EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 26 TRACK CHANGES noting that word processing meant that “with cooperation between author and publisher . . . the elusive keystrokes can be captured and reused.” 72 In 1985 the Modern Language Association took the unusual step of offering an official recommendation to its membership on the choice of a word processor: Nota Bene, a program created by a Yale doctoral student named Steven Siebert who was frustrated at the inability of existing software to adequately handle the notes and citations so critical to scholarly writing.73 The gradual uptake of computers within English departments also gave rise to another subtle circumstance: unsuspecting creative writing instructors would one day find a desktop machine (with all the latest software) provided as standard furnishing for their campus offices— a very literal realization, if you will, of what Mark McGurl, in reference to the institutionalization of creative writing programs in academia, terms the “program era.” 74 Occasionally textual scholarship—the discipline that studies the material history of the transmission and transformations of literary or other texts—has yielded some attention to the minute particulars of word processing, as has been the case with Adam Bradley’s work on Ralph Ellison or Doug Reside and the libretto for Jonathan Larson’s Broadway musical RENT. (Reside has applied forensic computing techniques to the original diskettes Larson used in his computer, thereby recovering alternate versions of some of the lyrics and MIDI compositions.)75 Experience teaches us that we are likely to see more of this kind of work, which depends on precise knowledge of individual writers and their personal computing history.76 A textual scholar would know, for example, that The Waste Land not only featured a typist as one of its figures but that Eliot’s actual typing of the poem—on three different typewriters—proved the key by which Lawrence Rainey unlocked the history of the text and accurately reconstructed the different episodes’ order of composition. (Doing so required document sleuthing of the sort usually practiced by the FBI.) Would such a coup have been possible if Eliot wrote the poem on a succession of Mac PowerBooks? Scholars interested in questions such as these for literary manuscripts that now exist only as document folders on hard drives or data in the “cloud” will one day have to come to terms with the particulars of different operating systems, software versions, and hardware protocols, as well as the characteristics of a variety of different hard-copy output technologies, from dot matrix and daisywheel to inkjet and laser printer.77 All of these problems and possibilities depend not just on our knowledge of “computers” or “word EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 27 processors,” but also on our knowledge of very specific products and technologies. wenty years ago, just at the moment of the Web’s apotheosis, Sven Birkerts fi rst gazed at the spinning globe in the corner of the old Netscape Navigator browser and counseled his readers to “refuse it.”78 In a much more recent essay he meditates on Joseph O’Neill’s use of Google Earth (whose default view is similarly the planet as seen from space) as a literary device at the end of his 2008 novel Netherland. Birkerts fi nds the literary image conjured by the technology compelling, so much so that he briefly considers installing the software on his own computer; but once again he opts to refuse it, reaching out to click but then withdrawing his hand: “The fact that such a power is available to the average user leaches from the overall power of the novel-as-genre,” he concludes.79 Say what one will, but this seems to me a dim view of that genre’s contemporary relevance if maintaining its vitality somehow depends on keeping readers an arm’s length from the very subjects it seeks to encompass. Part of the problem with commentaries such as Birkerts’s is a kind of flattening—a sweeping of all nuance and distinction, all attention to the minute material particulars of individual circumstance—under the banner of epochal terms like the Information Age. But what do such terms really mean to us here in the day-to-day world of the present? Joyce Carol Oates may not use a word processor, but she is on Twitter, with over 100,000 followers.80 Toni Morrison writes longhand but also uses a computer (and, as we know from the 2007 advertising campaign, reads books on an Amazon Kindle). Paul Auster writes longhand but employs an assistant to do his computer work. The same is true of Michael Ondaatje. Regardless of each of their individual attitudes toward word processing and its place in their workflows, there is no easy sorting of any of these writers into analog or digital binaries, into those who have either embraced “it” or refused it. In 1985 John Barth sat for his Paris Review interview with George Plimpton. “Do you think word processors will change the style of writers to come?” Plimpton asks. “They may very well,” Barth replies, and continues: “But I remember a colleague of mine at Johns Hopkins, Professor Hugh Kenner, remarking that literature changed when writers began to compose on the typewriter. I raised my hand and said, ‘Professor Kenner, I still write with a fountain pen.’ And he said, ‘Never mind. You are breathing the air T EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 28 TRACK CHANGES of literature that’s been written on the typewriter.’ So I suppose that my fiction will be word-processed by association, though I myself will not become a green-screener.”81 One way to take this is as mystification and nothing more, a throwaway statement wherein the air exuded from the typewriter (or word processor) swirls about the more earnest endeavors of the fountain pen, like vapors from an atomizer. The comment is perhaps that, but it is also something more I think. For a severe media determinist like Friedrich Kittler, it would in fact be taken as a statement of remarkable selfawareness, one in which the writer frankly acknowledges the paucity of human agency amid a mechanized regime of keys, chips, ribbons, rollers, and signals. “Writing in the age of media has always been a short circuit between brain physiology and communications technologies—bypassing humans or even love,” he flatly declares.82 (Kittler is contrasting the mechanized imprint of the typewritten page to the tradition of writing love letters by hand—readers familiar with his analysis will understand that we are brushing the surface of his whole cosmology.) Here John Barth is marking his own dominant impression of the technology, colored by alien associations and the threat of sublimation: one becomes a green-screener, bathed in that monochrome glow. And indeed, Barth himself did become one, the evidence of his manuscripts revealing him as assimilated by the time he was writing The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor some five years later.83 Moreover, he integrated the poetics of electronic writing into his fiction, in novels like Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative (2001), which imagines Johns “Hop” Johnson as a fictional protégé version of himself captivated by hypertext, as well as in short stories like “Click” (1997) and “The Rest of Your Life” (2000). None of this should be very surprising given Barth’s interest in literary experimentalism of all sorts, not to mention the foundational conceit in his Cold War fable Giles Goat-Boy (1966) that the manuscript of the novel had been compiled from reels of mainframe computer storage tape— certainly one of the earliest instances of a computer having any kind of voice or role in serious fiction outside of science fiction. No less notable is the story of Hugh Kenner himself, Barth’s interlocutor in the dialogue above. Kenner was a critic of the first rank, a distinguished scholar who studied under Marshall McLuhan and then devoted a career to Ezra Pound and other major figures of British and American literary modernism. He also, however, maintained a longtime interest in computergenerated poetry, wrote columns and reviews for Byte magazine, and in 1984 published a user’s guide to the Heath/Zenith Z-100 computer, a com- EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 29 petitor to the IBM PC noted at the time for its color graphics. In the introduction to the user’s guide, he mentions building his first one from a kit: “I . . . turned it on, pressed the keys, and saw letters and numbers jump to life on the screen. It worked!” He also states he’d gotten it to help with his writing, and indeed it does (“automating the drudge-work”), though not until after the subsequent addition of a printer.84 This publication is little remembered today, but just a few years after it appeared Kenner would publish a still well-regarded set of essays entitled The Mechanic Muse (1987), demonstrating how Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Beckett each responded to technological change in their own era. Given that Kenner was a student of McLuhan, it is perhaps best to read the exchange about the “air of the typewriter [and word processor]” as an impromptu extension of the thesis of The Gutenberg Galaxy: that language, mobile and recombinant, is now literally at our fingertips, pervading our structures and systems of thought, and reconfiguring ours senses. Whatever new twist the green-screeners portend, Barth resigns himself to his fate. But air—the ether— can also be understood as a medium of sorts, as it was for much of the nineteenth century.85 In this respect Kenner and Barth become anticipatory voices of some of the more influential branches of media studies today, those embracing networks and layers of coded or scripted artifice as the material base of a new, decidedly nonvirtual reality—a reality that also (nowadays) circulates throughout the air itself via wireless radio and cellular signals, and that even then intimately tied to networks of power, capital, and control in a global system where identity and commerce intermingle in data flows that are, algorithmically, indistinguishable from writing. Word processing may thus be a literary subject, but word processing also shapes and informs literary subjects—the persons who inhabit the system (and economy) of literature, green-screeners or other wise. As both Haas and Chandler remind us, writing is a medial process, characterized by the author’s relationship to an ever-expanding array of tools and surfaces. “Technologies cannot be experienced in isolation from each other, or from their social functions,” is how Chandler puts it. “Our use even of a pen necessitates the complementary use of related technologies (such as ink and paper) no less than does our use of a word processor.”86 We have seen that George R. R. Martin disconnects himself from the Internet while writing, but that does not mean he is isolated from other kinds of networks and dependencies: How, for example, does he maintain that DOS machine? Where do spare parts come from? How does he get files from the computer’s hard EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 30 TRACK CHANGES drive to his publisher? Who converts them from WordStar’s native .ws format, and how? Or does he print them out? If he does, on what kind of printer? And whose job is it then to rekey the text so it can pass to layout and production?87 (This is to say nothing of Martin’s reliance on that most elementary of modern networks, the power grid.) The reality of these contingencies and arrangements, their consequences and dependencies, are all part of what it means to “know” that a particular writer uses a particular writing tool, word processing or other wise.88 Writing, in other words, is never off the grid. It is always about power— a “power technology,” as Durham Peters calls it.89 He means both the legalistic and societal power that writing embodies and encodes, as well as its even more fundamental capacity to project language through and across basic physical categories like space and time. A literary history of word processing must therefore acknowledge not only the hybrid, heterogeneous nature of both individual persons and their personalities, but also the highly complex scene of writing (and rewriting) that we observe today, one where text morphs and twists through multiple media at nearly every stage of the composition and publication process. The history I offer here thus largely and willfully resists generalizations and sweeping conclusions; it highlights instead the stories of individuals, it pays heed to the difference different tools and technologies actually make, and it reveals how attitudes and assumptions can sometimes change over the span of even just a few years. It also, I would hope— constructively, even joyfully— extends our imagination of what writing is by illustrating the variety of ways in which all manifestations of that activity coexist and cohabitate with technology. Take, for example, Neal Stephenson and his epic Baroque Cycle. His colophon to the three books (just shy of 3,000 published pages of scientific and historical fiction) captures what I mean. He tells us there that the manuscript was drafted longhand, using a succession of boutique fountain pens. Stephenson then transcribed the text to his personal computer system using the venerable Emacs program and typeset it himself using TeX, the computer typesetting system to which Donald Knuth (perhaps our most famous living computer scientist) devoted nearly a decade of his career to perfecting. His publisher, however, wanted the manuscript set using what was then the industry standard, QuarkXPress, so Stephenson next took it upon himself to put together a conversion program written in LISP.90 Point for point, the brand names of the fountain pens—Waterman, Rotring, Jorg Hysek—balance out the technical partic- EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 31 ulars of the software programs and computing languages that follow. Stephenson’s fountain pens are, of course, beautiful, precision instruments; but his hand-tooled LISP program is beautiful in its own way, and every bit as integral to the writing act. Or else consider Jonathan Franzen, who in recent years has repeatedly spoken out against the pernicious influence of social media.91 It would be easy to cast him as a neo-Luddite and killjoy, a refusenik after Birkerts. But witness too this extraordinary passage, worth quoting in full for the sheer grit of it: the self-knowledge, the recall of technical details, and especially the deep, multisensory intimacy of the relationship to technology it exposes: I bought my first computer in 1989. It was a noisy metal box made by Amdek, with a paper-white VGA monitor. In good codependent form I came to appreciate the noise of the Amdek fan’s hum. I told myself I like the way it cut out the noise from the street and other apartments. But after two years of heavy use, the Amdek developed a new, frictive squeal whose appearance and disappearance seemed (though I was never quite sure of this) to follow the rise and fall of the air’s relative humidity. My first solution was to wear earplugs on muggy days. After six months of earplugs, however, with the squeal becoming more persistent, I removed the computer’s sheet-metal casing. Holding my ear close, I fiddled and poked. Then the squeal stopped for no reason, and for several days I wrote fiction on a topless machine, its motherboard and tutti frutti wires exposed. And when the squeal returned, I discovered I could make it stop by applying pressure to the printed circuit-board that controlled the hard disk. There was a space that I could wedge a pencil into, and if I torqued the pencil with a rubber band, the corrective pressure held. The cover of the computer didn’t fit right when I put it back on; I accidentally stripped the threads off a screw and had to leave one corner of the cover sort of flapping.92 No virtual realities here, only the minute torques and tolerances of the everyday: relative humidity, rubber bands, and stripped screws, their shavings of low-grade steel no doubt collecting somewhere inside the burlesque cavity of the machine’s exposed innards. It’s a prose passage whose only real reason for existing is to advance the theme of his essay (“scavenging”), and yet it also reminds us that all of this is what writing really is, these details no different in their way from those that inform the re-creation of the scriptorium so marvelously rendered by Umberto Eco, or from the EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Copyright © 2016. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 32 TRACK CHANGES care and concentration with which a connoisseur restores the delicate moving parts of a vintage typewriter. Of course sometimes the details really do make all the difference. Here is Nicholson Baker (who once made a living as a word processor; that is, a professional operator of them), describing the writing of A Box of Matches (2004), which he did like the novel’s narrator with his journal, early in the morning and in the dark: “I had a couple different laptops because they were not all that dependable, and one of them had a slider bar. I could slide the screen brightness down to almost nothing, so I was sitting in complete darkness. The screen would have just the tiniest hint of phosphorescence and a faint crackle of static electricity. I thought, This is an option Dickens did not have.”93 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/25/2021 1:51 AM via UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL CAMPUS AN: 1223492 ; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.; Track Changes : A Literary History of Word Processing Account: s4264928 Turnitin® This assignment will be submitted to Turnitin®. Instructions Stage 1: Technology Timeline Please see the full description of this project before you begin. For stage 1, you will create a timeline of your life using five specific artifacts of technology. At least two should be non-digital (a tool, musical instrument, appliance, non-digital electronic device, a form of transportation, etc.). You will then write a concluding paragraph that reflects on the overall impact of these technologies on your personal experiences and development. For your timeline, please do the following: 1. Select five specific artifacts of technology that have impacted you throughout your life, and find a picture of each. 2. Arrange your pictures in a chronological timeline by associating each picture with a specific age or time in your life. 3. Write a title for each picture that includes: 1. The name of the technology 2. The year you first used the technology 3. Your age at the time 4. Write a 3-5 sentence caption for each picture that describes how that specific technology influenced your experiences and self-identity at that time in your life. When writing your captions, you might consider these questions: Did you have an emotional connection to this particular technology? Why? How did this technology shape your self-conception? Your relationship with others? How did this technology affect your thoughts about yourself and the world? 5. Compose a concluding paragraph of about 7-10 sentences that reflects on how these forms of technology impacted your personal development. Some questions to consider include: Would you be the same person you are today without this technology? Did any of the technologies covered change you during a specific time of your life? Describe how technology, in general, is a part of who you are based on the artifacts you included in this assignment? 6. Provide MLA citations for each image at the end of your timeline. Sample Citation Martin, M. Photograph of Brother AX 28, Typewriter Museum, http://www.mrmartinweb.com/type.htm. Accessed 24 April 2019. 7. For fun, share one of your entries with your classmates in the Discussion Forum for this project. Please take the time to look at your classmate’s pos and reply to at least one briefly. Format Submit this as a Word document with embedded images. Your images should appear in chronological order with the name and caption under each image. Your concluding paragraph should be at the end. Your captions and final paragraph’s text should be typed, double-spaced, and use a common 12 pt. font like Times New Roman or Calibri. Sample Timeline Entry this is your image this is your title-----> Brother AX 28 Typewriter, 1989 high school this is your caption-----> This typewriter had spell check and a small digital screen to type a sentence and check it before the typewriter printed it. I wrote all of my senior year papers on this typewriter, and it made editing so much easier. I had liked to write but always wanted to edit my papers after I typed them, which was difficult with a manual typewriter, so I ended up feeling discouraged sometimes. My concept of writing was changed by this typewriter when I was introduced to digital editing, and I even ended up studying creative writing later and still write today. This typewriter encouraged my conception of myself as a writer.
Purchase answer to see full attachment