Life at Gramercy Typewriter Co.

“‘There’s going to come a time where there are so few people repairing these things that they’re just going to have to say, that’s the end of it.’” Mary Pilon visits Gramercy Typewriter Co.: The Last of the Typewriter Men.

Related reading
All OCA typewriter posts (Pinboard)

Esther Greenwood on the eighteenth century

From Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963):

I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.

I found this passage on a scrap of paper between pages of a book. My paper, so it must be my handwriting. (As a student, I helped myself to stacks of bank-deposit slips for use as notepaper.)

It occurs to me now that Plath’s sentence could furnish a wonderful exam question for a course in eighteenth-century poetry. The student would of course be asked to argue against.

New directions in spam comments

Yesterday I received this comment on a post:

Many an afternoon has been enjoyed by a family, bonding over the discussion of [a random name]. Cited by many as the single most important influence on post modern micro eco compartmentalism, it is impossible to overestimate its impact on modern thought. It is an unfortunate consequence of our civilizations history that [a random name] is rarely given rational consideration by socialists, trapped by their infamous history. In the light of this I will break down the issues in order to give each of them the thought that they fully deserve.

Wow. The sentences are easy to find online, as they are here or with minor variations:

Many an afternoon has been enjoyed by a family, bonding over the discussion of Personal Injury Attorney in Atlanta.

*

Cited by many as the single most important influence on post-modern-micro-eco-compartmentalism, it is impossible to overestimate its impact on modern thought.

*

It is an unfortunate consequence of our civilizations history that spartan wars hack is rarely given rational consideration by global commercial enterprises, many of whom fail to comprehend the full scope of spartan wars hack.

*

Cited by many as the single most important influence on post modern micro eco compartmentalism, telephone marketing is featuring more and more in the ideals of the young and upwardly mobile. Inevitably feelings run deep amongst the aristocracy, trapped by their infamous history.

*

In the light of this I will break down the issues in order to give each of them the thought that they fully deserve.

I can imagine Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard: I will break down the issues in order to give each of them the thought that they fully deserve. I will break down the issues in order to give each of them the thought that they fully deserve. I will break down the issues in order to give each of them the thought that they fully deserve.

Related reading
All OCA spam posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve omitted the random name, which turns out to be the name of someone in Australia. The spam comment came from Pakistan.]

Oliver Sacks on death and life

“Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life”: Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer (The New York Times).

The Lamy Pen lifetime warranty would appear to be anything but

I have a Lamy Safari fountain pen that I’ve been using without incident for about seventeen years. Yesterday the Phillips-head screw-top button that holds the clip in place broke in two. I’ve seen it happen to other people’s Safaris, and it seems telling that newer Safaris have a redesigned button, without the Phillips-head design.

Here is how the Lamy USA website describes the company’s warranty:

Do Lamy Pens carry any sort of warranty?

All Lamy pens sold in the US carry the following warranty:

Lamy pen warranties its writing instruments for the life of the product**. If repair is required other than from abuse or misuse, then for a small handling and return postage charge of $9.50 per pen, Lamy products will repair, refurbish, and return any Lamy instrument. If other parts have been abused, there will be a special charge. Otherwise, there are no labor or parts charges.

**The Lamy warranty does not cover damage caused by misuse, abuse, unauthorized service and the use of other manufacturers refills or inks.

I called Lamy this morning to see if I could get a replacement cap. No. I could send the pen with $9.50 and pay $20 for a new cap. Or I could order a cap from The Pen Company, a British online retailer. I looked up the cost with shipping: $15.75. For a few dollars more, I can buy a new Safari on Amazon.

What I found more interesting than the $29.50 cap was the company attitude — or, at least, the attitude expressed by its representative, who immediately spoke of damage caused by “abuse.” As I told him, I do not abuse my pens. (This Safari still looks virtually new.) He also called attention to nineteen (I had said seventeen) years of use. I reminded him that the warranty is supposed to be for the life of the pen. But he was adamant: no replacement cap. I guess this pen’s life came to an end when the button broke. Lamy, you’ve lost a customer.

Contrast Pelikan and Sheaffer, companies that, in my experience, are happy to honor their warranties and make things right.

[A pen-discussion thread calls attention to the fragility of the Phillips-head screw-top: “The problem with the screw is that the screw head is thin and the slots are deep and fairly wide. That just doesn’t leave very much plastic actually connecting between the head and the threaded shaft. I think that’s why the newer pens just have a single slot in the head, so that the screw can be a little stronger.” My Safari fell apart on its own: no disassembly required.]

Hoagies, pizzas, and English studies

Remember the culture wars? Here’s a reminder, from Joseph Berger’s article “U.S. Literature: Canon Under Siege” (The New York Times, January 6, 1988):

There are those who continue to uphold a traditional standard of literary quality, arguing that students should essentially read works whose merit has been established over the years. But there is a rising number who contend the idea of an enduring pantheon of writers and their works is an elitist one largely defined by white men who are Northeastern academics and critics.

Choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck, they hold, involves political and cultural distinctions more than esthetic ones.

“It’s no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza,” said Houston Baker, professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania. “I am one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards.”¹

I, too, like hoagies and pizza. But in literary study, as at lunch, one is making choices, all the time. Houston Baker’s analogy establishes an equality of foodstuffs, or writers. It’s all good. But what if one is offered a choice between a mediocre hoagy and a terrific pizza? Between a hoagy and a Twinkie? Between a pizza and a jar of Fluff? Surely some foods are more nourishing and satisfying than others. And surely some writers are more deserving of attention than others.

Baker’s analogy becomes even more tenuous if we keep to a single food. Since Buck and Woolf are novelists, why not regard them both as hoagies, or both as pizzas? How then is one to choose? In the world of food, of course, such matters are the stuff of endless debate: deep-dish? thin crust? And whose crust? Who has the best crust in town? And why should anyone sneer at Papa John’s? It’s curious that in seeking to remove aesthetic differences as a basis for choice, Baker should offer an analogy from a realm in which aesthetic differences are always and everywhere crucial.

One reason for the general collapse of English studies in recent years is, I believe, the tacit, never argued-for assumption that Baker’s position is the correct one, that it is inappropriate to deem some works more deserving of attention than others, that all cultural productions are worthy material for the mill of critical practice. Thus departments drop requirements that students study x, y, and z, whichever names those variables might represent. What’s so often missing from English studies is a sense of reverence for necessary texts — “not,” as Diana Senechal writes, “the reverence of calling an author ‘great’ just because everyone else does, but the reverence of treating the work, for a little while, as the most important thing in the room and mind.” In the absence of reverence, the object of critical inquiry can serve only to allow its exegete a false feeling of mastery, as he or she dissolves binaries and exposes ideological assumptions and comes away (yet again) feeling smarter than that unsuspecting sap, the text.

A claim to offer entry to great works of the literary imagination (which need not mean “dead white men”) is English studies’ distinctive claim to a place in the endeavor of liberal learning. As far as I can see, it’s the only claim, the one thing that distinguishes English from “communications” and media studies. To return to the realm of food: when someone is in town for a few days and wants to know where to eat, we have to be able to reply with conviction: You must go here. You can’t pass up the chance.

Related posts
Moby-Dick at Harvard
Verlyn Klinkenborg on the English major

¹ In a 1992 interview with Michael Bérubé, Baker points out that the Woolf–Buck comparison was Berger’s:

in the homology that came out, the first two terms were his own terms. I never mentioned the names of those authors at all. He made those up.

“Hybridity in the Center: An Interview with Houston A. Baker, Jr.,” African American Review (1992).

So Berger must have posed a question with Buck and Woolf as examples, and Baker replied with hoagies and pizza. As Bérubé points out, the two foods suggest the course of Baker’s career (Yale, Penn). “Yes! I like that!” was Baker’s response.

More “some rocks”

At Dreamers Rise, Chris has collected “some rocks.” Just great.

Mary Norris on New Yorker style

“What if all these commas and hyphens and subtleties of usage prove to be the products of a benign delusion?” Mary Norris of The New Yorker writes about the house style: “Holy Writ.”

[Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. Want.]

Gotham Book Mart bookmark

[Slightly faded, slightly stained. Heck, it’s just a bookmark.]

A Gotham Book Mart bookmark, probably from somewhere in the 1980s. Leave it to the Gotham to advertise itself by using an exchange name — PLaza 7-0367 — long after the days of exchange names. The art is no doubt the work of Edward Gorey.

On what must have been my last visit to the Gotham’s 47th Street location, my fambly and I ascended to the second floor (I’d never been), to see an exhibit of Edward Gorey’s work. My son the cartoonist was pretty excited. Ben, do you remember that time?

Other bookmarks
Paperback Booksmith (now Brookline Booksmith)
Strand Book Store

Dubble trubble

To enjoy yesterday’s Henry, we must remove from our cultural archives all traces of The Boys from Brazil, The Shining, and Village of the Damned. We must place ourselves in a world in which jobs are advertised on pieces of paper taped to store windows. Also, a world without an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Also, without photocopiers. In the Henry world, copies are made with an A. B. Dick Mimeograph or some second-rate duplicating machine. Perhaps a Dubble?

Here is a wonderful advertisement for A. B. Dick. I like its clarity and conviction:


[Life, November 11, 1940. Click for a larger view and greater conviction.]

A related post
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)
Mimeograph duplicator (another Life ad)