Alpha Neo
A little over a month ago I finally bought something I had looked at for a while. A device from the company
AlphaSmart called the Neo. On a clerks wages such viscous material pleasures come only rarely. Of course they dropped the price 30 bucks right after I bought it. Essentially it is a small thin keyboard, a dark forest green in color. It has a built-in word processor with a five line LCD display and flash memory for 8 text files equaling some 230 pages total. AA batteries power it. A USB cable allows you to send a ascii file to a printer or into the clipboard register of a PC or Mac, for a slowish transfer. Or more quickly with a manger program that installs on your computer and can pull or push files to or from the Neo. The upscale version, the
Dana Wireless, can mobilely email files. The Dana runs on the Palm Pilot OS As Tran pointed out "Why do you need that, you have an iBook?" Yes and I like my iBook, my third in five years. I try not to lead it into danger (anymore). Another part of the answer is in the gathering. Writing deliberately on subjects that seize your attention, that you want to make sense of involves marshaling a modicum of notes and information about them. This is somewhat in counterpoint to staring at a blank page or blank screen, then writing whatever comes off the top of your head. It may not produce more interesting writing, which is why I write to Atomized in different ways. Writing to an idea you bring with you requires process. First it needs either a photographic memory, or taking notes. Short-form notes I have got a grasp on by keeping a small notepad. This keeps me from finishing a week with a dozen glyph-covered scraps of paper scattered over a dozen different locations. Longer form notes presented a different problem. Of course you can always write more into the little notepad. I don't hesitate to do this when encountering certain types of ephemeral situations. Things akin to taking notes for a class; the professor starts talking you start writing - second nature really. There were two gaps I wanted to fill. One was my own thoughts, moments when phrases, sentences, the order and argument of something comes to me and I'm not in front of my iBook. I rarely note these down, because I believe I will remember them. I never do. This thing is small enough that I can and do keep it around with me. Writing sketches and kicking pieces towards completion as thoughts strike me. I've used it for taking notes on books and articles, particularly where I feel I want to quote or paraphrase the material. I despise the time-stealing chore of typing up hand written notes. I've written the last eleven posts on the Neo while I been learning how to use it. I can hardly imagine not using it now. Mostly for the greater informality to writing I've had since I learned to type in sixth grade. Since the point in the last 20 years where if you were writing in longhand, if you weren't on a keyboard, you were just talking to yourself. I like word processing I like sentences and paragraphs being mutable malleable and rearrangeable, editing on the fly. For the canonical writers of our generation, whoever. If they write like this as well, future biographers and critics may miss the physical trail of mutation. Marginal notation on manuscript. It may leave them with less to say; left wrestling rattling bones without the counterpoint of rustling paper, but I doubt it. While I mused about this I processed a book into the library. A photo essay on the process. Interrogating a wide range of authors. For each writer you get a single photograph of their workspace or some object from their workspace. The book is called
How I write : the secret lives of authors [WorldCat.org] edited by Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann It would be unfair to try to describe or characterize it. A small sample that made me laugh: Jonathan Franzon's chair. I had a chair just like it (a GSA chair from the previous century) I threw it out recently. Actually mine was a four-legged chair; although, it had identical torn vinyl. If it had been one like Franzen's, a wheeled revolving chair, I would certainly have kept it, duct tape and all. Then there was Will Self's post-it notes. Every one their own system I suppose. This is what the book is about; writer's fetish objects. The objects environments and arrangements, that people make fetishes out of in order to write. Most of these writers had specific and self acknowledged fetishes. I doubt these writers needed the editors of this book to spend much time explaining what they were looking for. A nod of understanding and then led the way I recognize in my 'Neo' part of what it is: a practical processing talisman. A charm of sorts that frees me from writing between walls, or to write where ever I find a wall I like.
11:53:20 PM  ;;
|
|
