Mechanical joy for sale, and one scaryhike

There’s a great article in the LATimes here (click) about the upcoming auction of Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter.

McCarthy is the guy who wrote “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road,” and he wrote those, and several other books, letters, screenplays and heaven knows what else, all on this one machine, a portable Olivetti that he picked up for $50 about 50 years ago. At a buck a year, that’s not a bad deal, especially since he swears that the only maintenance he did was to blow the dust out a few times with a gas station air hose.

Gee, not a single job here for the guys in IT, who I have to call about once a week.

Those were the days. I’m convinced that this idea that electronics would cut costs by elminating the backshop in newspapers, just to take a random example, has not worked out. Between having to hire an army of software folk and technical repair folk, not to mention spending numerous millions of dollars for a completely new system every five years, it seems to me that the cost savings have not worked out as hoped. When I started at the S-E some of the typewriters we used looked as bad as Cormac’s and probably had less maintenance.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go too awfully nostalgia on you — I am very much aware that the future is here, there’s no going back, electronics will make us free, and so on.

Don’t care. The only other machine I’ve ever seen that still worked after 50 years is my Leica camera, and it’s actually needed to be services a few times. Tolerances on a Leica are a bit closer, so it may be excused, but it still does work.

So does McCarthy’s typewriter, but apparently the 5 million words he’s pounded on it have started to show, so another article I saw said he was encouraged to get a new one. Which he did, via the Internet, for $11 plus $18 shipping, but it’s practically new so should last another 4 million words, at least. We can only hope Cormac lasts that long.

Speaking of “The Road,” a friend loaned me a copy because I’ve never read any of McCarthy’s work. “This one will make you want to commit suicide,” he said.

After the first 30 pages or so, I’m worried he’s right.  That is one grim novel.

SPEAKING OF GRIM  — I found a web site that has pictures of the Angel’s Landing hike that was the subject of a recent post and is also in tomorrow’s column. The site (here) shows it to be every bit as grim and foreboding as I feared, except for the parts that are worse.