Someone might remember my fascination with old typewriters. I wouldn't call myself a collector, but for some reason I find that I've managed to accumulate five or six typewriters from the fifties and the sixties.
Here's the latest find: a plastic Barbie typewriter. When I bought this from a thrift store in Pori (I think Ottilia found it for me and brought it to me proudly), I thought immediately that it's strictly eighties. But hell, no - there's a note under the writer that says it's from 1997! Just who used typewriters in 1997? Even I had a laptop by then!
The font is ugly and you can use only capital letters. Some of the Scandinavian letters, such as Ä and Ö, and all the numbers can be used only by shift. No corrections are possible. I wonder how many writers working now started with this...
The machine was broken down, but I managed to fix it! I'm not very handy and I felt very proud of myself. The letter "I" doesn't work, it just leaves an empty space. I don't think the machine will last for long, but I wrote a poem with it:
In English:
The merchandise is produced
by producing random
unfamiliarity
Familiarity steps over the
borders the stars step down
to the world the world under the moon
where the slave is the ruler
and the king of his own thoughts
This is the truth and you can't run away from it
not even in a dream
Death is our friend, comrade
from remoteness, from the production fields
(I don't think that's a very good one, mind you. It took one minute to type.)
I also came up with a title of my coming poetry collection while introducing the machine to Ottilia and Kauto: The Unknown Spiders.
cool typewriter ;)
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