Movie review of No Country for Old Men written by a lousy typewriter

Going through some memorabilia boxes at the cellar, I found this note, written by a plastic Barbie typewriter some years ago. Seems like I intended it for publication, but never got around to doing that. So here goes! I remember struggling with the damn machine and even fixing it (the tape was torn or something like that), though I'm not handy at this kind of thing, not at all. I believe we took the typewriter back to the thrift store soon after this. The picture of the machine is taken from Pinterest. (I never fulfilled my promise of using another typewriter from now on. What is true is that I joined the typewriter group on Yahoo. I never posted there and I don't think I ever read any of the posts, and now Yahoogroups is defunct. Oh, how time flies!)

Oops! I thought this was going to be my 1,500th post!

But it turns out my earlier post - on the French paperback covers - was actually No. 1500 on Pulpetti. So I should've congratulated myself then!

It's never too late, though.

Here are two Finnish book covers, one is my book about forgotten Finnish writers, one is Finnish author Mari Mörö's newest book, a novel called Kuuri. Notice anything funny? It seems that there's a picture bank that the Finnish publishers use and they have only one old typewriter of which they've taken a load of photos. The funniest thing is that I used to have that kind of Remington Portable. I sold it in 1990, if I remember correctly, which I feel stupid about. It's a pretty machine, and in recent years I've amassed a collection of about ten portable typewriters.

Typewriter generated stuff

Over at Facebook, I commented Ed Lynskey's status. His computer had broken down or something and he was thinking whether he should take out his typewriter. I wrote, sure, typewriters generate pulpish stuff all by themselves. Here's an example. It's a beginning of a story I typed just for the fun of it.

It goes roughly like this:

She was something I hadn't seen during my whole career. Just pure flesh and yearning. The combination was special to say the least, and I just had to gulp down my bourbon. I would've done that, no matter what. Her husky voice also told me what I'd already expected: she'd bring trouble into my life.

Mysterious prose writing

I've been occasionally posting some stuff I've written with my old typewriters. They've been usually stories that I've done while trying to entertain my kids, and some of them have been written from Ottilia's dictating. This is one of the more mysterious pieces, which may've gotten its start from Ottilia's story (and perhaps based on reality), but eventually I ended up writing it as a piece of flash fiction, with an emphasis on stream of consciousness.

Translated, it goes something like this:

Kauto Teerijoki is playing with his cart: it's a nice business: We were flying in the first class. Then I realized that a new world had been discovered. It was in my wife's purse that was made from a finest sivet cat. I didn't anymore feel like writing the new verses to the Holy Bible that I'd promised to deliver to my publisher.

Typewriter samples

When you don't set out to write good poetry, you sometimes come up with good ones. Here are some samples I wrote when I tried my vintage typewriters (I'll put up photos later on). I don't really know if they are any good as poems, but there is something intriguing, something surrealistic about them.







The horribleness steps into the unknown river.
The eyes are looking at us.
We are prisoners and we don't know what explodes the eyes.













[This is my exercise in Federico Garcia Lorca.]

tambourine is playing
the Greekishness is spreading its wings
there are limits to being unknown
tambourine is playing in the dark night
it is the night of being European



[This is virtually untranslatable. At least I won't try. It's not really a poem.]

The Barbie typewriter

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.