Mark Douglas West

I'm a writer of fantastic fiction (send in the Freds!) who lives between Brevard, North Carolina -- officially one of the coolest small towns in America -- and Asheville, NC, beer capital of the US! I'm not exactly retro -- doesn't retro imply that, at some point, you moved forward? Still using a Royal typewriter, despite the fact that James M. Cain used an Underwood. Mr. Typewriter can sell you beauties -- including a NOS Linea 98 -- but they're not limbered up like my typewriter, a Royal HH. My mother, who was a church secretary, insisted on Royals -- Underwoods could get wobbly once the front part of the carriage got loose, and the Olivettis and Olympias were made by people who had once shot at my father and my grandather, and my uncles L.T. and Earl and Paul, which violated her rules of polite conduct.

You just don't buy products from people who shoot at your relatives, she said. It might encourage them.

In this modern era, when writers are also typesetters, somebody like Postnet in Brevard will rent you the use of a high-speed scanner that does OCR, or you can use OmniPage or something to turn the images into text. I grew up on Royals, wrote my first stories on Royals, and intend on leaving with who brought me to this here dance.

Typewriters are the up-and-coming technology.

• They are virtually indestructable -- my Royal was manufactured in 1957 and is hence over 50 years old.
• Anyone reasonably competent in basic mechanical technology can effect most repairs.
• They are environmentally friendly -- requiring only human power and providing exercise discouraging carpal tunnel syndrome.
• The technology which converts their input to digital streams is centralized and hence highly cost-effective and efficient.
• Their manufacture requires no exotic chemicals, metals, or technologies (And, yes, they are still manufactured).
• Their use does not enable surveillance technologies like 'Echelon' or hasten the collapse of civil discourse.

Today's thought

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

The answer ... about a cord. Or, perhaps better, about a culleus.

Ephemeris

Click here for nuntii in lingua latina.

Someday there will be some disaster, as there always is. Civilization will crumble, as it always does. And the humble brothers and sisters, immured, will persist behind their dull and simple walls, as they always do.

Then, after years or decades or centuries, when the glittering machines and brilliant baubles of our time are forgotten, the heavy doors of the monasteries will creak open, and the Carmelites and the Franciscans and the others will come forth, with seeds and medicines and books and the fidei depositum.

And it will be Day Zero, once again.

So you might as well learn Latin now.

It will save time when the day comes when the day does not come.

Headlines are better in Latin

Here's proof.

Mundus vituperat regimen Israelianorum propter sanguinolentum ictum in navim zonam Gazae petentem.

"The world has strongly criticized the Israeli regime after its bloody attack upon a ship trying to reach the Gaza strip."

But that translation doesn't get the force of 'vituperat,' the feeling of striving of 'petentem,' the actual derivation from 'bite' of 'ictum.' Latin has a relatively small vocabulary, making the weasely niceness of English press-talk impossible. In Latin, the language is too close to the Flavian Ampitheater to speak of war as anything but a bloody business.

George Orwell was right; we neuter our language, and then neuter our thought.