Friday, June 1, 2012

Typewriting and tattooing

Click here to read a perceptive term paper written by a student in my course this spring that explores the parallels between typewriting and tattoos. It's published here anonymously with permission of the author.

You can find lots of typewriter tattoos on Google Images. Here's just one example.



6 comments:

  1. Isn't that interesting! Fifty years on I've loved my typewriters but never even thought about getting a tat for it. Or anyone else, either. Thanks, Richard! Richard K/TX

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  2. That was an interesting paper. I've never really understood tattoos. I guess rule one for them is the expectation that you will be looked at and welcome the attention, neither of which are true for me. Still, interesting take on it. Male or female writer?

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  3. I think this is a bit of a stretch, but there are glimmers of interest in this student's theory. It reminds me of how fertile the college student's imagination can be, creating something out of nothing, drawing unlikely parallels. I got quite good at this "back in the day".

    An adjunct of this is "stating the obvious". I did get caught doing that on one college paper, and was properly chastized.

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  4. I have a few tattoos myself. Two are music related but the third is a wrist job that reads "write 2 live 2" so that it can be read any way.

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  5. I want Cormac McCarthy to write his next novel as tattoos. Throw away that Olivetti Cormac!

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  6. I think a really neat tattoo would be of Philip K Dick (favorite author) with his trusty (and cumbersome) Olympia SG3. Just can't find a photo of any such occurrence.

    It's funny. The typewriter that got me into collecting is absent from my collection. All of the ones I have found, Craigslist or otherwise, are SG1's. I almost picked one up in Indiana, but it was too far out of the way from our next stop.

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