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Sunday, November 13, 2016

Nanonovel no. 13: Devil May Care


5 comments:

  1. Clipping right along with a Clipper. I wonder how often we all side with the wrong side throughout our life and never know it.

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  2. heh, could the original owner not find spanish keytoppers, so left those keys bare? :D

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    1. This machine was given to my father as a high-school graduation present. When he studied Spanish literature in graduate school, he had the typewriter modified to type Spanish, as well as typing square brackets [ ]. The original keys were the ones you see for most letters here, and the replacements were more traditional metal-ringed keys. No keys were available showing the brackets, so he taped typed brackets to the top of the old keys.

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    2. Hey Richard

      Wanted to share with you the literature that came to my own mind on 11-8, from Eliot's "Christianity and Culture":

      "I believe that there must be many persons who, like myself, were deeply shaken by the events of September 1938, in a way from which one does not recover; persons to whom that month brought a profounder realisation of a general plight. It was not a disturbance of the understanding: the events themselves were not surprising. Nor, as became increasingly evident, was our distress due merely to disagreement with the policy and behaviour of the moment. The feeling which was new, and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment; what had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not, I repeat, a criticism of the government, but a doubt of the validity of a civilisation."

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    3. Thanks. That was the month when my father's family fled Czechoslovakia, barely in time.

      Right now I do have grim feelings about the soundness of Western civilization. Neither liberalism nor conservatism have addressed the concerns that have led to a disturbing nationalist populism in many countries.

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