Chase Public is a Cincinnati cultural center that, among other things, organizes street typing events (they call it Short Order Poetry and Short Order Stories). I've had the pleasure of participating in street typing with Chase Public a couple of times. You can see Short Order Poetry in action in this post, and Short Order Stories in this one.
Today I stopped by to service the Chase Public typewriters, which needed a little cleaning, a couple of ribbons, and a few adjustments.
For this "house call" I prepared a bag with everything I thought I might need, including screwdrivers, screw starter, 3 rags, Soft Scrub, mineral spirits, Scrubbing Bubbles, Pledge, PB Blaster, toothbrush, dental pick, Q-tips, compressed air, and pliers. I believe I used all of those things, and needed nothing else. I also donated a copy of my book.
It's good to support this organization. Executive Director Scott Holzman told me that Short Order Poems has been very popular, and the Chase Public poets have been invited to events around the country. What great ambassadors they are for both poetry and typewriting!
Scott also mentioned that the recent New York City Poetry Festival included The Typewriter Project:
The Typewriter Project, The Poetry Society of New York’s latest concept, is a series of site specific literary installations which encourage users to go analog. These typewriter installations—wooden booths with a seat, desk, and typewriter inside—allow professional writers and first time typists alike to join in a citywide linguistic exchange. Each booth is outfitted with a 100-foot scroll of paper and a USB typewriter kit, which allows every written entry to be collected, stored, and posted online for users to read, share, and comment upon. The Typewriter Project intends to investigate the subconscious of the city by creating unique spaces designed for contemplation.
Our insurgency marches on!
The Insurgency grows! had to kick up the monthly bandwidth allotment a couple days ago - ran clean out of pipe and 503'd almost a week before the month ended. getting about 1.4 million more monthly hits than this time last year. Everyone's doin' the clickity-clack! :D
ReplyDeleteHoly escapements! That's a lot of hits. About twice as many as I've had for my entire blog in its entire 7-year history. I wonder what's going on. One factor with my blog is my large number of typecasts; Google doesn't make their text searchable, so they catch fewer readers. (OK with me—the blog can be an esoteric discovery that way.)
DeleteYou know, it's weird. Google seems to do some sort of image meaning processing because I know that my blog posts will tend to show up ranking pretty high within like an hour from when I post them, if I search for terms in the post. That may be a Wordpress thing, but that would surprise me given that Google owns Blogger and essentially therefore competes with WP. However, it's TWDB that gets that level of traffic. The blog is on an upward climb too, but doesn't command the kind of traffic that the database does. that got about 5.6 million hits this month, which I think is an all-time high. In any case, it *feels* like pretty steady, but not excessively explosive growth. I also noted that ETC membership seems to have gained fairly significantly since the last time I got an address packet. all in all, it still feels tingly, IYKWIM (:
DeleteInteresting. Those numbers for TWDB seem huge. Yes, ETC has been growing steadily—though of course, membership is in the hundreds, not millions! ... I like to say that I firmly believe that 0.1% of the world's population would enjoy owning a typewriter, so there is plenty of room for growth.
DeleteGood to know someone still makes house calls. Great work Richard. Good that you have all the enthusiasts in Cincy. The New York Typing Project should be projected into more cities.
ReplyDelete