Underwood No. 5
September 3, 2008
The Underwood No. 5 has been restored by Matt at Ace Machines. It’s been back for several weeks now. Matt worked on it for about a week.
I like driving over the St. Johns Bridge. It’s a small three lane bridge and the speed limit is 35mph. I like going over small bridges slowly. Portland has several bridges. It is sometimes call Bridge Town or Stump Town.
When I was in Budapest, there are several bridges that cross the Danube. All of the bridges are small and pedestrian friendly.
I remember going over the Hawthorne on a daily commute and writing my impressions of it in one of my old journals.
If I can use an analogy of crossing this slow bridge instead of the information super highway, it is like that journey across that slow and beautiful St. John’s bridge which is like typing, a slowness. I cross over into that world to retrieve my Underwood. At the moment I didn’t make this connection. I had to speed through the 205 super highway to get to an area of industrial town and then to the bridge and a beginning of a presence. I was on a surface but a bridge is a connection that is different from the road, a continuation that is endless it seems. But a bridge signals something, a crossing over into something that I’m still trying to work out the meaning, and the symbolism.
It is something like that when one is typing. There is the bell which celebrates the reaching point of a page. One sets these limits and margins of course. It is different from what seems like an endless text wrap. I guess that is what typing on a machine is like. And it is entering into another era and experiencing the gears making something as light as a word on a page and feeling something important being said. It’s like a coughing out of word which actually moves minutely on the surface of the table.
jonathan smith photography bridges
Grace’s Post: literary-geniuses-and-their-vintage-typewriters.
Writer’s on Writing, Kent Haruf on writing with a typewriter and blind fold.
Duc N. Ly 