I have beside me the 1949 edition of the Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified. It has that great, musty smell of an old book.
I’m touch-typing as I write this, which I’m quite proud of. It’s a skill I’ve long wished I had, but until recently assumed I couldn’t pick up at this point in life. “In high school” I’d say, “if you were smart you could were allowed to take Band instead of Typing, so I took Band. Shame then, that as a writer I don’t exactly need to play the clarinet every day, but typing…”
It’s an old story, and now it’s no longer true. Oh, sure, I’m stumbling over my fingers, having to remember to put them on the home-keys, but I’ve picked up a new skill.
This came out of a conversation with my partner’s cousin, in which she said she could type and do shorthand and that this was a real advantage at work. Classic steno-pool skills — how I’d love to have them, I said. I scribbled a little note for myself to look into typing and shorthand, and followed up on it the next day.
I bought a program called KAZ: Keyboard A-Z. It’s unbelievably ugly, and operates like a CD-ROM from about 1996. Its mascot is a horrible cartoon bird. As someone who’s doodled for years, I can’t describe all the reasons I hate this thing, so I’ll provide a picture:
But the program says it can teach you to type in 90 minutes, and it did. I’ve actually got to go back and finish it, ’cause after a certain point I was just typing. (Of course, I forced myself to type properly in my everyday work, which helped a lot, or I’d still be doing that lobster-claw manoeuvre with my right hand.)
So with that success under my belt, I moved on to shorthand. That’s significantly harder, but I am gradually getting it. It’s kind of a weird, antiquated skill to pursue, but there are lots of times when it would be a huge help (taking creative briefs from a phone call, transcribing an interview).
My experience with smelly old books is that they’re wonderful and charming, but if they’re instructive, they’re always a bit “Oh yeah, we’ve learned something better than that since then.” But with these books — which are so cheap to buy online, ’cause there are piles of them just sitting around from the time when these courses were common — contained in them is a neat ability from the past that we’ve lost. Working through the exercises, I wonder why we don’t all write like that instead of in this tedious, convoluted way (which I never thought I’d say, being one of those people who rails against Internet arguments for lazy spelling).
The books I’ve picked up have this wartime and just-post-war feel to them, and learning from them (with drills like “The French will take the trench”) kinda puts you right in that period. I don’t want to naïvely glamourise an unthinkably difficult period in history, but I wonder if I’m not the only person who yearns a bit for that “Make do or mend” philosophy over the present glut of commercial and celebrity culture.
And reading through the sample paragraphs written in shorthand — even re-reading what I’ve written — is such a slow torture that I’m being driven back, back, to sit beside myself at four or five years old. Oh right, there was a time when I didn’t know how to read. That was hard.
I remember it being just as hard later on as I tried to put my thoughts into sentences. It was like trying to walk inside a rubber ball.
It’s kinda nice, though, spending time in my mind with me-at-five, having sense-memory unlock lost little moments from kindergarten and Grade One.
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My folks were here for a visit a few weeks ago. We had a great time together, with the fella driving us all over creation, the parents meeting the parents, and all that. It was a wonderful, beautiful visit, even with some uncomfortable reminders that the years are creeping up on us. I’m trying my damnedest to appreciate my parents for the good, honest, loving, and fun people they are now, to live that second chance the first time around.
For some reason all this ephemerality, the wabi-sabi of it, makes me want to get married. And the fella seems okay with that. Of course, the thought of the logistics of actually doing such a thing knocks the notion squarely back into the “Someday” closet
So I’ve neglected my blog for a while. Big deal, eh? Living has kept me busy, along with making preparations for my participation in the Scottish Poetry Library’s small press fair, “By Leaves We Live”. If you’re in Edinburgh, please come by on Saturday, say hi, and have a look over the stuff I create. I’ll also be giving a talk about indie publishing.
I still have another DIY Book episode to produce, and then the first section of the three-part process will be complete. At long f*ing last, I’ve managed to getthe podcast up on iTunes properly so all the episodes are shown and can be downloaded. It’s been a frustrating process, and all the “It’s here… now it’s there… now it’s broken” has surely shaken off some listeners, which I regret.
The real momentum behind the thing will probably come when the whole process (write, make, and sell your book) is outlined in however many episodes that takes. That’ll be a while, but it’s neat to look back and realise that I’ve nearly completed the first part, and I didn’t know how I was going to do that.
Progress is most encouraging.
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The main intention of this entry was just to start writing here again, to take the blog off the “Obligation” shelf and do it just for fun. I realise shorthand, typing, and the transitory nature of life probably don’t come across sounding all that fun. Ah well.
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