Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou

by Clay Reynolds

  It may all be a myth, of course, a legend, a public relations scam designed to keep Elvis’s record sales high and Graceland’s popularity intact. But real or not, it works. Over twenty million people have wandered through Elvis’s home in the past thirty years, and I think that few have truly come to worship or to mourn; even fewer have come to snicker, as I did on my first visit. Rather, I think they come to confirm that Elvis’s impact on our culture is lasting because of the integrity evident in the way he lived. I noticed, for example, that the largest exhibit in the Trophy Building is not a reflection of his celebrity; it is a huge plaque given to him by the grateful charities of Memphis in response to his generosity, for which, the tour guide stated, he took no tax credit. To do so, Elvis felt, was to negate the Christian impulse behind the gift.

  I determined, at last, that there’s a modesty about Graceland, an honesty that suggests that he bought it, furnished it, and kept it as a home, not as a symbol of his success, a castle built to the glory of his reign.

  I spent very little time around Elvis’s grave on this visit. I felt, somehow, that I had not been adequately shriven for my previous behavior. The music, though, was now more melodic, more tasteful. The crowd was less sorrowful, more pensive. The whole setting seemed less grotesque, somehow, more moderate, more in tune with the memory of the man who rested there. And the eternal flame was lit.

  This time, when I left Graceland, I found the scrawled remarks on the front wall to be as numerous as before. But they were somehow more profound. “Elvis Lives,” was the most prevalent comment, but so was “I love you,” signed by both male and female names. Not a few notations had guitars or musical notes drawn next to some temporal devotion; and one said, “Elvis and Us.” That, I think, might have said it all.

  ###

  That night I wandered around Beale Street in downtown Memphis. Unofficially, I guess, Beale Street is the “birthplace” of the blues, or at least of Rhythm and Blues, in much the same way that Memphis is the hometown of Elvis Presley. Muddy Waters played there, so did B.B. King, and Ike Turner, and Memphis Minnie; and so did Porkfat Coleman, Darin’ Danny DeVane, Creole Carol Caruthers, and hundreds of other “wanna-bes” and “never-weres,” whose grainy, dusty black and white photos hang next to those of The King in the shops and bars of Beale Street. In a sense, they’re all still there. The heavy blues beats bounce out of the clubs and cafés along the district, and it’s hard not to take a table and a cool drink and just sit and lose a few hours in the deeper, darker rhythms of life. Elvis Presley wasn’t the first to understand how pervasive and persuasive such rhythms were, or how they could move the masses to swoon, scream, and cry out for more. But he used them better than almost anyone in contemporary music.

  There were and are better musicians, maybe, smoother crooners and harder rockers, but most of them quickly pass away, some long before they enter eternity to stand beside The King on the celestial stage. Indeed, when they get there, most of them will be lucky to open his act for him, or maybe play backup; for though they might have been a part of us for some short time, they will be gone. Elvis is still alive, still singing, still taking care of the business of recalling our past and making us sweetly sad if not for what we once were, perhaps for what we might have been. In short, The King was us, and I suspect he will be for a long, long time.

  ERROR IN, ERROR OUT:

  SOME THOUGHTS ON THE IMPACT OF THE WORD PROCESSOR ON COMPOSITION

  “You write with ease to show your breeding,

  but easy writing’s curst hard reading.”

  —Sheridan

  During the 2006 Golden Globes Awards, much was made of the comment by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry that he had composed most if not all his work previous to the award-winning script Brokeback Mountain, at least, on a typewriter. This came as no surprise to many who know Larry. At one time, he told me, he kept several identical machines located around the country where he was apt to find himself staying for a while. Even when word processing became far more user-friendly and economical, he stayed with the method that he had always known and preferred.

  I, too, was a dedicated user of a typewriter when the age of the personal computer dawned. I completed two full books and probably drafted more than two hundred seminar papers, articles for publication, and other writing on a 1936-model Royal Elite. It had a sticking “D” key, and to this day, when I’m typing, I have a reflex to pull that key back up as soon as I hit it. I soon graduated to a more sophisticated electric machine, an IBM Keytronic; and, because I was both fast and accurate on it, I felt that, unlike most activities I’ve tried in life, I had a mastery of it. Certainly, I was comfortable with it. I assured a friend who urged me to abandon it for a computer word processor that I doubted I could ever give up my “tactile relationship” with the typing process, that immensely fulfilling sound and feel of a key striking paper, leaving an indelible mark. There was also the satisfaction of watching a stack of completed, typed pages grow as I worked.

  Nevertheless, I soon abandoned my mechanical writing implements and shifted to the computer. It was necessary for my academic work, for one thing; and soon it became mandatory for any sort of communication, both professional and personal. Still, some twenty years later, when I watch an old film that features a close-up shot of a typewriter key striking a pristine white page, depicts the clackity-clack din of typewriters with their distinctive margin-alert bells filling an office space, I find myself somewhat saddened that we’ve lost an ambience that, perhaps more than anything else, characterized the industry of written word production.

  ###

  From time to time, and with no particular thought to Mr. McMurtry’s enviable success, I’ve often thought about going back to using a typewriter, but I seriously doubt I could manage it. I still have the clunky old Royal I keep in my university office, mostly to amaze students who look upon it the way I might regard a genuine Model-T or an ashtray in a hotel restaurant. I tried to use it here awhile back, just for grins; but after years of word processing, my fingers are just too fast for it, and my “touch” isn’t nearly heavy enough anymore (although I tend to wear out a computer keyboard about every two months). My experiment was frustrating in other ways, as well. Having grown used to the automatic backspace-to-correct capability, I made far too many errors that required me to stop and erase. It was also uncommonly noisy. My office neighbor (age about 24) immediately came over to see what all the racket was.

  At the same time, I have come recently to wonder what impact computer word processing has had on writing. There’s no question that processed writing is more attractive on the typed page, generally more correct, grammatically, and the variety of available fonts is also appealing. But I do believe that compositional quality has suffered. For one thing, it’s become much more homogenized, to a certain extent, less inspired. There’s a tendency for common expressions to be included more readily and for other, unique forms of utterance to disappear. There’s no question that word processing is less labor intensive than typewriting; and most professional writers and reviewers would aver that throughout the publishing industry, line and copyediting has become less attentive, as much of an editor’s work is obviated by spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, and the ability to run global search/replace commands to ensure consistency of usage.

  Still, there’s a psychology about the process that wants consideration. Prior to the word processor, when one sat down to type something—whether it was being composed on the machine or typed from handwritten copy—one tended to be very careful, not only about typos and mistakes in spelling and grammar, but also about content. If one typed out something at length and discovered that he was on the wrong track or had overlooked a logical point, skipped a step in a chronology or stage of development in a cause-effect or spatial sequence, if he just changed his mind about the thesis or wording or anything, it would mean having to stop, back up, and start typing again from the point of the departure or error. It might mean having to retype
the entire document. If this involved making carbon copies, it could be an expensive and time-consuming chore. I think this process caused a writer of anything—journalism, scholarship, technical data, and especially fiction or poetry—to be much more circumspect when sitting down to type up the final copy. The process almost demanded a good deal of prewriting activity—carefully considered and well-organized outlines, scenarios, and preliminary drafts—before starting the laborious process of typewriting it for publication.

  Today, of course, a couple of keystrokes is all that’s required to excise anything that’s wrong or headed off on a tangent. Material can be added or expanded at will. It can be cut out, saved, inserted elsewhere, or totally reversed in order, reorganized; paragraphs or even whole chapters can be rearranged in a matter of minutes, and one can do side-by-side comparisons of several different versions without having to commit any of them to paper.

  From one point of view, this might mean that the end product would be superior, better wrought, more polished. From another, though, it might mean that a great deal of what’s coming out of the printer (or being posted directly onto the web) has not been subjected to much pre-thought, pre-writing at all, that it’s effectively off of the top of somebody’s head, that it’s undergone no mental gestation period so it might develop and grow, or even be aborted when some calamitous deformity was revealed in a colder, clearer, light of intellectual hindsight.

  In the old days, of course, any written project generally went through at least two and usually three typed drafts: rough draft, fair copy, and final copy. Sometimes, only the last of these would be typewritten. At each stage, the writer had a chance to proofread, self-edit, consider, and make changes. Huge amounts of time were involved. Now, though, all that’s done on-screen, and editing is usually carried on while the composition of the rough draft is still ongoing.

  ###

  No one, not even Mr. McMurtry, would disagree that word processing is cheaper, easier and quicker than typewriting. But that’s true of many activities in life, and the result isn’t always positive. Many items we use and rely on daily are not as durable or useful as they were before technological development and modern materials were applied to their production and manufacture. Many things are safer, perhaps, lighter, easier to use, less expensive and more disposable; but in some cases, those qualities have limited the appeal and even the utility of any number of products. I can think of a dozen household items ranging from tools to appliances that now have lightweight, user-friendly, ultra-safe plastic parts where metal or wood used to be the norm. The difference is that now, if some tiny little plastic part breaks, the whole thing is useless; before, I could sometimes go out to my garage and fashion a replacement out of a spare bolt, a coat hanger, bailing wire, scrap of wood, a dowel, or some other piece of workshop detritus, then solder or screw it on, and it would be as good as new, or at least still serviceable. Have you ever gotten water in your car’s electronic distributor? Used to be, a screwdriver, a dry shirt tail, and a folded dollar bill to re-gap the points was all that was needed to put you back in business. Today, it takes a tow truck and a hefty charge for a new part. Will word processing ultimately result in writing that is as disposable and unmemorable as a razor, camera, or coffee maker, or even a personal computer?

  In my observation of student writing, I can say with certainty—and with a hearty seconding from most of my colleagues in the academy—that the general quality of written academic work has declined precipitously over the past two decades. The deterioration is not so much in grammar, spelling, and form (those have actually improved, to some extent, at least in terms of the old “careless” error), but rather in personal expression and a sense of individual creativity and uniqueness of utterance. I find that the most common errors are dictional redundancy, dropped words, use of the wrong word, misplaced modification, and a tendency toward jargon and colloquialism and similar mistakes that used to go under the heading of “style.” The problems are mostly elementary and easy to catch, but I’ve discovered that if I ask a student, “Did you proofread this in hard copy?”, the answer is invariably an admonishing scowl and a perplexed shake of the head that I should even suggest such an arcane exercise.

  Over the past decade of teaching writing courses, I can testify that fewer than a dozen pieces of writing have been turned in with hand-applied proofreading marks of correction on them in spite of my suggestions to do so. Students, for some reason, find it heretical to deface a printed, word-processed paper by correcting an error by hand. It’s as if the printed page has become sacrosanct, an artifact by virtue of its having been generated by a computer peripheral. No matter how likely it is that a paper might not be perfect, students are loathe to read their final copy with a correcting pencil in hand, a dictionary or grammar handbook at their side, an eye for error on the page. They have, they often aver, read it “on-screen” over and over. How could they miss anything their grammar and spell checkers didn’t catch?

  More than checking for errors, though, they also are unconcerned about the possibility that they might be able to improve on the overall quality of what they’ve written. Rhetorical effectiveness, even eloquence is no longer a consideration. It’s as if the physical appearance of the words is sufficient to “sell” their arguments and ideas, and they are reluctant to make a change once they’ve been committed to the printer’s buffer. Sometimes, things don’t even go that far; increasingly, professors are accepting work in “electronic format,” essentially e-mail attachments or postings on central websites, and the writing is never put on paper at all. It’s actually possible in some schools for students to pass through an entire course of study without ever submitting hard copy of anything. Professorial corrections and comments are offered through on-line editing commands.

  I can recall being astonished at a professional meeting I attended about fifteen years ago when a paper’s presenter declared, and with some pride, that she had never seen the paper she was about to read in hard copy. At a conference I attended last year, two people delivered their papers by reading them directly from a laptop screen. They had never been printed out at all. (This gives rise to the question of why we all flew thousands of miles and paid hundreds of dollars to gather in a single place to hear the paper read aloud and badly, when it could have been transmitted via email far more efficiently. But that’s another issue.) In both cases, though, I heard mistakes as the readers orally plowed through their prose, careless wording and errors in organizational logic, and just plain dull prose. Of course, similar problems might have existed had they been reading from hard copy, but, I suspect, at least some of them would have been corrected had they printed up a copy and proofed it in advance.

  From my own writing activity, I am convinced that no one can accurately proofread on-screen. I have no convincing conjecture as to why this may be. Possibly, it’s because one can only see one section of one page at a time, that part of one’s mind is occupied with manipulating the mouse or keyboard, or it may be because there’s some kind of intellectual or psychological detachment that occurs between words written on a screen and the eye. I do think that there is more of a tendency to skim-read on a screen than in hard copy; but that’s only a conjecture. I do know that much as I write—and I write for publication almost every day—I can read a document a dozen times on screen, then run up a hard copy, and still find numerous mistakes and errors in it that, somehow, escaped my notice. Inadvertent rhyme, incomplete sentences, unconscious repetition of words or even whole phrases and clauses that were invisible before suddenly appear obvious. I’ve heard the same confession from enough other professional writers to believe that this is a fairly common phenomenon. The number of mistakes one finds in a daily newspaper, where, today, almost nothing goes to hard copy before press, is also testimony to the existence of the problem.

  I also find that I have a kind of emotional disconnection to stuff I read on screen as opposed to material on the printed page. This most especially applies to fictio
n and poetry, but it also is true with regard to hard news and academic essay. This may be a personal quirk; I can’t say that everyone—or even anyone—else reacts that way. But I do know that I react that way, much as I try not to. If it’s a shared phenomenon, then it raises the question of whether the same obstacle might not exist in the composition process. If it does, then what does that bode for the ultimate aesthetic of written documents? More to the scholarly point, what does it mean when there is no hard copy at all, no drafts and proto-versions of books and plays and poems? How can we study the evolution of belles lettres if no one runs up preliminary versions for consideration and editing, but merely deletes all but the final draft. What if there is no preliminary draft, because the writer makes changes as the document is being composed? Is this the end of philology?

  Of course, that’s another issue, too. But aligned to it is yet another: the question of what has been lost in the way of archives of another sort—personal letters (now all email), notes, doodlings, idle ramblings, to say nothing of journals and diaries, that now are only composed in ephemeral, electronic formats and can be deleted or rendered irretrievable because of outmoded media. What will biographers and historians of the future have to work with?

  ###

  If one could figure out how to structure some kind of experiment, I think some interesting conclusions would come from a comparison of the processes of composition. It would be problematic, of course. Merely finding a large enough control group who composed in longhand or who knew how to use a mechanical or even an electric typewriter at a competent level would be challenge enough. Still, it might be enlightening as to our overall shift into electronic expression as a way of life. The move into electronic composition is inevitable, and I certainly would advance no hope of stopping it or slowing it, even if I wanted to, which I don’t—necessarily. But I do think it’s important to understand what impact it may have on modes of written expression and on the impact of verbal communication through the composed word. If we have a notion of what’s going on in terms of electronic transmission and receipt of information from one mind to another, both rhetorically and substantively, we might be able to do it better, or at least more effectively.