Computer love?
So writer Nathan Heller writes a fun retrospective in this week’s New Yorker: “Hello Laptop, My Old Friend.” Due to the death of his current computer, he was forced to ‘resurrect’ an old laptop:
It was an affection born of shared interests and mutual experience. I bought Laptop when I was twenty, and for years after we were inseparable. We lived together in school, in the city, abroad, and back home — some ten towns on two continents in total, with short trips to several more in between. Laptop followed me to countless cafés, bounced through hostels, patiently waited at research libraries, and offered no complaint about the odd hours or the basic loneliness of his endeavors. I wrote college papers on him, then a thesis. Hundreds of pages later, he helped me compose my first magazine work. Laptop is an IBM T42: a stripped-down, strangely square model that was the standard issue at my university tech store. But he has a rare, marvellous keyboard — deep, well-defined, solid — and has proved indestructible. The only T42 I ever saw give up the ghost belonged to a friend who treated it badly — flinging it onto tables, hammering cruelly at its keys, and dropping it repeatedly — until, one day (I think there might have been spillage involved), she broke the unbreakable. That was around the time I started to suspect that people’s rapports with their laptops reveal more about them than we might want to know.
God, this article sent me spiraling back in time. Forget the Apple IIc I on which I wrote the spec script K-9, using 3 1/2" floppy discs and a dot-matrix printer. What about my laptops?
When I had an overall deal at Warner Bros., the studio supplied me with what must have been the heaviest, clunkiest laptop in history. Seriously, I think a permanent kink in my right shoulder derives from lugging around that bad boy.
Then I had an NEC. That got stolen. Then some sort of clone PC. That died. At some point, I made the switch to Apple and have all sorts of Mac type products floating around. I currently use a MacBook Pro.
Not to mention all the desktop computers I’ve owned.
Here’s the thing. Writers spend so much time at their computers each day. I tracked this recently myself, counting the time I was ass-on-chair-face-in-monitor, and it was 15 hours.
I mean holy shit, right?
But what is our relationship with these beasts of burden? And it is a relationship. I don’t think I’m alone in talking to my computer. When my fingers don’t seem to cooperate… or the computer takes a few seconds too long to execute a command… or that split second when we press the ON button and the thing hesitates before coming to life, and our very existence as creative entities flashes before our eyes.
Good God, everything we are as writers is loaded up in there.
What is the nature of this relationship? Is it love? Hate? Affection? Distrust?
What is your relationship with computers? With what computer did you lose your virginity? Which computer have you owned that you loved the most? How many computers do you have stashed around the house? Are there some you simply can not get rid of?
And what is the deal between writers… with our hearts and souls… and these machines which are in some ways the most tactile form of connection to creativity we have on a daily basis?
For more of the New Yorker article, go here.
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