Palaces

It was while isolating with covid last September that I decided to rescue my old manual typewriter from a box in the attic. Cleaned and oiled it was as good as new, so I started rattling away, typing up the various typestract poems I had hidden in my journals for years. What is so appealing about an old Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter? It's not just the still unrealised potential of an "obsolete" technology, but the textures which result from the inevitable variations in pressure when fingers strike the keys, and from the equally inevitable mistakes and corrections, as much a trace of the fleeting moment as a graffito. Then there is the visual patterning created by the even spacing of the letters, combined with the grid which they map across the page, the percussion of the keys against paper and platen, the sound of a forgotten future haunting the digital present...