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What I noticed most was that this was uncomputerised prose. There is a difference. Prose written with a pen and then typed up, a fag dangling from the lip. It went into The New Yorker and The New York Times, into the introductions to the classics, into the heads of readers, never to escape.
So wrote Ronald Blythe about an edition of W.H. Auden's essays. It was the phrase 'uncomputerised prose' that struck me most when I first read it a couple of years ago. Here, in one expression, is both a critique and a paean - a critique of machine men with machine minds^; a paean to what writing has always been and, after the Butlerian Jihad^^ being made more and more inevitable as our waxen wings grow nearer the sun, will be again: the physical act of scratching words onto paper (or vellum or stone).
Analogue technology. I write these words with a fountain pen made of metal. The paper rests on English oak. The Machine - the nexus of power, wealth, and technology whose goal is at once the abolition and deification of Man - would of course rather you wrote on a screen. Thus your words can be commodified - or, if heretical, vilified, and thrown into Orwell's memory hole. But this first act of rebellion goes deeper still. Blythe's 'uncomputerised prose' is itself blithe, if you'll pardon the pun. That is to say, it's joyous, and delights in creation for its own sake. By removing itself from the Machine's sphere of influence, i.e., the Matrix, it ceases to be useful. It denies the Machine its dreary Benthamite calculus. It evades its algorithms. All writing 're-presents' reality, but hand-writing less so than its digital simulacrum.
Note how every such act of rebellion... does essentially the same thing. You can't be a victim of the gladiatorial arena if you're busy playing marbles - or conkers or hopscotch or chess - outside its walls. The people who censored Roald Dahl probably can't read his handwriting. And that's why he'll survive.
^ machine men with machine minds (HTTPS)
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