Above: a subtitled still from Michaelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, one of Stanley Kubrick’s top 10 favorite films. Watch the entire scene here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Serial Series is a six-part meditation on the production of text from the text’s point-of-view. It was written serially and published serially during the three-week run of Dexter Sinister’s The First/Last Newspaper, a project for Performa 09.
Above, from top: a Sholes & Glidden c. 1873, the model used by Mark Twain; a Hansen Writing Ball c.1882, the model used by Friedrich Nietzsche; the Adler typewriter found on the desk of Jack Torrance in a still from The Shining; the Smith-Corona on the desk of Theodore Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber) in a photograph of his Montana cabin.
Shortly after buying his Remington Model 1 typewriter, Mark Twain dashed a letter off to his brother in 1874. In his note, he seems equal parts addled and satisfied with his new purchase:
I am trying get the hang of this new fangled writing machine, but am not making a shining success of it. […] I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don’t muss things or scatter ink blots around. Of course it saves paper.
Knowing they had a notable writer for a customer, Remington’s salespeople contacted Twain to see if he’d vouch publicly for their Remington Model 2, which he’d purchased as soon as it was released. In a typed note of all caps he declined, signing off not as Twain, but with his given name, Samuel Clemens:
Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the Type-Writer, for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe the machine but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc., etc. I don’t like to write letters, so I don’t want people to know that I own this curiosity breeding little joker. Yours truly, Saml. L. Clemens.
Above, from top: Gravemarker for Isaiah Sellers in Missouri; Twain on a riverboat; signatures as Clemens and Twain; a Remington catalog from the 1880s; Remington typewriter inventor (and newspaper publisher) Christopher Latham Sholes.
Like many of his books, Mark Twain’s 1883 travelogue Life on the Mississippi was published simultaneously in England and the U.S. in an attempt to ensure against piracy on either side of the Atlantic. In it, Twain recounts—among other stories from his young life on the river—the origin of and his decision to use the pen name “Mark Twain” instead of his given name, Samuel Clemens.
Chapter 50 introduces a captain Twain writes is “now many years dead. He was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on the river.” But he’s a two-sided figure: an able sailor on one hand, but a competitive storyteller on the other. His tales were designed to outdo all the rest. As older pilots bragged about their experiences on the river to newer men, Twain writes, “the stately figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine Son of Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst.” Capt. Sellers “dated his islands back to the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice; and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before.” Twain continues,
The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them “Mark Twain,” and give them to the New Orleans Picayune. They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island So-and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as “disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.”
In an effort to impress his fellow young pilots, Twain signed his first article for the New Orleans True Delta, which was a parody of the captain’s style with his name, “I. Sellers.” When he found out, Sellers “did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth,” Twain recalls.
He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed “Mark Twain” to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner’s discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands—a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.
Above, from top: Franklin the pirate (from The First/Last Newspaper); the cover of Poor Richard’s Almanac by Richard Saunders; Dickens gives a public reading during his second visit to America in 1867; Twain the young author and journalist.
One of America’s first pirates was a Philadelphia printer named Benjamin Franklin, who was born in Boston three years before England’s passage of copyright protection with the Statute of Anne in 1709. At 15, Franklin watched his brother James establish the colonies’ first independent newspaper, The New-England Courant. Franklin ran away two years later and soon found himself in London as an apprentice typesetter. By 1726, he had returned to America and found employment in Thomas Denham’s print shop.
For Franklin, piracy was a win-win: money for him, along with revolutionary ideas for a young republic. The scarcity of books in the colonies led Franklin to establish a book-sharing conversation group known as the Junto (or Leather Apron Club), and, later, the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731. According to the US State Department’s Outline of American Literature, which is available as a free PDF from America.gov, “The unauthorized printing of foreign books was originally seen as a service to the colonies as well as a source of profit for printers like Franklin, who reprinted the works of the classics and great European books to educate the American public.”
Above, from top: Karl Marx; hand-loom weavers; a coin with Queen Anne’s likeness, 1708.
British literary historian N.N. Feltes has said that “Readers are made by what makes the book.” Meaning, the system that produces a text also produces the readers who read it. In Charles Dickens’s case, that system was serial publication. But, in Dickens’s case, that system was also the nascent industrial revolution, which involved the shift from what Feltes describes as the “petty-commodity production of books,” in which books were produced in small quantities by artisans, to the “capitalist production of texts,” in which books were produced in mass quantities by professional printers and publishers. In a very short time, the system that produced a book went from something like that which produced a homespun quilt to something like that which produced bolts of industrially-woven fabric. While the machines made the fabric cheaper and easier to make, its weavers owned nothing but their labor in making it. And while presses made books cheaper and easier to make, their authors in turn owned nothing but their power to conceive them.
The comparison of writing to weaving is not lost on Feltes, who uses it to recall Marx: “While the condition of early 19th century writers could never decline to that of their wretched contemporaries, the hand-loom weavers, nevertheless Marx’s comment on the weavers’ predicament in the face of the new relations of industrial production is illuminating.” Marx noticed that workers in a capitalist system are estranged from the work they make. Since their work is no longer their own, the concept of labor arrives to take its place. This yields, as Marx says, “the conditions of labor and the product of labor.” The book, which was once the work, is now the product; its text, which was also once the book, is now the labor. Its author’s right is not to the product but to his or her individual labor. In one stroke, the “professional author,” and the “commodity text” were born, along with the mass-consuming public to support them.
