Cormac McCarthy is auctioning the Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter he has used for the past 50 years (and 5 million words).
Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50.
The way you do things always affects how the things themselves turnout.
We popped to the royal festival hall, last night for the final part of their acoustic tuning events. The line-up was messily eclectic, but we were supposedly there for the sound more than the music. And well, the jazz sounded great, the beatbox guy went down well with those too old to have heard of killa-kela, and no acoustic engineer in the world could get bert janschto be audible.
I wasn’t there for that though.
The RFH is the cultural heart of London but not necessarily for the events they promote as much as the space they host. It’s almost as if the gigs and recitals and all the great work they do is merely an excuse to have this incredible building right in the centre of London. All this wonderful light and these expansive views over the south bank and across the city .A neutral ground for hip indie kids, real-ale jazzers, leftbank arty types, classical enthusiasts from the suburbs.
They have been very careful with this most hallowed place. The carpets and banisters, the incredible, intricate wood paneling all looks as if they have been painstakingly restored-they’re brand new. Brand new-retro. Everything is how it was when it was first opened!! And yet different. New entrances, more light, less clutter, the acoustics revamped (it really does sound amazing) and everything designed to reveal the wonders of this most precious building and to remind us how much we have missed her.
Cormac McCarthy’s latest book ‘The Road’ is quite possibly the best thing you will read all year.
Stripped of some of the author’s usual dense, impenetrable prose the story of a father and son’s journey through a horrifically bleak post-apocalyptic landscape is at once McCarthy’s most accessible work and his most affecting.
As ever McCarthy never shies away from portraying humanity’s propensity for plumbing ever greater depths of depravity. Indeed with the all trappings of society long past, this evil is unbound upon a ruined and desolate country. The journey of the father and son against this relentless backdrop is one of holding true to an innate sense of goodness, against enormous odds. It is a story about the cost of overcoming, the great price this road exacts and the desperate struggle to hold onto hope and light when all about is fallen.
I read it straight through in two feverish days and would recommend you to do the same. It is hard to imagine a more perfectly crafted thing.
to be audible.
