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When is a typewriter not just an implement for writing? Well, when it's used to create its own form of art.
Recently, quite by happenstance, I met performance artist Tim Youd while he was, well, typing - on an old-fashioned, manual typewriter on the porch of the home of the legendary Nyack author, Carson McCullers. You can read that account here: http://talk-frank.blogspot.com/2018/06/todays-mostly-true-short-story-ghost-of.html. What I learned about him from a subsequent meeting was the incredible artistic mission he is currently embarked on.
Apparently, Mr. Youd is on a 10-year quest to retype famous American novels, word for word, on the old typewriters they used AND in the locations from where they were actually written, like William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury in Oxford, Miss, or Jack Kerouac's Big Sur, actually IN Big Sur, and so on. He's hoping for 100 before he's done. He's already retyped about 55 novels so far in the 5 years since he began the project.
I met him in Nyack because he is currently working on McCuller's 1946 novel, Member of the Wedding, which she wrote while living here. He intends to type the entire novel (as he does with all of them) on a single sheet of paper to create a type of visual art where the entire novel is consolidated into a compressed area. He then displays the "novel" sheets as individual works of art.
In our brief conversation, I related to Mr. Youd our rich literary tradition with the likes of McCullers, Charles McArthur, and Ben Hecht to name just a few of the famous writers who called Nyack home. I think that he was pleased to continue it.
You can read in detail more about Tim Youd's extraordinary endeavor here:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/nyregion/typing-vassar-tim-youd-mary-mccarthy-group-artist.html
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