Unit Five Blog Post

            For this blog post, I want to talk about “Revising,” which is chapter five of Joseph Harris’s book, Rewriting, How to Do Things with Text. In this chapter, Harris writes about how rare it is that first drafts are instantly readable, despite media depictions of it. Harris states, “[t]his one-draft view of writing is reinforced by most movie and TV depictions of writers at work, as we watch them quickly type perfectly balanced and sequenced sentences until, with a sigh of satisfaction, they pound out THE END or press SEND” (100). Harris is correct that this rarely happens. This is why I think that the fifth response paper is a good exercise for this class. Nobody is a writing wizard right off the bat. Unless of course, you are actually a wizard. By the way, let’s give a big shout to wizards! Literature, legends, Renaissance festivals, and online computer customer service would be much boring places without them.

            There is a well-known real-life exception to Harris’s comments about the one draft writing style shown in media. Famously, Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel On the Road was typed on a massive scroll. Here are some pictures of this below.

And here is a recreation of what it was like when it was first unfolded.

Even through the scroll of On the Road is legendary in literature, Kerouac did do some revisions to it for the final completion of On the Road. Even Kerouac knew about the power of editing. Here is a link about the scroll below:

https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2008/scroll/

       Harris writes about how important revising, editing, proofreading is to achieve the creation of a polished text. Harris’s discussion about the importance of these things in literature reminded me of the literary centered hashtag #ThanksForTyping. Bruce Holsinger, a professor at the University of Virginia, noticed how many acknowledgment pages in books had mentions of the author’s wives typing, transcribing, proofreading, and editing the books. Many times, the authors would just thank their wives without even stating their names! So Holsinger went to Google Books, took screenshots of these acknowledgments and posted them to Twitter under the hashtag # ThanksForTyping. Here is the link to it: 

https://twitter.com/hashtag/ThanksForTyping?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E845643268046106625&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2017%2F03%2F30%2F521931310%2F-thanksfortyping-spotlights-unnamed-women-in-literary-acknowledgements

So why is #ThanksForTyping important? Well, because it shows that many women (mostly wives) in their editing, transcribing, and proofreading of materials, have helped shaped and refine some of the greatest works of literature while being underrated or even uncredited entirely. It’s about finally giving these women their due. Here is an article about how the literary oeuvres of Tolstoy, Eliot, Nabokov, Wordsworth, Fitzgerald, etc, were helped by the women in their lives. Here is the link to article:https://theconversation.com/thanksfortyping-the-women-behind-famous-male-writers-75770

           Wait, there more! I actually have my own list of underrated female literary contributors.

         1.     Sylvia Beach

Beach published one of the most acclaimed books of the 20^th century, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Here is a link about this:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/books-and-their-makers-sylvia-beach-and-james-joyce

Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare & Company is still in business in Paris, France. The current owner of Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Whitman, gave a tour of the bookstore to the comedian Craig Ferguson, back in 2011. The tour of the bookstore begins at the 2:34 mark. Here is the link to the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2zRBCyuDCY

    2.    Eileen Blair

Blair was the wife of George Orwell. Her family members have stated that she was a contributor to his works. She might also be a pioneer of dystopian fiction through her poetry. Here are the links below:

https://unbound.com/books/eileen/updates/three-orwell-family-members-speak-out-about-the-importance-of-eileen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Blair

    3. Alma Reville

Alfred Hitchcock is justly remembered as the one of greatest directors of time. His wife Alma, a writer and editor, was a constant contributor to his body of cinematic works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Reville

   4. 1.      Margaret Warrington

Warrington was Stanley Kubrick’s secretary. I’m giving Warrington a mention here for a reason. You know the “all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” segment in Kubrick’s The Shining?

             Well, Warrington typed the phrase out…on 500 pages.

https://www.ranker.com/list/weird-facts-about-the-shining/anncasano?page=4

So I leave you with some questions. What do think about #ThanksForTyping? What do you think about On the Road or any of the other literature that is mentioned in this blog post? Let’s get talking!