Low life | 3 December 2015

My favourite YouTube video clip this week shows a chap sitting at a desk typing. All you can see of him are his hairy forearms, poised hands and fast fingers. He types for ten minutes. Nothing else happens. The typewriter is a portable designed in the early 1960s by Marcello Nizzoli for Olivetti — the famous Lettera 32. Cormac McCarthy bashed out five million words on one of these, blowing the dust out of it now and again with the air hose at his local garage. He auctioned it a few years ago for a quarter of a million dollars. The video clip is a paean to the beauty and style of the Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter.

The camera lingers adoringly over every aspect of the teal, steel-encased typewriter, eventually focusing on the keys rising and falling and the typed letters accumulating on the paper. Our interest quickens as the letters form words, the words sentences.