Remember that you could only make an exclamation point by typing an apostrophe (they were straight) and then backspacing to type a period beneath it?

My son asked, first time he tried the Royal, “Where’s the 1?”

You need to use lower-case L. I’d completely forgotten that until I answered him.

Tuesday morning, before we left for Theophany, I checked my email and found a Google Alert for my name on a site that links to mentions of Royal typewriters. Just down the page was a link to a recent interview with Virginia Aste, Richard Brautigan’s first wife. She tells about an Idaho camping trip she and Richard took. She says: “Richard was always writing. He sat at a card table with his Royal typewriter during the trip. I didn’t know what he was writing until later.”

His pages became Trout Fishing in America.

One’s a loaner, the Scientific American issue from 2005 about consciousness. Thanks to my friend Laura I can browse some of science’s surmises on the brain, since I have an idea in my brain to write a piece about decision-making and belief.

Three are brand new. The book I’m holding, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, if you don’t know by the picture, is about Richard Brautigan. It arrived yesterday, and although I’m well into rereading On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, I scanned the first sentence of Fishing and was hooked. My great thanks go to Keith Abbott, good friend of Brautigan’s throughout the late sixties and seventies, for putting into words his knowledge of the man and of the times they shared in Haight-Ashbury and beyond. (Also thanks for updating this biography and including lots of pictures.)

For some time I’ve wanted to read Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola. I’ve only begun the introduction, but it looks greatly worthwhile.

And while I’m not a book review person, I will probably post about my friend Linda Clare’s novel, The Fence My Father Built, after I finish it. Linda was one of the frozen writers I visited in December who looked joyful despite her circumstances signing books at the fairgrounds. (Another of them, Dorcas Smucker, had her latest book for sale then, too. I’ve already finished and recommend Downstairs the Queen is Knitting as a great follow-up to her others.)

My treat to myself a few months ago was subscribing to Poets and Writers, and I hope to make time to finish each brimming edition as it arrives.

I haven’t even mentioned that in November I finished Dracula, and I really do recommend it. Not for nothing a classic. You’ll see where much of our vampire lore comes from. I learned that Buffy the Vampire Slayer got it right in her “dusting” method of killing vamps, mostly. The sinister creatures crumble to dust, if they are really old when you stake them (and cut off their heads, by the way, just to be sure).

One more book I’ll bring up, because I’ve dubbed it my favorite for 2009. While tending my dying dog, I plucked from the shelf a book I’d found months ago at Goodwill but never yet started. Stephen King recommended it as his favorite memoir, so I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing. But the title, A Three Dog Life, drew me. It’s a wonderful story, not really about the dogs, although they are critical characters. Abigail Thomas, you’re my current creative nonfiction hero.

In those days going around with Brautigan was like traveling inside one of his novels.
~Keith Abbott, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, Astrophil Press, 2009~