Last night, I watched "Starting Out in the Evening," a lovely little film about the relationship between grad student Heather, played intriguingly by Lauren Ambrose, doing her thesis on her favorite author, played by the always amazing Frank Langella.
Langella plays Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist who received accolades early in his career, but now has been struggling with his next book for the past decade. His books are no longer in print and all but forgotten save for Heather.
Leonard sets aside a certain number of hours and days he writes and sticks with them religiously, usually dressed in crisp slacks and button-down shirts (just the way I like my men dressed), and pecks away behind his typewriter.
Long after I watched the movie, I was still haunted by the image of Leonard writing clackity-clack behind an old-school writing utensil such as the typewriter.
I became slightly obsessed with looking at photos on the Interweb of old typewriters today, almost as obsessed as I was with writing.
I've been feeling so inspired to write lately, be it here at Ramblings On, in my journal or in my haiku/tanka notebook. Seeing "Starting Out in the Evening" only fed the fire that needs to come out of my fingers and onto a page.
I wish I could have been one of those literary greats from those days in New York, like Dorothy Parker and her cohorts on the Algonquin Round Table. I'd like to have written, toiled and created behind a rickety typewriter, feeling those round buttons slam against the white pages with words - my words.
I'd like to take that typewriter above, move to a delightful apartment in New York circa the 1920s-1930s and marry it.
We'd live in that apartment together quite happily, I reckon, drinking Manhattans from gold-gilded glassware, maybe smoking ever-so-gracefully from a pearl holder, surrounded by books, books and more books as we wrote and wrote, hoping that someday, an aspiring novelist such as myself would blog about wanting to be like me many, many years later.
