I had no hearing aids until I came to America. The Odessa I know is a silent city, where the language is invisibly linked to my father’s lips moving as I watch his mouth repeat stories again and again. He turns away. The story stops. He looks at me again, but the story has already moved on.
Decades later, when I come back to this city, I don’t feel I have quite returned until I turn my hearing aids off.
Click — and people’s lips move again, but no sound.
No footsteps of grandmothers running after their grandchildren. No announcements by tram-conductors as the tram stops at a station and, finally, I jump off.
A cab whooshes by me and abruptly parks at the curb. I do not hear the screech of its brakes.
This is the Odessa of my childhood: my father’s lips open, in Proviantskaya Street. I see a story. He bends to pick up a coin. The story stops. Then, as he straightens up and smiles at me, it is a story again.
It holds that everything in nature is made up of tiny, immutable parts. What we perceive as change and flux are just cogs turning in the machine of the Universe – a huge but ultimately comprehensible mechanism that is governed by universal laws and composed of smaller units. Trying to identify these units has been the focus of science and technology for centuries. Lab experiments pick out the constituents of systems and processes; factories assemble goods from parts composed of even smaller parts; and the Standard Model tells us about the fundamental entities of modern physics.
But when phenomena don’t conform to this compositional model, we find them hard to understand. Take something as simple as a smiling baby: it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain a baby’s beaming smile by looking at the behaviour of the constituent atoms of the child in question, let alone in terms of its subatomic particles such as gluons, neutrinos and electrons. It would be better to resort to developmental psychology, or even a narrative account (‘The father smiled at the baby, and the baby smiled back’). Perhaps a kind of fundamental transformation has occurred, producing some new feature or object that can’t be reduced to its parts.
Nominally a book that covers the rough century between the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s and that of computing in the 1950s, The Chinese Typewriter is secretly a history of translation and empire, written language and modernity, misguided struggle and brutal intellectual defeat. The Chinese typewriter is ‘one of the most important and illustrative domains of Chinese techno-linguistic innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries … one of the most significant and misunderstood inventions in the history of modern information technology’, and ‘a historical lens of remarkable clarity through which to examine the social construction of technology, the technological construction of the social, and the fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity’. It was where empires met.
Don’t Stop the Presses! tells the story of a mandate. Morrison explains how newspapers are interwoven into the fabric of American culture, society, and politics. Freedom of the press is, of course, consecrated in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Our founding fathers were also publishers: Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton. Small frontier towns set up newspapers as quickly as they incorporated, bringing in and operating prized presses in ingenious ways. “Any new settlement of a few hundred people didn’t consider itself a real town until someone had lugged a printing press over mountains or across deserts to print a newspaper,” she notes. Cheyenne, Wyoming, had four papers and 1,000 people in 1867. In Quilcene, Washington, a water wheel powered the Megaphone.