Patrick M Brennan

My one-act play Milgram’s War has been selected as a finalist for the Attic Theatre’s 2006 One-Act Marathon in Los Angeles. Milgram’s War will be one of six finalists produced as part of the Attic Theatre’s Written Word Festival, which starts on July 7th, 2006, and runs for six weeks. A panel of judges drawn from the LA theatre community will see all six of the plays produced, and vote on the winning script. The judges’ final ruling will be announced on August 12, 2006, and cash prizes will be awarded to the second and first place winners.

I’m pretty sure this will be the first play of mine produced in LA. Wish me luck!

I have to admit I’m a little annoyed by “writers” who don’t bother to learn how to use their word processors. Since I am a well-known techie in my circle of writers, I often field questions from my fellows, and I’m happy to help. But I’m also dismayed by the lack of knowledge some writers exhibit about their primary tool. Simple things like properly setting up a page can utterly defeat otherwise intelligent people because, as they lamely explain, “I don’t know anything about computers.”

Well, look: if all you want to do is bang out letters, you don’t need to know much about your word processor; it’s push-button simple. There’s not much formatting involved. On the other hand, if you are creating documents of any complexity at all, you should know how to manage that. Plays are rather complex in terms of their formatting. But there are simple commands in every decent word processor to create the formatting you like (and there are programs you can buy that will do the formatting for you, if you’re rich and lazy). It’s not hard, though, and it’s not “computers".

Things like highlighting a block of text, pointing to a menu, and clicking on a command aren’t arcane any more. They don’t belong to the realm of “computer literacy". In the age of the $500 laptop computer, they’re just everyday nuts and bolts stuff. It’s easier than driving a car (and less dangerous). Nobody is too stupid to learn this stuff. If you don’t know how to do it, then you just haven’t bothered to learn it – which isn’t a value judgement, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person – unless you’re a “writer". In that case, as I said, I’m a little annoyed. Are you a writer? Then be a writer. Take the time to learn how to use your tools.

I thought back to this on my vacation, when we took an afternoon to tour Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West. One of the highlights of the tour, for me, was visiting Hemingway’s writing room, which still has his portable Royal typewriter. This humble machine was the instrument Hemingway used to create some of his best work. Hemingway, obviously, was not a mechanical engineer, but I’m sure he knew how to change the ribbon and set the margins on his typewriter. In fact, given the amount of travelling he must have done with it, I’m confident he was able to make simple repairs to the machine.

Now what would Hemingway say to you if you told him you couldn’t figure out how to make your word processor format your document correctly? I’ll tell you.

He’d laugh. In your face.

A memory from high school visited me very vividly last night. I recall sitting in my high school library, and I was working on some science assignment, but I’ve forgotten the details. Nerd that I was (and am), I was solving the problem by creating a program on my handy TI-59 Programmable calculator. To create this program, I had written the program steps – essentially keystrokes – in a column on a couple of sheets of paper. A program would look something like this:

RCL 1
x
RCL 0
x2
+
RCL 2
x
RCL 0
+
RCL 3
=

The paper was at my left hand, and my calculator on my right as I keyed the steps into it (in “learn” mode).

As I was doing this, an older woman – whom I had never seen before or since – toodled up beside my table and without a word of introduction, she said:

“In my day, we didn’t need a calculator to add up a column of figures.”

And then she shambled away, smugly, without even waiting for an answer.

I think she was an administrator of some sort at the school.

PMB replies to a comment from Hey, They Were Right :
why isn’t that “made in china” picture on the cover of the Wall St Journal?

I thought it was pretty obvious that the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t care to call attention to that fact. The business types who read the WSJ have been the enablers of the sale of America to the Chinese, which is the awesomest historical joke I can think of (Also, that the biggest Communist country in the world would become the biggest outsourcing company in the world, once they had the market on Chinese labor cornered – oh, it drips with irony). So, those who already knew what was going on with China, didn’t need to read it in the Journal; and those who didn’t know, well, best not to upset them with the truth.