#coffeebreak: the machine stops
Today’s 10 minute writing challenge. I feel some Orwellian undertones in this picture. Those machines surely can’t just be for creating newspapers! And who is the caretaker in the middle?
No related posts.
Today’s 10 minute writing challenge. I feel some Orwellian undertones in this picture. Those machines surely can’t just be for creating newspapers! And who is the caretaker in the middle?
No related posts.
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sketch:
the man doesn’t look comfortable at all. he is looking at the lithographs like they might pounce on him. Also looks like he doesn’t leave the studio very often. compare the tiny stools that he is provided to the massive contraptions that take up most of the room. the human presence is barely accounted for, seemingly more like an altar than anything else. Seriously the guy looks freaking nervous. Play off that.
write:
George had been leaning against the wall, eyes closed, breathing deeply the smell of oil and cooling metal, when the first clacks sounded. At first they were tentative, sounding out across the wooden floors as though ultrasonic, expectant of a shape that might silence them once more. George sat motionless while the sounds rebounded off his body, and soon the hall was filled with a cacophony if metal striking metal.
George looked searched the room with his eyes–not daring to turn his head–for another to share witness to the machines’ autonomy, but there was no-one. The rest of the lithographers had escaped the clinging atmosphere to smoke in the alley behind the press. George could hear them stomping up the steps now, reluctant to return to the altar stools crouched in front of the great contraptions. Evidently, the machines did too, falling silent as the rest of the workers approached.
They greeted him with a nod and an `A’right, George’, and back to work they fell, slotting the type together and feeding
And of course, only now do I realise I used the word ‘lithographers’ rather than ‘linographers’ or ‘printers’. Ah well, great picture!
I really love this sense “breathing deeply the smell of oil and cooling metal” for some reason it brings the scene alive.
Here is my effort (just got time to type it up):
He went around with the grease and the long wire antenna he used to apply it between the keys of the machines when they called out for it, their hot metal parts screaming with seizure. Between the maintenance times they had given him a stool to kneel on – sitting was forbidden while the machines were running. And now he had just finished greasing number 2 and was wiping the antenna with a rag he kept in a doctors bag underneath the legs of the stool. His knee settling back into the groove he had worn in the top of the stool after years of loyal service. His back unclasping, disc by disc as he straightened out against the bay windows looking out across the sodden yard.
A high pitched squeal interrupted the movements, his back thrusting up with fright, the rag falling through his fingers, the edge of the groove impacting with his knee joint. The squeal again now inside the same second, higher pitched, more urgent, following so rapidly that it sent him toppling to one side along with the bucket thin grease, and onto the floor.
Machine number 2, the one he had just finished servicing, roared again, shook in its brackets. Lead plates gnashing against each other. The man struggled to his feet, slipping in the grease pool. He fell against machine number 2, something that was forbidden, and steadied himself by grabbing hold of a steam pipe which instantly came loose. He pushed himself towards the shut off switch as the machine bucked again, an ink valve bursting, covering him in a thin spray of jet blue ink. He flipped the switch and the din of the press went silent.
The supervisor opened the door and the man, covered in ink and grease, sat back on the stool and then stood up again and resumed an awkward half crouch. Reams of paper had escaped the machine and now sat in a pulpy mess on the greasy floor. The ink still bubbling from the broken valve. The supervisor stepped carefully towards the machine and tore the top sheet of paper from its steely grasp.
Nice one mark, I liked your varied use of mechanical words; groove, joint, antenna, disc, plates. Really gives the story a cold, mechanical feeling to it. Oh, and ‘steely grasp’ made me grooooaaan.
Coffee Break – Linotype Machines:
Log entry 10.43AM:
It began as fantasy. Just elements of ideas forming in the man’s head. Now, the concepts were beginning to take form. “All things are created twice” – he remembered reading that in a book somewhere – “first in the mind, then made manifest in reality”. But his mind was travelling too quickly for introspection now, indeed, too quickly for introspection at the best of times. He was on edge, both physically and mentally. On the lacerating edge of technology…
The first victory was the mechanical divide to be bridged. This had been conquered during the beginning weeks of the project – his own personal Industrial Revolution. Sure, the Luddites were not impressed but on a whole, the mass experiment could be termed ‘successful’, or at the very least ‘useful’. Those who fall by the wayside, those hapless victims to the surge of evolution, never seemed to witness a second chance. Succession so unkind to them, in stark contrast to the machines pulled from the wreckage of its spurious drive and reinvented. Was this some kind of a metaphor for survival, for existence even? What did it mean? Perhaps it was time to reinvent himself…
When he was so close to the next breakthrough, the Professor was often troubled in this manner. It was a good feeling to have. A feeling he knew. The realisation he was close, spurred him on. There was so little time left. He wanted to say he had the power to create AND the ability to stop this onslaught. He invented it, therefore, he had the power to halt its lacerating drive… But there was a hint of suspicion floating through the whirring cogs of the Professors mind. Had he gone too far this time? The ghost in the machine. The fly in the ointment. Was the domination of mans spirit next?
Cheers, Benjamin
http://www.bsawon.wordpress.com
“This is yours Christopher.”
“But I didn’t want it Papa.”
A two-line argument had everyday inside our heads for the last six months before I went. Him sitting there, that expectant look on his face; one part pride, one part outrage. I wanted to scream keep you machines old man but of course I didn’t. I had promised Mama. No, I broke his heart slowly. Joined the navy without him knowing. Told him just a day before I was due to ship out.
I didn’t stay to watch how he took it. He never wrote, but that wasn’t surprising. He wasn’t a man for the hand written letters. He was a punched on page type of man, the control of being able to mass-produce something like a book appealing. Unfortunately he had only one son. All my sisters had married well, and he wouldn’t have grandsons that wanted the place.
Mama wrote, of course. She conversed of Papa’s business as gaily as ever, reporting that he was printing medical texts now, and though she never said it, the question was always there, implied by the concern for my health and length of my service: when Christopher, when? The answer was never forthcoming because the answer never existed. Until today. The answer Mama, is now. Why, I couldn’t say.
I’ll walk in there this morning, older than the last time I walked into the factory floor. I’m a smoker now, which I wasn’t before. I’ve killed people, on orders. I’ve lined my gun up at blurred objects, moving in the distance and fired, then pretended that my actions had no real world consequences. But I heard the cries, timed to well with the report of my rifle.
I’ve known women. Some were rays of light that illuminated my miserable existence, others were rays of light that alleviated it, and I’d never know which until I was with them and it was too late.
The little boy marched out of here into the world. A man limps back, to face that expectant – outraged face once more.
Will he say, “This is yours Christopher”?
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