Does writing with a pen and paper yield something different than writing on a laptop?

READ THE BOOK IN UPLOADED FILES AND WRITE WHAT YOU ANALYZE ABOUT IT. CITE IT.
The title of Brathwaite’s poem, Letter Sycorax, offers one clue to get us started. Sycorax, as you probably know, is a character from The Tempest. In Shakespeare’s play, Sycorax is a powerful witch and the mother of Caliban, one of the few native inhabitants of the island on which Prospero, the hero of the play, is stranded. Brathwaite’s letter begins, “Dear mamma// I writin yu dis letter/wha?// guess what! pun a computer o/kay?” In his book Bitstreams, Matthew Kirschenbaum describes the poem:

“The lines are presented in Brathwaites characteristic ‘nation language,’ his Creole or ‘dub’ appropriation of English, replete with rhymes, puns, cacography, truncations, and eruptions of punctuationin short, the language of Caliban.”

In addition to the specific reference to Sycorax as the addressee of the poem, Brathwaite references Sycorax more broadly as his signature style which he calls, SycoraxVideoStyle, or SVS. Brathwaite developed SVS during his “time of salt,” a period of time between 1986 and 1990 marked by profound personal losses: the death of his wife, the destruction of his archive by Hurricane Gilbert, and being robbed and shot at his home in Kingston. In an interview for Cabinet Magazine, Brathwaite said of SycoraxVideoStyle:

“I come to Sycorax during my Time of Salt: death of Zea Mexican 1986, loss of Irish Town Library of Alexandria 1988, murder by Kingston gunmen 1990 just look at the dread frequencies of these catastrophes. My writing hand becomes a dumb stump in my head I mean I cant write or utter a sound or metaphor. But Sycorax comes to me in a dream and she dreams me a Macintosh computer with its winking io hiding in its margins which, as you know, are not really margins, but electronic accesses to Random Memory and the Cosmos and the lwa.”

The computer Brathwaite talks about in the quote above is the Mac SE/30. Returning to Kirschenbaum’s Bitstreams, “Brathwaite first encountered the Macintosh during a residency at Harvard in 1988. Brathwaite, himself a seasoned computer user, was no less thoughtful about what they were doing to his writing; indeed, computersand specifically the Macintosh SE and an accompanying Apple StyleWriter printerbecame an integral part of his poetics and personal mythos”

We see a trend emerging here in the repeated connection between Sycorax and writing on a computer. One of the questions Brathwaite’s SVS introduces is the question of mediation and technology. Specifically, technologies we use to write. For example, how does the implement a poet uses to write affect what is or can be written? Does writing with a pen and paper yield something different than writing on a laptop? When you write a text message on your phone, does iPhone’s autofil alter the way you intended to word your message? To connect these questions to the larger theme of this class, we might think about the ways different musical instruments, like writing implements, determine the kinds of noises that can be made.

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