And about don marquis and e.e. cummings

If you don't know about e.e. cummings and his propensity for writing in lower case, you have no one but yourself to blame. I recommend Wikipedia to start.


If you don't know Don Marquis, you may just have missed The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel,  Marquis' hysterical account of the life of a cockroach who shared Marquis' office space at The Evening Sun in New York during the early part of the last century.

I discovered Archy and Mehitabel when I was in junior high or high school, when a friend of mine loaned me her copy to read. I was fascinated by the fact that Marquis had managed to turn out an entire book in lower-case type (I'm not sure I had even heard of cummings yet, but I'm sure I hadn't been terribly smitten by him), and even more by the explanation: Marquis attributed the entire book to Archy.

The idea was that Archy was actually a reincarnated poet who still loved to write (even in his incarnation as a cockroach), but he felt obliged, apparently, to share the office news from his view on the underside of the world in exchange for the use of Marquis' typewriter.

As a cockroach, his only means of typing was diving from the top of the machine onto the keys; since he was only one cockroach, he couldn't strike two keys at once, so he couldn't hold the shift key. As I recall, at least one segment (I sort of hate to call them chapters; I suspect they were actually collected from Marquis' daily column in the Evening Sun) appeared in all caps as a concession to those who wanted capital letters, but Archy made the caps by locking the caps lock key for the entire segment. After all, using the caps lock would have required three leaps from the top of the machine to capitalize normally: one to lock the caps, one to strike the letter, and one to unlock the caps. I agree with Archy; sounds like way too much work to me.

You can read snippets of Archy's work from the Don Marquis website at http://www.donmarquis.com/archy/, and copies of the whole book are still available on the web. As the website shows, archy was Marquis' voice for a lot of observations of his world, but his bug's-eye view makes them even funnier.