Category: Ramblings

The Culture of the Book

From an interview with Larry Mc with Chronicle books editor Fritz Lanham:

Q: What will you talk about at Rice?
A: The end of the culture of the book. I’m pessimistic. Mainly it’s the flow of people into my bookshop in Archer City. They’re almost always people over 40.

I don’t see kids, and I don’t see kids reading. I think little kids love to have stories read to them, but when they get to 10 or 11 or 12, they run into this tsunami of technology: iPod, iPhone, Blackberries.

They don’t resist it, and it’s normal that they wouldn’t; it’s their culture. I’m not so sure they ever come back to reading. Some will, but most won’t.

My comments and thoughts:

Book culture’? When was that? When was this mystical time period that human beings read?

Since the invention of writing, it has been an exclusionary thing. Then comes gutenberg, makes it so the mass can get books, right?

Right?

So they get excited, sometimes. (Harry Potter, I am looking at you) Still books are seen as a ‘learnin’ thing. The average person was not so much a reader. Bible? On Sunday?

Sure.

And yes, there were riots for Dickens novels, there was the unprecidented popularity of Jack London, all the way through the Beats getting challenged on the first amendment all the way to the Supreme Court.

But in the end, you would never fill a stadium for a poetry reading. As a culture, books have always been in the back ground behind things like movies, TV, sports.

College kids read. Dorky kids read. Smart people read. See what I mean?

So are we reading less? Ask JK Rowling or Stephanie Meyer. Indeed I would say that now we are reading more than we ever were. That now, today, we as a species are producing, distributing and reading more works of prose/poetry/non-fiction due to the internet, due to print on demand, due many things.

So maybe we aren’t all sitting around reading high literature all day, but keep in mind, most of ‘high literature’ at the time was just pop culture (I’m looking at you Shakespeare).

End of the book culture? I don’t think so.

I Lost My Pen!

As people we can get too attached to objects, to things, based on history, or cost, or sometimes just because it is pretty.

For me, there was this pen.

I already have this thing about ink. I prefer blue ink when I write. I am not sure why or when this happened, some of my oldest notebooks do in fact include the forbidden black ink, but not in years.

Getting attached to a pen, saying things like “this is my WRITING pen” isn’t such a great idea. I would spend more time searching through my desk or pockets or car for a single missing pen rather than write. I would push aside piles of blue pens, for the ONE pen, as if it was the only thing I could use to put down my ideas, as if it was the only thing keeping me from writing.

Meanwhile I am not writing. Whatever was in my head is slowly sliding out, and I am proving, yet again, that I excel at procrastination more than anything else.

Throw it out. If you have one of these pens, throw it out. I left mine in a bar, seemed appropriate. Use cheep pens, nice pens, use your keyboard or hammer and chisel, whatever. Just write.

And yes, I am writing to myself, but you can do it too.

These are the Ramblings of the Newly Old

“What do you want to do when you grow up?”

The question was asked to all of us at one point. Where is your direction in life? Where are you going? What is it you want to spend the rest of your life doing?

The rest of my life.

That is a bit of time for one thing, one task, one GOAL. Seems too much for any one thing to take, a burden even Atlas would cringe at.

So perhaps instead of what do I want to do, it should be what do I want to do for now? Now I seem to be doing well as an engineer, part time writer. If I had a say, it would be the other way. Writing every day and consulting as an engineer. One of these days, no?

That being said, I was a web programmer once upon a time. Something I still dabble in, still mingle at parties with. I’d go back there too if it was something interesting. Database programming for corporate websites would not be my ideal.

So what do I want to be when I grow up? Well, since I don’t have plans to grow up, I suppose I have time to figure it out.