Unintended Consequences
Quoted in a long-ago Village Voice interview --when many of us still viewed (and used) the computer as a very fancy typewriter--the poet Louis Simpson confessed he couldn't imagine composing on a computer.
In an earlier day, the argument would have been between the typewriter and the pen.
Today--for this writer, at least--the conflict is no longer, if it ever was, between composing on one or the other. A large part of the growing tension I'm feeling is between my romantic attachment to the idea of print; of a newspaper, magazine or book I hold in my hand and read, versus the 'page' I read where I am right now, sitting at my computer.
I never thought it would come to this. Who of my generation did (science fiction and fantasy fans excused from consideration)?
THIS MUCH AND NO MORE
For me, 'the written word' means reporting and ideas and narrative and analysis. But it also means these:
The clang of the printing press. The utility of day-old newsprint. The guilty crack of a stiff new binding. The allure of dust jacket art. The romance of the written (and printed and published) word.
For someone who went to school when school desks had inkwells in them, the long, slow detachment from the traditional delivery system of literacy is hard to get used to but impossible to deny or resist. What I'm sitting here writing is no longer considered print copy, as we used to say. It's text.
But there's a more fundamental issue, especially for someone of my contrarian bent: How much of the digital communications revolution do I want to admit into my life?
The answer thusfar is, This much and no more. An IMac but not an IPod. A digital camera but not a cellphone or a Blackberry. A blog but not a Facebook page.
