DemonKia
Posts: 5521
Joined: 10/13/2007
From: Chico, Nor-Cali
Status: offline
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Prefatory note: I've always wanted to live in the future, so I've always felt a deep chasm between myself & all those longing for their nostalgic pasts . . . . . .
& from that perspective I've generally been amused at the usual alarums raised at this or that new technology, an inevitable phenom . . . . . . All the scathing wit displayed (everywhere, not just here) regarding Twitter is not much different than the cutting witticisms I've heard directed at the internet, or even personal computers, over the last 3 or so decades that I've had a reasonably adult consciousness & awareness . ... . . & thru reading I know the same kinds of skepticism greeted the telephone, the car, the rocket, radio, television, & a whole host of other technologies that most of us at least use, even if we discount their value . . . . . .
Here's another part of what forms my mental framing around these issues of new technology:
When I was 12 I set out to 'be a writer'. I read everything I could lay hands on about what other writers had to say about writing. They said a lot of things, but 'write' was neck-&-neck with 'read' at the head of the list. I also noted with quite a bit of envy / jealousy that the 19th century writers had an 'unfair' advantage in that letter writing & journal keeping & such were all the rage during that time, but in the 1970's & 1980's (when this was initially an issue for me) letter writing was a dead art for all intents & purposes, & it was looking like 'the young' were in danger of becoming de facto illiterates out of a sheer lack of interest in anything textual. (The great teevee-will-eat-our-brains bugaboo was still seeming quite relevant back then . .... . )
Without the 'assist' of a culture of textual interaction, writing the 5 or 10 pages a day that I have as my ideal was a lot more work. For a long time I struggled to produce a page a day. Not just the social milieu played a role, there were other things, but . .. .
Fast forward 20 or 30 years, & I'm surrounded by a letter writing culture, a time & place where everyone at every literacy level is engaging in random acts of text, with more ways to do so emerging every few years. I'm delighted. My fantasies have come true, I'm romping in some of my finest dreams these days.
I write an easy 20 pages a day these days. It's all about habits.
Those Victorian letter writers had the advantage of their cultural milieu, but not all were going to be Dickens or Twain or Dickinson or whoever, nor will all ours be Thomas Pynchons or T. Coraghessan Boyles or Maya Angelous, but if that's the only point, well, I live in a richer universe than that. Art of all kinds delights me, but I take special delight in the 'naive', the untutored & untrained, the underappreciated & the easily overlooked . . .. .
If I had a superpower I'd pick invisibility, undetectability cuz I want to know what kind of random weirdnesses & ordinarinesses others engage in -- especially my 'heroes' . . . .. . I can only relate to the feet-of-clay part, since so much of me feels made of that stuff . . . . . . So I like to hear all those random details of ordinary & not-so-ordinary lives, it cheers me quite a bit to know that David Lynch has plenty of mundanity in his craziness, I like to feel that sense of connection . . . . . . .
*shrugs shoulders*
Cheers, folks.
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