Looking Back Can Be Fruitful

Recently on my Books in Northport blog, I added a new layout item, that of the "Featured Post." It's a way of not only looking back but inviting others to look back with me. Perhaps they missed something along the way that I believe deserves attention.

I am added a "Featured Post" to this blog as well. If you're viewing on a phone rather than a larger screen, though, you won't see the right-hand column in my layout, and I don't know how to adjust for that. Maybe you do. In any event, the "Featured Post" highlighted today (in future others will take its place) is this one.

Thanks for taking the time to visit.

“Honey, We’re Shrinking Our Brains!”

A New Device

A telephone company representative – a very helpful, pleasant young man, and I’m not blaming him one bit – convinced me recently to go for a new plan on my business phone line. Under the new plan, I would receive for ninety-nine cents a “tablet” that would let me do do everything but make phone calls. Hell, why not?

The tablet came, and it was cute. The rep thought it would arrive charged up so I could use it immediately, but such was not the case. The dark screen remained dark that first afternoon. I plugged it in and turned back to my bound and printed books, leaving the device to take on energy enough to be useful.

I won’t go into all the reasons for my disenchantment, because only one is pertinent to my point today: There is no keyboard. Oh, there is a tiny representation of a keyboard, but one cannot type on it. Not the way I learned to type, using all my fingers and whaling away at 120 words a minute. Impossible. Not enough room for hands. One is limited to poking at letters with a forefinger and hitting the wrong “key” as often as the one aimed at.

“This device,” I announced, “is not going to be my new best friend!” At this stage of the game, in fact, I don’t see myself using it at all.

Portability vs. Literacy

“But it’s so portable!” a friend urged in its defense, and I know that people love their small devices. The tablet, smaller than a pad and larger than a phone, fits nicely into a little leather zippered notebook carrier that can also hold all manner of cards and papers. It’s lightweight. Cute. Small.

But it is no use whatsoever for the things I do routinely on my Macbook, such as writing this blog post.

The tiny representation of a keyboard, limiting the user to forefinger poking or the two-thumbs method I see many people employing, discourages complex development of thought or imagery. It is ideally matched with the character limitation of certain kinds of social media, granted -- and we are told those limitations can produce a new kind of “poetic” expression. But how often, really, are word-limited blasts carefully composed and rewritten and distilled into anything memorable? There is more to a haiku, after all, than the prescribed limit of its syllables.

Real writing is real work. James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” writing was not the author spewing out whatever passed through his own mind. It was his careful, line-by-line, imaginative construction of a created character’s thought process. Huge difference, kids.

The more difficult the mechanical composition process, the shorter the productions. The more instantaneous the forms produced, the greater the temptation to spew. To bypass reflection. To throw a rose or give the finger and move on, eschewing reason.

The debate over attention span continues: Is our attention span shrinking the more we read online, jumping from one screen to another like cats on a series of hot tin roofs? I submit that not only our reading habits but also our writing habits should be examined. Thinking, like sleep, can be shallow or deep. Lightweight devices, I’m thinking, encourage lightweight thought.

And no, not every communication needs to be a philosophical treatise. Of course not! But we don’t want to eliminate deep thought, do we? Make it obsolete?

A Shrinking Population?

When I began writing my first blog, Books in Northport, back in 2007, not everyone in the world was uploading photos and exchanging links on social media twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; instead, most of us who wrote blogs and followed those of other people dedicated a certain portion of each day to these pursuits. We composed our posts thoughtfully, and comments sections encouraged substantive exchange.

It’s different now. People around the world live every waking moment in the virtual world but “don’t have time” to read blogs (especially, I’m guessing, the wordy ones like this). It’s like asking people to leave a cocktail party for a public affairs lecture. Ugh! Where’s the fun?

The online audience in general is not shrinking, but what about the audience for serious discourse? Cat videos are ever popular. Super Bowl commercials are viewed over and over. T-shirt and bumper sticking sayings, ready-made, fly around Facebook. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s fun! Best part is, there’s no take-away, nothing to pack out and carry home.

This probably sounds like hectoring. I sound like a scold, saying other people should be more like me. I know how it sounds, but what I’m really saying is that it’s getting lonely on my virtual island. The cruise ships pass by, and tourists along the rail wave hankies and call out greetings, and that’s all very nice, but I am starving for deeper engagement. I am ready to listen to you, to read your words and reflect on them, and if you are willing to listen to me in turn, read my words, reflect on them, and respond in kind, you are a godsend! “We few, we happy few!” I want to shout on the rare occasion this occurs.

But I exaggerate. After all, I am blessed with a life partner whose active, nimble mind continues to engage with mine and with the world, and we have dear friends of whom the same can be said, whether or not they can navigate my blogging platform easily enough to leave comments. And anyway, I am what I am and have no real desire to become essentially different.

And so I go on, writing these long posts and corking them up in metaphorical bottles to be thrown out onto Lake Michigan. There’s nothing inherently wrong with cocktail parties. Some of us are just better in quieter contexts.

Mom and Pop and Stardom

Mom: I got three comments on my new blog.

Pop: Three? That's not very many.

Mom: It's more than zero.

Pop: Have you ever had zero?

Mom: Yes, many times.

Pop, who is a star, sees Mom as some kind of star, but in reality she is more like a dust bunny.

Who Will Read Your Blog -- or Your Book?

I remarked recently to one writing friend (frustrated at a number of friends who had not read his book) that I think a lot of people resist reading novels by people they know out of nervous terror. What if it’s lousy? What if I hate it so much I can’t get through the damn thing? Embarrassed ahead of time for their writing friend by the possibility they won’t enjoy the book, they postpone opening it at all, and it gets misplaced or buried or put away on a shelf and forgotten. Better to make excuses for not having gotten around to it yet, they seem to think, than feel pressured to like and praise.

And life is so busy, dontcha know? Everyone is “busy,” in one way or another. I know I am. Aren’t you?

Coming home after my winter sabbatical, I could tell instantly who read Books in Northport once in a while and who never looked at it once while I was away. Anyone asking, “So where did you spend the winter?” or “What did you do all winter?” obviously felt no curiosity, because pretty much my whole winter was right there online, in words and pictures, for anyone to follow. No charge to read it, either. Free! Followers who couldn’t deal with reading online (one friend I know of for sure) could at least scroll through and look at the photographs and enjoy the images, and even the time commitment for speed-reading the rest could probably be satisfied in 10 or 15 minutes a week. Leaving comments was and is always entirely optional, as is giving me feedback in person when we’re back together in the same room.

So why...?

“I don’t have time to read blogs,” I hear from a couple friends routinely on Facebook, it seems, 24/7. Huh?  Some say, more honestly, “I never read blogs.” Okay, I know where I stand with them. The worst is the apologetic, “I should read it....” There is no ‘should’! It’s there for anyone who’s interested! Not interested? Not obligated!

But also, I couldn’t help noticing that when I wrote this past winter of travel adventures or posted photographs of Southwest scenery, a comment or two would usually result, while if I wrote of my novel-in-progress and how the writing was coming along, the silence was deafening. If a post combined writing news and topics unrelated to writing, the latter got the responses.

Again, I can’t help thinking it’s embarrassing to a lot of people when someone mentions working on a novel. It’s as if you’re claiming to have been Marie Antoinette in a previous life. Uh, yeah, sure, they think, praying you’ll change the subject.

Interest. Priorities. How well friends know you -- or want to know you.

My life, my blog, and my writing are priorities in my life but not necessarily priorities for all my friends. Other people have, each and every one of them, their own lives, their own priorities and interests. None of us can pay attention to everything.