A Year of Shakespeare

Advances in technology don’t always signify progress, or at least not the unmitigated progress we are promised: cars may be a significant step up from the horses that they replaced, but bring with them highways, smog and petroleum dependency. Newspapers vanish in the Google News wake. Nobody writes snail-mail letters anymore.

While the Kindle and its clones are all the rage, books in paper with glorious heft and margins to write in continue to be read — at least for now. I cling to the Romantic delusion that there will always be a subculture of Americans who read for the sensual pleasure as well as the conveyed idea. A book is an experience as much as it is an abstract evocation, a conjuring, an occurrence merely in the mind.

We savor its timelessness when we enter its labyrinth. Even now I’m struggling with the ephemeral quality of this blog… writing directly to keyboard instead of with the usual notebook and pen. I dislike the taxi-meter atmosphere that an electric metronome creates.

Nevertheless, Twitter continues its global assault across the parapets of our most sacred insitutions, including literature. All in good fun, of course, so long as the big books, the mighty works, continue to be read and reread…

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2009/12/29/twitterature-classic-tolstoy-twitter/

This entry was posted on 2009/12/29 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Asides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.