my obsolete loves

One of the many things that keeps me up at night:

The book survived the phonograph as it had the newspaper. Listening didn't replace reading. Edison's invention came to be used mainly for playing music rather than declaiming poetry and prose. During the twentieth century, book reading would withstand a fresh onslaught of seemingly mortal threats: moviegoing, radio listening, TV viewing. Today, books remain as commonplace as ever, and there's every reason to believe that printed works will continue to be produced and read, in some sizable quantity, for years to come. While physical books may be on the road to obsolescence, the road will almost certainly be a long and winding one. Yet the continued existence of the codex, though it may provide some cheer to bibliophiles, doesn't change the fact that books and book reading, at least as we've defined those things in the past, are in their cultural twilight. As a society, we devote ever less time to reading printed words, and even when we do read them, we do so in the busy shadow of the Internet. "Already," the literary critic George Steiner wrote in 1997, "the silences, the arts of concentration and memorization, the luxuries of time on which ‘high reading' depended are largely disposed." But "these erosions," he continued, "are nearly insignificant compared with the brave new world of the electronic." Fifty years ago, it would have been possible to make the case that we were still in the age of print. Today, it is not.

Some thinkers welcome the eclipse of the book and the literary mind it fostered. In a recent address to a group of teachers, Mark Federman, an education researcher at the University of Toronto, argued that literacy, as we've traditionally understood it, "is now nothing but a quaint notion, an aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry — clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society." The time has come, he said, for teachers and students alike to abandon the "linear, hierarchical" world of the book and enter the Web's "world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity" — a world in which "the greatest skill" involves "discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux."

That's from Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, which I was reading/listening to on NPR (online no less!). I mean, listen, I have insomnia, so a good many things keep me up at night. But the idea that 5 years in a multi-tasking workforce has turned me into someone unable to concentrate long enough to be truly creative scares the living bejeezus out of me. I see it, even. Not just with reading. But the way I have to allow myself to wind down this spiral to finally settle enough to get to the meat  of what I want to write. It feels like water circling a drain somehow, so I... postpone it. Like I fear how much time the creativity moments will take, so I just don't go there. 


But I'm going to have to go there this fall. Every day. And even though all sorts of things worry me about all of the dying art forms I adore (curses!) I feel hopeful. So I may starve and daydream and read poetry and write and other obsolete things. But I'll get to do here and here and for that matter, here:

And that's enough for me.