January, 2012

Today (Saturday, January 21^st) is the day the solar storm—or flares or whatever they are—is supposed to disrupt all the electronic infrastructure that keeps the world tottering around, cell phones and iPads and computers and satellites and such. It seems to be partially true. Many of the sites I was attempting to connect to for research are not available. On the other hand Google, good old Google, is available. And, when I googled (good old Google) “iPad” to make sure I capitalized the right letter, that site came up just fine.

Of course, it may not be solar storms. I live in a very rural area where the primary relay station for our telephone/computer line is down at the low end of the valley, and every time it rains, or every time there are very high winds, or every time some hired hand for the local agribusiness sets the rippers too deep on his tractor (I’m talking about tractors the size of the average three bedroom house) we lose our telephone and computer service. Today it is raining, we have fifty-mph-plus wind gusts, and the fields at the end of the valley are being prepped for early planting, so it may be solar flares, or it may not.

But it provides an interesting and illuminating lesson for this curmudgeonly old Luddite. I arrogantly consider myself aloof from and immune to the fads and fashions of our frantic modern world. I proudly write “NA” in bold letters on forms that ask for my cell phone number. I not only do not have a cell phone, I don’t have an iPad, I don’t have a laptop to lug around, I’m not entirely clear as to what an X-box is (but it sounds like something shameful that should be kept in a brown paper wrapper on a high shelf), I scream for my wife if something goes wrong with the television when I’m watching Friday Night Fights, I don’t twiddle or twitter or whatever it is, and I still do my math longhand and as accurately as my wife does with a calculator. In my library I have the twenty volume Oxford English Dictionary, two complete encyclopedias (one of which is the Britannica), and probably around a thousand research books on all the subjects that interest me, as well as God only knows how many novels. I am an island, fiercely independent, complete, and self-sufficient unto myself. Internet? Pah! We don’t need no stinking internet.

And yet…. And yet. I’ve grown accustomed to spinning through some of the stories on different news services before I start my day’s work, a routine that both settles me and provides me with alternate points of view. I derive a certain comfort and encouragement from various blogs on writing by people whose work I admire. Good old Google is my homepage. None of my encyclopedias or dictionaries (all published back in the eighties) could tell me how to spell iPad.

All of this got me thinking about SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect [intellectual property] Act). Both of these proposed pieces of legislation fit the bill (you should pardon the expression) as examples of why government—my government, your government, their government, anyone’s government, everyone’s government—is a dangerously powerful organism that needs constant monitoring and frequent overhauling. These bills may have been proposed with legitimate good will (though there are some who suggest this is merely pandering to powerful influences in the entertainment industry) but they typify the kind of simplistic thinking that passing a law will solve a problem. More to the point, they have the potential to interfere with the free flow of ideas and knowledge on the internet. I don’t particularly wish to see this blog reproduced on your site, with advertisers begging you to accept bags of gold that should be sent to me, but there are already laws in place to protect my intellectual property (my wife just suggested that a chicken wire fence should do the trick) and I really don’t want you to be able to close me down just because I stole the title for this blog from “My Fair Lady.”

What would we do without good old Goggle? I don’t know how to spell iPad.

If I have any trouble posting this, I’ll propose a law banning solar flares.

I suppose it is in the nature of man to always look for a silver lining in every damned cloud. It can be an intensely irritating trait, when carried too far, or at the wrong time, because everyone knows there are days when climbing back into bed with a bottle of whiskey and a straw is the only sensible solution to some of life’s little practical jokes. But occasionally, when used sparingly—like an intense spice or hot pepper—Pollyanna-ism can be indulged in. I intend to indulge now.

There is little to be said for insomnia. If inability to sleep correlated in any way to productivity, I wouldn’t mind so much, but usually in the middle of the night my brain manages to be both restless and cloudy and incapable of much of anything. (When I expressed this to my wife, she immediately asked how I could tell the difference between night and day. Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a wife’s tongue!) But the silver lining is that it provides a wonderful opportunity to revel in reading for pleasure.

I read a lot, but much of is directly correlated to whatever I am working on, research of one kind or another, for this project or that, and when I quit working at my desk I almost always dive into the myriad outdoor chores that are part and parcel of owning horses and dogs and a small ramshackle ranchette. So reading for pleasure during working hours always seems slightly sinful to me. But, baby, late at night, sin is the order of the day. (That had a different meaning many years ago, but time marches on.)

Occasionally I lick my wounds and reread an old favorite, P. G. Wodehouse, Somerville & Ross, Dickens, something like that, but usually I try something new. New to me, I mean, not necessarily new to the rest of the world, which is normally way ahead of me in every way and every area. (My recent “new” list includes poet Dame Edith Sitwell’s “Fanfare for Elizabeth,” [published in 1946] and Louis Auchincloss’s “The Rector of Justin” [hot off the presses in 1964] so you can see that “new” is a relative term.) But sometimes I really get wild and crazy and up-to-date and go for something written by someone who is actually still alive. Julian Barnes’s “Flaubert’s Parrot,” William Trevor’s “Death in Summer,” and Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” have gotten me through some recent nights.

What about you? Who do you curl up with in the wee dark hours of the soul? (We’re talking books here, nothing X-rated, if you please.)

If you’re ever feeling so damned cheerful you just can’t stand it another minute, and all of life seems a glorious golden dream in the best of all possible worlds, just remember you can always bring yourself back down to reality by watching the morning news.

This morning CNN quoted some statistics about unemployment and education. The least useful degree you can have is in architecture, followed closely by fine art, which is followed closely by humanities and liberal arts. That little segment reminded me of a conversation I overheard in a restaurant a few years back.

I was driving east through Nevada, marking my progress by the billboards. The radio in my truck has never worked – at least not during my ownership – and without the benefit of music or talk radio or books-on-tape I rely on scenery and billboards to entertain me. In the Great Basin the scenery has a certain sameness to it, sameness and a lot of emptiness. A coyote is cause for jubilation. Once, to my delight, a distant cloud of dust gradually evolved into a herd of Hereford cattle being driven by cowboys, and I pulled over to watch them through my binoculars, wishing I were on horseback with them, wishing it were 1800-something instead of 2000-something.

The billboards too have a sameness to them, advertising the same chains of gas stations, the same motels, the same fast-food joints that are found in every state. If you were truly masochistic – or possibly obsessive-compulsive – you could travel from Seattle to Miami and eat the same damn Big Mac and sleep in the same damn Motel Six the entire way, arriving finally in a perfect state of mind to commit ritual seppuku. The only enlivening and unique billboard I passed was one advertising money-back guaranteed vasectomy reversal, a procedure I wouldn’t normally have considered during a cross-country drive. 

I spent the night in Elko, in a non-chain motel, and in the morning I got directions to a non-chain restaurant called The Coffee Mug. The celebrated mugs were covered with advertisements for local businesses: realtors, office furniture, a laundry, a dairy, and all the other small businesses that keep the American economy rolling along. The two that caught my eye, however, were an ad for an alcohol and drug de-tox center right next to an ad for a private investigation agency, an excellent example of symbiosis.

I was seated near the door, eating and reading “Atonement,” when a couple on their way out bumped into a man on his way in. There was an exchange of pleasantries and then the single man said, “So, tell me, Joe. How’re you handling retirement?”

“Retirement? Oh, boy. I’ll tell you how bad retirement is. I’ve got to go out now and find some books.”

“Books?”

“Yeah, books! So I can have something to read. That’s how bad retirement is.”

That exchange prompted me to contemplate a career in aluminum siding, but then—insanely optimistic Pollyanna that I am—it occurred to me guys like Joe need books, if only to get them through weary rigors of retirement. So Joe, if you should stumble across this blog, just click on the “Books” page. I have a few things for you there.