It’s always interesting how an art form or even an institution that is dying can linger on for decades.
Opera, for example. Yes, everybody there is very old, very white, and usually pretty monied. But it’s always been that way, and people were predicting the death of opera at its heyday.
There’s the Catholic church, which has survived female popes, a split papacy, and sex scandals, of which the most recent have been, well, only the most recent.
Then there’s the book—and that’s serious. The book is dying, or so said Meryl Streep in a documentary, and since I make books, I felt I really had to check it out.
It’s horrifying, the number of people who are functionally illiterate. But even worse are those who can read but don’t or won’t. All of that is bad, but I wonder if the real problem isn’t much, much worse.
We seem to have two speeds: hyper-stimulated or drugged. We are presented with “music” everywhere: in parking garages, in elevators, on hold on the telephone. We are insane about music, to the extent that no one can believe that I know literally nothing about Bad Bunny. The fact that my Uber driver picked up a woman from Pakistan who had come to Puerto Rico (and spent 6 months learning Spanish) only to attend his concert tells me everything.
Let me be clear. There is NO background music. There is NOTHING that you can play in the background that will not be a distraction. I can sit in a room where everyone is smoking cigars. I cannot be in a room with background music.
It’s a problem, solved only by putting my music on top of your music. So in the café where I bind books—whatever the cashier puts on the store speakers, and whatever French song is playing in the adjoining exhibit is what I will have to endure.
The problem is that I am listening, and they are not. In fact, they’re completely unconscious of whatever they’re hearing. But try turning the radio or the television off. It’ll work, until the next person strolls by, and turns it back on. It is unthinkable for us to endure silence.
Or maybe it’s unthinkable for us to endure thinking. Because as much as I can, that’s generally what I’m doing. But a lot of people use music / TV / cell phones the way I use air freshener—it masks the stink, but doesn’t get rid of it.
We forget how recent all of this stuff is. My grandmother, born in the 1880’s, grew up in a world without radio or television. She had a piano in the parlor, because most people did. She had a deck of cards. She had books. She had friends to talk to.
Her daughter, my mother, was born in 1920—and I can now tell you that the first radio station (so thinks AI) was KDKA in Pittsburgh. Interesting but untrue—I grew up listening to WHA in Madison, Wisconsin, so I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that WHA is “the oldest station in the nation.” They told us that every hour or so. Radio was great because you could clean house or bind books or generally do stuff that needed doing. It also didn’t occupy your visual cortex, so the image of a child in a cage or a Viet Cong village burning didn’t stay in your brain all day. It was in keeping with a long tradition of reading aloud—whether in a monastery, as you chew your meal in silence listening to Brother Sixtus read Thessalonians, or a cigar factory, where one person was designated the “lector.” In fact, the experience was essentially similar to a citizen of Athens hearing the saga of Odysseus recited by a guy in a toga with a lyre. My mother listened to radio very little until the end of her life, when she liked to listen to NPR in the morning. She had her woods—20 acres of it—and her dog and her books. Oh, and friends.
Anyway, radio sneaked in the same year that my mother did, and television snuck in about the time I got going, in 1956. It was scorned by people like me, and by my parents as well. It was the “boob tube,” and it was going to make us dumber. We had a television when I was quite little, but it died, and nobody really thought about replacing it. I was delighted, since I had my cello and books. Oh, and friends.
I didn’t miss television because televisions hissed in those days. Take 3 aspirins every four hours for the next week, and you’ll have a nice case of tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. And that’s what living in the 70’s and 80’s was—the television was always on, and always hissing. I heard it, but almost no one else did—since the television had done its job and numbed us all.
Why did the old televisions hiss?
In the old days, I’d have to take a shower, shave, walk to the bus stop, and go to the public library. I’d look in the card catalogue, I’d ask the librarian. I would get the answer, perhaps, but with far greater effort than I got this, from AI:
Old televisions, specifically Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) models, emit a high-pitched sound due to the flyback transformer generating high voltage at a frequency near the upper limit of human hearing (around 15-20 kHz). This vibration of components like the transformer's core, caused by rapidly changing current, produces an audible whine, often referred to as coil whine. As these components age, they can vibrate more, potentially making the sound louder.
Oddly, the next big thing was not the Internet but the cell phone. True, the personal computer—which was such a big thing that we called it a “PC”—looked for a time to be the next thing. People would be spending time not with their televisions, but with their PCs, and indeed one of my friends did just that. His wife watched the “novellas” or soaps in the living room, he was surfing the net in the study.
You might call it the golden age of the PC—back there sometime just before the turn of the century. The PC wasn’t cheap—it could easily set you back a couple of thousand bucks. It also required an inquisitive mind willing to learn a lot of things most people didn’t want to learn. You turned the thing on and were presented with a cold green screen, on which you tried to find something blinking. Then you had to meet the computer somewhere in the middle space between your brain / fingers and the computer’s brain and logic. Here’s how we interacted with the PC, before cell phones:
You had to be pretty smart and quite patient to learn all of this. That meant that the entry level was high, and it meant that my friend, twice as smart as I and a professor of philosophy, could chat with an Oxford don as he looked out on the quadrangle. This was, and still is to my mind, totally cool.
We’re now at the cell phone, and we’re not stopping there—not by a long shot. Because have you noticed? The technology is getting closer and closer, trying to get in.
Books stay on the shelves, which are usually attached to the walls of the living room. They live on those shelves until we take them down and put them in our hand or on our coffee tables. The radio lived closer—it got into the bathroom and the kitchen, and certainly the family car. Television stepped right into the center of the living room and grabbed everyone’s attention (before it numbed them into submission). There is a television in the club where I am writing, and it is of course on. It is also completely ignored, especially by the person who is sleeping on the sofa in front of it. If I turn the television off, the silence will awaken him and he’ll be indignant.
The cell phone was the necessary bridge between technology and the human body. Why do old televisions hiss? The answer was right in my hand, if I knew where my cell phone was and had paid the 80 bucks to ATT to use it. I fear the day, which I know is coming, when the human flesh of the left palm will be replaced by a synthetic flesh with an internet connection.
It's looking for a way in, remember?
It's either the hands or the eyes. There are also goggles that let you see the world outside and cruise the internet. I could be crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and watching the Ken Burns documentary about the making of the bridge on YouTube at the same time. The documentary is supposed to be great, and I’d like to see it.
In my living room.
Because if I saw the documentary while walking across the bridge, what would I be missing? Would I be looking at and chatting with John and Jeanne, as I did when I crossed the bridge for the first time on foot with them? Would I have heard the sea gulls above us, or felt the wind tug, or seen the boats disappearing from one side of the bridge and reappearing on the other?
We can close a book—in many ways—and turn off our radios and televisions. I can turn off my cell phone as well, and do. But would I rather lose my wallet or my cell phone? The wallet has really important stuff, like money and credit cards and also my identity (driver’s license, and Social Security card), but my cell phone has my life (my photos / memories, my music, my personal information about whom I date or want to date, and the telephone numbers, none of which I know, of all of my friends).
Oh, and my cell phone shows me pictures of tits and ass, if that’s what I’m into. Not saying that I am, just that a lot of people are.
So it’s trying to get in, this technology of ours, and it will, though under what guise I don’t know. It might claim to be convenient—no monthly payments, no losing data! It doesn’t have that app FindMyPhone which I really need, though how I can FindMyPhone when the PhoneIsWhatI’mLookingFor is beyond me.
The other way in will be children. What horror is worse than not knowing where your kid is? My mother kicked me out of the house to go to school, which today would be called neglect / abuse, since I was walking unsupervised for a mile in sub-zero weather to get to Midvale Elementary School. Anything could have happened to me, and no parent would do it today. Today, I might ponder microchipping my child, just as I might the family dog. The United States is obsessed with the safety of our children, which is good idea, until we start using it to further our ends. Then, preschool teachers become sly sadistic Satanists, and barely a child escapes their clutches without being sacrificed in an obscene and bloody Satanic ritual.
Remember this lady?
Well, she’s dead now, Virginia McMartin, but can we rest easy? No, because if we don’t have to worry now about preschool teachers, we still have this to concern ourselves with:
How easy it will be for our technology, with its artificial intelligence, to invade us.
All the while showing us tits and ass, of course, which is the main thing.
It’ll be inside us, and then encouraging and self-affirming thoughts can be put into our kids’ brains, without the need to take them camping or to church:
You are a child of God and deeply loved
Your parents love you
Clean your room
Donald Trump is the true son of God
This will be handy, of course, since now I won’t have to spend a morning getting to the library to find out why old TVs hiss. I won’t even have to find my phone. The AI will be seamlessly integrated with my own (lesser) operating system, and will provide the answer.
So what to do with the book, which is lying on my coffee table or on my shelves?
Meryl Streep doesn’t know, though she spent an agreeable and intellectually stimulating 53 minutes on YouTube telling me why.
I think I know, and I’ll tell you, if my addled brain can remember to do it. But what I really, really want today is not to talk about the book.
I wanna talk about the Penny Dreadfuls!
