|
| Recent Journal Entries |
|
|
 |
Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
Upload This Soup With a recent trip to the museum at Ellis Island in mind, I approach the rapid-fire language of technology as would a person confronted with dozens of easy speakers of another tongue not mine. Vat is this page capturing and so on? How many bites have I? Nothing makes you feel like 40 going on 100 like computers and computer talk. Free downloads that do little more than introduce new terrifying terms, things that won’t open, other applications that damn you for not knowing, should have been disabled prior to the zip-botp-tastic-ram-a-rif-ic easy-peasy whatsit. EH? Is this thing ON?
My already snowy hair just went a few shades whiter. I am pretty sure this is how a lot of fiction writers felt when it became necessary to move from the Underwood to the word.doc file when creating a book. The hilarious thing is, a few of my friends consider me to be tech-savvy! Which only means one step closer to semi-literate than they are. I’m like the one sent into the bakery to buy bread, my pigeon Spanish suddenly seen as a skill-set whereas my own throat is dry, my gut not unlike a hibachi on Labour Day week-end, my self-loathing as consistent as any tidewater: you dumb, you not dumb, you dumb, yeah, you dumb, and so on.
Let’s not get carried away: my ability to use Facebook and update my website do not exactly make me fierce competition for Bill Gates.
I console myself that there are people out there, actual people, who do not know how to cook. They can see the stove and fridge in their homes as necessary evils of the 21st century, but it doesn’t mean they really know how to use them. While I have a slightly more intimate relationship with my computer, it isn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven. I equate it with this: I am a very good cook. Capable and happy at the stove/counter. And yet, if you suddenly asked me to do what I do very well on a digital sixteen-burner thingy that kept shouting instructions at me in another language, I might not seem like a very good cook. It would be Ellis Island, sort of.
My compassion for novelists trying to negotiate this mad technology while trying to WRITE [which is a form of cooking anyway] is huge.
Fed up with machines today: I’m going to make some chicken soup. The pan and the vegetables and the thyme do not expect me to scan, digitize, tabulate and capture them for best results. No, for the best results in this soup story, only singing and intuition are required, thank god.
Listening to Moon River, Ron Davis
|
