The End of the Written Word?
The Snow Goose Bookstore is closing its cover this month after nearly three decades of serving the literati of Stanwoodopolis. The two sets of owners were the monks keeping the guttering flame of Uff-da civilization from going completely dark for the past 30 years. They were the Book Bambis vs. Amazon’s Godzilla where we all expected they would be Bezo toejam in a year, no more, but they held on despite terrible odds, through the Great Recession, despite Google, despite Kindle, despite a world whose attention spans are too short for a novel or a work of non-fiction or a poem by e.e. cummings.
Oh, I know, most of you will say ‘the world has changed, Skeeter, even if you haven’t, Gutenberg is dead, send him some flowers for his grave, move into the 21st Century, embrace the tweet, stick with haiku.’
First it’ll be the bookstores, then the libraries and finally books themselves. Who has time to read them anyway if e-mails are nudged aside by text messaging? U no, wen speling and puncs have dyed. My old pal Prof. Ralph visited from the hinterlands of Minnesota last week. He was, like myself, an English major back in our college years. I asked him what he was reading these days and Ralph just shrugged and said ‘not much’. Not much what? I asked and he said not much of anything. If us English majors have given up on the great American novel, maybe there really is no hope.
Prof. Ralph is writing, he said, probably a bit defensive about abandoning Hemingway and Updike. ‘A novel?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘philosophical musings.’ Great, a solipsistic diarist, completely uncontaminated by outside ideas, especially one who no longer reads anything, just what we need instead of the Snow Goose Bookstore. Close the door, shut the gates, the barbarians are definitely on their way.
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Yep. I don’t understand the world in which we currently live, though I may have adapted a little more thoroughly than I might have wished. I do still read, though sparsely compared with the past. I am tired of my own solopsistic musings. I was reading the Forster novel Howards End on my way back from Spokane and somehow lost it. It feels symbolic somehow. And the motto of that novel is “Only connect.”