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iPhone 3GS - Source: Reuters
I like to spend some of my spare time reading.
Professionally (or as professional as you can be in the journalism trade, I make no representations) I came up idolising long-form magazine writers, people like A J Liebling , and Wolcott Gibbs, both of whom flourished under the Harold Ross-era New Yorker. I realise now that these men were carving out the middle-brow of American journalism, but at the time their work exuded (to me) a sophistication and surety that my own crabbed scribblings lacked.
So it was a surprise to read an interview with Dorothy Parker , a sort of middle-brow pioneer herself, in a collection undertaken by The Paris Review, and find that Parker, in conversation, sounded like one of those posturing, ruthless, downtown New York figures that I sometimes meet here. She seemed ingratiatingly cute, self-pitying and straining for effect.
When I arrived in New York I believed this was the lingua franca of the city. I'm now not so sure.
Of course, the mode of finding your idol's clay feet is hardly new. And to be fair, Parker was also living in the animal squalor in which pooch-lovers often find themselves, holed up in a residential hotel with newspapers and chop bones decorating the floor, and failing to file book reviews for Esquire on account of being crook with the piss.
I'm just nosing into a conversation with Ernest Hemingway, who is equally tedious and self-regarding in his answers. He defends himself by saying that the conversation he and the interviewer are clearly enduring is mere talk, and shouldn't be transcribed.
Talk is a means of feeling your way to a subject. It is like - he implies - thinking out loud, though with less of the thinking, and more of the out loud. Thus, Hemingway pleads that his words, his chatter should be left to perish.
As I write this, on a train travelling from Washington DC to New York, almost everyone around me is peering into the unblinking electronic screen of their Blackberry/iPhone/smartphone.
Those few who aren't verbally describing this or that iniquity brought on them by the opposite (or perhaps the same) sex, or their children, employers or pooches, are sending text messages which amount to a new form of English, or composing truncated emails on the dwarf key-boards of such implements.
Almost all of this information is being written. It's meant to be spoken. Language, which can flit between the vernacular and verbal, or the formal and written, is being press-ganged into the service of speech and information.
It is becoming more personalised rather than personal, more immediate, and possibly more filleted of meaning.
Because no thoughts are perishable anymore, it's plausible that less thoughts will live. Already fiction writers complain of lacking the attention span to read novels (other people's, of course), and youngster rebels are switching off their Blackberries after work in the belief that this technological revolution is making them more scattered, less able to concentrate, and insular. They are a minority.
This blog, typed on a midget's keyboard on a regional train, could not have been written without such technology.
Not quite speech, and not quite writing either; welcome: our mime-y retrograde future!
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