SCREENS RANT

My Summer Screens Rant…

 

Dave Eggers, interviewed in the new issue of Creative Nonfiction, talks about e-readers. And how most of the people in the world can’t afford e-readers. “Secondly,” he says, “I just plain won’t read books on a screen. It just seems nuts to put every last aspect of our lives continually onto a screen. We moved entertainment onto screens (TV), and then we moved most of our work onto screens with computers. And I know so many people who just can’t wait till they can read everything on a screen…”  (He goes on, and it’s a great rant—for my students I assign this interview as required summer reading.)

 

I could see myself reading a book on a screen, I suppose. I haven’t yet. I’m not against it. I have get emails from readers asking me why my books aren’t e-available. I’m sure they will be. Very soon. And I feel lucky about all that. I’m not anti-screen. But, I have to say, the happiest week of my year this year was the one I spent at the retreat center—no computers, no television, no e. No screens except the ones in the window, overlooking the mirror lake.

 

I work by hand. I sleep by hand. Eat by hand.  And I use my computer—I use it a lot.

 

But I need lots of breaks from screens. My eyes need the breaks and my heart needs the food. I love book books. I love non-electronic things: jewelry, flowers, friendship where you take a walk together. I love food and bicycles and love—these things are completely non-e-able.

 

I’m getting a web cam this week, so I can talk to a soldier I love, a kid on a tropical island, far far far away. I love vast stretches of the e world.

 

As I write this, I see a kid in the park across the street from my house. He’s in the branches of the ancient mulberry tree. He is reading a book.

 

I love unconventional farmers in the age of agribusiness. I don’t want to lose touch with paper, pencil, chalkboard, hopscotch. I like DIY and wrinkles. I need the kid, across the street from my house, in the park this afternoon, lodged in the limbs of the mulberry tree tree with a book. A book book.

 

He is his own battery charger, which is never lost, which he knows, intuitively how to repair (read another book).

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Related posts:

  1. Georgia Under Water is available as an e book
  2. Writing By Hand
  3. Patrimony
  4. SUMMER READING, II
  5. Sam’s Questions

3 Comments

  • hi heather,

    I’m in NYC working with L Calkins & trying yo use an iPad–I suck at it.I mean the iPad part. More later when I have a real keyboard. Except–I enjoy your blog wisdoms.

  • I love books if I have to read an e book I print it out. I juts got Kales from my garden this morning, it was so green- refreshing and reminded me of my small village back home in Kenya, somethings are not e-able. However, I love to write using my computer. In your book, page after page, picked it free from our community room, (who gives away such a book), you say we should write with our hands and I am trying, no, I am stuck on that one.

    Glad to meet you in your book. I had to Google your name to see your face. You now make me walk around with my kinky hair unkempt-go figure why.

  • When I was a kid (which was in pre-screen days), we would often go for Sunday drives. All of us would pile in the back of my father’s Buick after church, and he would drive anywhere and nowhere along the country roads of our county.

    Perhaps that was his way of deprogramming even then from the industrial world.

    I hadn’t really pieced it together until I read this post, but I understand now my fondness for riding around the countryside on Sunday afternoons.

    Thanks for helping me see that.