The Way Light Falls

While I do not fear contradiction, I am nagged by a feeling of guilt for being too quick to judge. I think I am still right about everything I said about books in this post a few months ago, but in a sense I've also betrayed the books. I feel unfaithful for abandoning my profoundly sentimental reasons.

I gave in to ebooks for practical reasons. While I had to dish out six grand for an ebook reader and another grand or two for the smart sleep cover, it was easy to redeem the value of the investment. Even if I've been selective, I have gathered enough reading material to last me a few years. I've acquired an decent line-up of ePub versions. To name a few: Hauruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calivno, Umberto Eco, Banana Yoshimoto, Tom Wolfe, as well as more recent ones I haven't read from Jonathan Franzen, Nicole Krauss, Junot Diaz, Gary Shtyengart, David Foster Wallace and even a short story collection edited by Jeffrey Eugenides that included one from Alice Murno. I also got some current magazine issues and for the first time in my life, I wasn't just reading New Yorker back issues that I pick-up from second-hand bookshops.

Perhaps it's an infatuation, but I did read a lot quicker and more often. The convenience of technology allowed me some advantages. With a built-in comfort light that's not too glaring, I can read in bed and still lay beside my D. and little I. I've spent a lot of time at airports the past few weeks and with a device that can carry thousands of books, it allowed me to switch back forth a few that I've stored. I've made an attempt to read "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace. If that gets too heavy, I couple it with a chaser or two of non-fiction from David Sedaris (Exploring Diabetes with Owls) or Jonathan Franzen (Farther Away) which I honestly end up reading more.

A perfect handle, adjustable font sizes/margins, a variety of font selections, long battery life, a web browser, a dictionary, highlights and annotations in a touch are also built-in conveniences. There's barely anything poetic about technology but I feel fascinated with what goes on whenever light falls on the surface of the ebook reader. From halogens of coffeeshops, the CFCs of our bedsides lamps, and especially sunlight, the pearl-ink screen gives off a magical glow. There is a perfect scientific explanation with what's going on behind that gray-scale screen. But each swipe of a finger still feels like alchemy: the wave of a magic wand, a foretelling of the future or an accumulation of an imagined experience. This must have been how enthralled people were after the invention of the Gutenburg press and when books started getting published.

It's a different medium of consuming content, an enabler to feed your imagination as a novel or  mere words, come to life. It wasn't as soulless as I thought it would be, given that it was just a perfunctory 6-inch, colorless tab.

Perhaps all my self-contradiction and incongruity is really just being romantic. The old man is now sitting in his lazy boy, all the while dreaming about his old chair.

No technology, no chemical could ever replace the smells.

We are Still High

The evening's city lights and wine as we celebrated five years of marriage.

We called our wedding "the making of our lives as a truly blissful trip." We've settled down since then. While the ride has been smooth sailing, we remained on a high. 

The Hipsterrific, Instagrammy Future

While I am no one important or influential myself, I credit Spike Jonze as a profound influence in my taste for consuming media. In the zit-ridden absurdity of my teens, his work was a sweet bubble gum that my vivid imagination kept chewing, spending countless hours as though drugged on MTV. It had the randomness, creativity, formlessness, vicissitudes  of joy versus pain, and perhaps plain insensibility of videos such as Buddy Holly by Weezer, Cannonball by the Breeders, It’s oh So Quiet by Bjork, Diamond Sea by Sonic Youth and Praise You by Fat Boy Slim. It made all the weirdness I felt --- pleasant. Moreover, the tenets of the Spike Jonze’s “Her” has been entrenched in me long before and I have finally witnessed a fulfilling, enlightening culmination that is the movie.

Okay, that was a little vague, most especially for kids who were just born in the late 90s. But I’m an avid reader, and in fact I have read something from a hotshot contemporary author like Jonathan Franzen that references, and certainly better explains the foundational possibility of the Spike Jonze love story, “Her.”

“…according to the logic of technoconsumerism, in which markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks of nothing and gives everything, instantly and makes us feel all-powerful…. the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, ” is to replace a natural world that is indifferent to our wishes – a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance – with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. Let me suggest, finally, that the world of technoconsumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but o trouble love in return.”
By Jonathan Franzen, in Pain Won’t Kill You, commencement address, Kenyon College, May 2011. Published in the collection Farther Away  

In Her, the not-so-distant future is hipsterrific and instagrammy. My, I’m even inventing my own terminology! The fashion of the day is high-waist and inelegant, but it looks like it finally makes sense as nobody could care less. This future is a logical result of a love affair that begun with our ubiquitous iPhones. Siri’s descendant is an “OS” that speaks with the voice of Scarlett Johansson. This OS, with its fuck-worthy voice, is also super-customized to be simultaneously everything we ever wanted, while being an effective extension of ourselves.

Theodore: Well, you seem like a person but you're just a voice in a computer.
Samantha: I can understand how the limited perspective of an unartificial mind might perceive it that way. You'll get used to it.
[Theodore laughs]
Samantha: Was that funny?
Theodore: Yeah.
Samantha: Oh good, I'm funny!

Several, even canonical works of literature tossed out the idea that technology will surpass humanity. Maybe so, but maybe not always in a way that we get gobbled up by the monsters we create. In the space made in-between, there will be so much novelty . There are dance numbers, great conversations, the aesthetic strangeness I felt when I saw the video of Diamond Sea, Buddy Holly or Praise You.

In a witty dialogue seemingly tailor-fit to a hipster audience, a line from the movie goes, “We are only here briefly, and in this moment I want to allow myself joy.”

And A Chummy Side Note

On this first You Tube Music Awards, Spike Jonze directed a live music-video performance of Arcade Fire's Afterlife, featuring Greta Gerwig. I posted it on Facebook, with the intention of spreading a piece of joy and the privilege of being fascinated, to friends who share the same tastes.

Nobody but my Her liked it. We watched it again and again, fending off all the aloneness that may have been rooted upon (quite ironically) by social media and the technology that enables it.