Writing is a lie

In the West (which includes the East, of course) text is so much of the texture of life that it has become natural to us, like rocks or rain.

Or has it? Does magic cling yet to the written word? In spite of it all, in spite of the tabloids and the IRS forms (and the blogs!), do we by reflex in our unguarded moments (that is, most of them), and at this late date in our jaded culture, still think of writing as a priestly craft, a setting-down of divine knowledge?

A few weeks ago "The New Yorker" published, posthumously, John Updike's last review -- of the new John Cheever biography. Updike knew Cheever, and we all have known for a long time that John Cheever was a fallible human being, which this bio apparently seals. OK, fair enough, but he wrote luminous stories in inimitable prose that also had wisdom in them. Sacrifices must be made, shamans are not to be held to bourgeois standards of behavior. But Updike said something more interesting -- that Cheever, for all the smarts in his stories, was essentially clueless in his life.

Perhaps we see beauty and we infer wisdom. In our natural state we would look for signs in clouds and listen for them in thunder. The most obtrusive natural phenomena in modern life are texts. And they come to us from on high: we don't see their production; they simply arrive -- presumably from and with the approval of Those Who Ought To Know What They Are Doing. If you have read this far you are making my point for me. Do you think that I know what I'm doing? If I told you what you were like -- as a man, or a woman, or a veteran of a foreign war, wouldn't you believe me, just because it is written?

It ain't what you do...

Life today is brimful with marvels. The usual suspects are cell phones, computers, and even the Three Gorges Dam. Lean supply chains. Wysiwyg word-processing. We could, in fact, call the modern world a system for producing and distributing novel goods, services, and ideas.

We could, with equal justification, call the modern world a powerful solvent of what is human in our cultural arrangements. The anomie of lives based on television shows and popular music (or concerts and plays, as far as that goes). The ironic isolation among urban crowds that awaits most of us. The curious fact that we may not know (or care to know) our neighbor of twenty years, yet give to a charity to help earthquake victims half a world away.

But one of the most jarring of current phenomena is the triviality of most of the things we use, and the extreme technical sophistication that goes into producing them. Think of the froth that crowds our days and our minds: striped toothpaste (hell, any toothpaste), pop-tarts, television sitcoms, rock concerts, Playboy centerfolds, Viagra. Luxury cars, McMansions. High-end entertainment systems. And web sites. Facebook, Flickr, this very site.

There are engineers out there wearing white shirts with pocket protectors whose whole care in life is producing a jelly bean that will not stick in your hot little hand, but offers but little resistance to your slack little jaw when you throw a handful in your mouth. They know how difficult their trivial task is, and how undeserving are the beneficiaries of it. But life gives them this opportunity to do something hard, and clear, and to do it well. They feel lucky.

I have, for a while now, been playing at putting together a web site. I have all the tools at hand -- Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, HTML, Javascript -- and can use them with fair facility. Since I'm baking this thing on my own (no industrial production methods for me!) I get hung up on the peculiarities of CSS and the varied ways different browsers interact with this confusing mix of markup, scripts, and style specs. (Fortunately, I've lived long enough to simplify in one way -- no IE need apply.) But I also get hung up on design -- making a page visually appealing and its content easy to grasp. It turns out to be an extreme technical challenge to make something appealing to the public. The sites by geeks for geeks (like kernel.org) tend to be fairly stark. These guys don't quail at complexity, but they save their programming chops for deep system issues.

But in many ways it is just as important -- and every bit as difficult -- to make and sell a beer ad that will play successfully at Super Bowl halftime.

My first blog -- ever.

I just ran across this facility this morning as I was bathing in a gush of techno-babble on Linus Torvalds's Blogspot blog, and lifting the new "Tuz" image. Once I figured out that Google owns www.blogger.com I started circling it like a moth a flame (or a hyena a lion's kill...). Anyway, gmail has worked well for me and mine, so I just now took the plunge into the world of public -- if anybody reads my postings, that is -- self-expression.

This blogging site is cleanly competent, like Google's other offerings, and vaguely unsettling. Is Google like the guy giving out free drugs by the schoolyard, to get you hooked on gmail, Chrome, Blogspot, and so on, and then turn the screws? Or worse yet, is Google going to gather all the forage on the Net to itself, leaving the other companies to starve? (i.e. Is it the Walmart of the Web?)

More prosaically, it probably just wants to become Too Intertwined In Our Lives to Fail. (The AIG of the Web.) It's important to remember that there is no precedent for Google, the Web, and what's going on now in our so-called society. Who knows, it may all turn out wonderfully.