Speaker 1: A story in the New York Times reporting that college
students in a writing course do better when they go
offline for a month makes perfect sense to me, same
as if you say a writer does better at a
laptop in the public library than schnockered on a sailboat
in a storm. But the idea of persuading students to
go offline strikes me as quixotic, like Amish evangelism or
banning the use of chairs. The Internet is here, and
we're all caught up in it. I was in my
fifties when the World Wide Web came in, and its
advent was not a big event to me. I was
still working on a manual underwood typewriter. I have a
clearer memory of seeing Albert Wolsoon, the last living Civil
War veteran, in a parade in downtown Minneapolis. I remember
my uncle Jim farming with horses and fibromaghee and Molly
on the radio. And I remember boredom, which has mostly
disappeared in America, except perhaps among lighthouse keepers or attendants
in parking ramps or felons in solitary confinement. And maybe
imprisonment offline would be considered cruel and inhumane in a
court of law. Now, growing up pre google in a
small Midwestern town among taciturn people, I experienced boredom intensely,
and it led to reading, and in due course to writing.
I took up writing haiku three blackbirds shrieking as my
old black cat calmly squats in the sandpile. This was
enough to amuse me way back then. And because I
could write a seventeen syllable haiku and I had good handwriting,
and I spoke in complete sentences, I was considered gifted.
I considered becoming a poet, but I wanted to earn
money and not live up over my parents' garage, so
I went into public radio instead, where, thank goodness, the
audience was made up of reference librarians, caregivers, bird watchers,
organic gardeners, people who were spiritual but not religious, people
who enjoyed the enigmatic more than actual entertainment. I shouldn't brag,
but I can be more enigmatic than anybody I know.
I got a reputation as an artistic storyteller, which, believe me,
there is no such thing. Storytelling is not an art.
It's a craft like plumbing, and either the water comes
out of the tap or it does not. But back
in the boring eighties, enigma was more appreciated. And now
there's the smartphone offering endless entertainment videos, YouTube GPS telling
you exactly where you are on Earth and how far
to the nearest comedy club or yoga studio or liquor store.
Not just any old liquor store, but one that offers
designer beers with floral notes of marigold sprinkled with saffron,
playing off earthy vanilla finish. We didn't have that back
in my time. We just had cold beer. I tried
to explain this to young people, the fact that we
didn't have soft butter back then. Butter air raided to
make it spreadable, just little hard bricks of butter that
when you tried to spread it on toast you tore
the toast apart, or else you scrape shavings of butter off,
and by the time the toast was buttered, it was cold. Now,
back in the day before google became a verb, we
had to memorize information it wasn't easily available, such as
verb tenses, or state capitals or the nine planets. My
very educated mother just served us nine pizzas Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
Jupiter Center, and Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and a boy named
Ralph Kraus liked to ask mister Jensen or science teacher,
how big is Uranus? Is there life on Uranus? It
was a high point of our science class, in which
high points were few and far between. I grew up
under the heavy burden of boy Scouts, which I believe
has mostly disappeared, done in by social media. We had
cruel scout masters who took us winter camping in the
north Woods, believing adversities stimulates intelligence. I'm not so sure
I associate intelligence with staying warm. Now I look at politics,
the regressive maga right working hard to horrify the genteel left,
which has elected nihilists and golf pants who exercise their
whimsical powers to serve three percent of the people seventy
five percent of the time. And it's easy to despair.
But if you go offline and wander through crowds of shoppers,
your sense the spirit of kindness and gaiety of our people.
Old men dozing off at the switch need to be
shoveled into the Home for the Hopeless and let the
young and conscientious come in to repair the damage, and
I hope it happens in my lifetime.