Kindle or Kindling?

By Victoria Racimo Thursday, July 22, 2010

They were Liz and Dick. Dick and Liz. They didn’t need last names. Next week, I bring you my interview with Nancy Schoenberger, co-author with Sam Kashner of the current NY Times best seller, “Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century.” It’s all there: the ups and downs of one of the greatest romances in celebrity history.

For this book, Elizabeth Taylor gave the authors unprecedented access to nearly 40 love letters and poems from Burton, personal photographs, and an unpublished first draft of her 1965 autobiography. It’s been hailed as a “five-alarm blaze of a biography…”, is receiving rave reviews and guess what, Ms Schoenberger is Professor of English at The College of William and Mary and Mr. Kashner, her husband, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Harper Collins, Publishers. This is THE summer read. (Rumors of an impending film abound: Mike Nichols, Angelina Jolie, Russell Crowe, Colin Farrell, Catherine Zeta Jones, all tossed in the ring according to ET.)

When I’m about to speak before an audience or gathering of any size or type, I rarely know what I will actually wind up saying. One thing leads to another and before you know it, you hear yourself saying things you didn’t expect to say. Words just tumble out of your mouth.

Been there, too, right?

Or, public speaking can be like a train charging through the country side -- going where the tracks already laid out, take you. If no teleprompter, you neatly notate bullet points on blue 5x7 cards.

Yet, last Sunday, as I was prompted to step onto the stage of the Williamsburg Library Theatre to introduce the performance of “War of the Worlds”, I had no idea what I was going to say. First, of course, I thanked everyone for coming. Then, I talked about the show and WRL’s Centennial Celebration.

But then, one thing led to another, and suddenly, I was talking about books and publishing and the impending demise of books on paper! (Amazon sold more Kindles this quarter than they did hardcover books.) I talked about digital communication. I heard myself say, “WARNING, we must never let happen to our libraries what happened to the library at Alexandria, Egypt”, (which was destroyed by fire in ancient times.)

That library at Alexandria thing led me to thinking further about books and art and culture in this techno fluxed world. We're in the grip of a cultural panic and have no idea whether we're coming or going. At the moment, the dominant note is usually strident, all-or-nothing: "The novel is dead", “Classical music is dead.” “The orchestra is dead.” “Books are history"; "The sky is falling"; "We are doomed", etc.

That's a caricature, yes. But, at the core, these statements about the condition of the arts in general raise valid questions and warrant cause for alarm. I think the problem is the desire to try and box things into arbitrary categories like: “will the iPad change the world” or “is non-fiction more 'truthful' than the novel”.

I think our difficulty, as consumers and commentators, is that this is a period of astonishing and disorienting change. A cultural road map at least 100 years old has been torn up in just the past decade. Making sense of cultural change is hard to do at the best of times. With not even a functioning atlas, it's doubly hard.

(If you bought your computer two years ago, it’s already old. And that new cell phone is like a new car – take it out of the store, off the lot and whoops down it goes.) There’s a cartoon I recently saw that shows a couple sitting on a couch. The woman gleefully says to the man – “Isn’t it wonderful! To think our relationship has made it past the 3g phone!”

Contemporary cultural panic. No one really knows anything or what’s really next. And how long  “what’s next” will be around. No one knows the future of the book. Paper, rock scissors, kindle, eBook, Nook? What about live or recorded classical music? Twitter Disney Hall? Is that a substitute for being there? What does digitisation really mean in the long term. Everyone’s theorizing, betting, and the odds-on-favorite is Mr. Guesswork.

Movies? Plays? Journalism? Novels? Is there some new art form still unrecognized? No one knows where the centre of gravity is especially with many more options to come. (As for me, I still want to turn the pages of a book, listen to an orchestra live, and watch a Broadway show two on the aisle.)

No one knows if the audience is global or local, or a mixture of the two. Some artists, usually popular ones, are lucky and stumble on a global connection. Yet, I believe a provocative interaction between global and local is vital.

If ever it came to pass that all culture, art and communication evolved only within a viral world, and a disastrous crash and burn were to happen, we might experience another “Alexandria.” What then?

With a nod to a bit from the Frost poem, “Fire and Ice” –

The cave people kindled.