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The Monday Morning Memo

Guilty Pleasure

February 1, 2010
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January 27, 2010: It’s weird when you think about it: Apple releases the iPad just as Salinger breathes his last. It feels like the ending of a play.

J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac were the tortured voices that led us into forbidden places in our minds. We followed them, spellbound, as they sauntered into dark rooms we would never have entered alone.

Then Salinger’s Holden Caulfield shuffled onto the big screen as James Dean and gave us brooding angst in Rebel Without a Cause and Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty bopped onto the little screen as Maynard G. Krebs and gave us freedom of expression in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

America said, “The movie was good, but the book was better.”

But America has since changed her mind. Today she says, “Out with the old literature!” that requires focused attention as you experience a story in the quiet of your mind. “In with the new literature!” that requires nothing from you but to sit, slack-jawed and drooling as flashing images enter your brain.

Joseph Brodsky saw this day coming and tried to do something about it. When he was named Poet Laureate in 1991, Brodsky proposed a populist poetry initiative that might “turn this nation into an enlightened democracy… before literacy is replaced with videocy.”

Methinks it may be too late, Joseph.

The glittering iPad promises movies, TV shows and YouTube videos at our fingertips, 24 hours a day, wherever we happen to be. No need to carry a pill bottle. Just touch the screen and go unconscious. This tablet is electronic.

Yes, I’ll buy one.
Of course I will.

And I will feel sad.

Roy H. Williams

ON SECOND THOUGHT, NO, I will not merely shrug my shoulders and sigh. I will call a 48-hour meeting of the literate – the Cognoscenti – and invite great authors to come and speak to us as we remember Salinger and Kerouac and Brodksy and revel in our literary heritage. We'll make it a fundraising event to help us finish our own great bastion to new thought, high art and deep literature – the grand Tower at Wizard Academy.

Come, be one of the first 10 people to contribute $1,000 and you'll have a free room in Engelbrecht House, the student mansion in the valley below the tower. The First Annual Wizard Academy Writer's Conference will be May 19-20. Can you come? Will you? If we can find the rest of the money – exactly $196,851. – the tower can be completely finished in June or July. Come. We'll sing. – RHW

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Random Quote:

“The 1st Kansas regiment, of which I have spoken before, is encamped near us. One of the members of that regiment, a sergeant, died in the hospital two weeks ago. After death his comrades discovered that their companion, by the side of whom they had marched and fought for almost two years, was a woman. You may imagine their surprise at the discovery. I went to the hospital and saw the body after it was prepared for burial, and made some inquiries about her. She was of rather more than average size for a woman, with rather strongly marked features, so that with the aid of a man’s attire she had quite a masculine look. She enlisted in the regiment after they went to Missouri and consequently they knew nothing of her early history. She probably served under an assumed name. She was in the battle of Springfield, where Gen. Lyon was killed, and has fought in a dozen battles and skirmishes. She always sustained an excellent reputation, both as a man and a soldier, and the men all speak of her in terms of respect and admiration. She was as brave as a lion in battle and never flinched from any duty or hardships that fell to her lot…Poor girl! She was worthy of a better fate.”

- Lt Frederick Haywood, correspondent for the Poughkeepsie Telegraph (1863)

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