May 2, 2013 - At a coffee shop in Las Vegas - taking advantage of the wi-fi to catch up on mail and rest from the road. Heading to Austin for a wedding and to prospect a bit for future gigs. From there its north to Chicago....
Reflecting on temporary things. Back last Fall I renewed my subscription for three years to the Wilson Quarterly (not going to link it). After taking my check, I received a note from them - they decided to give up their print edition and be strictly on-line. I was struck by that - not only do I like to read the Quarterly (liked) when eating or bathing (not a wise idea for the electronic edition), but I thought about the greater ramifications of what it means to switch everything to a digital format.
I collect old books. I love the feel - the texture of them. My oldest is not as old as some I've seen and held - maybe 250 years old, but here is something to think about: that 250 year old book, still readable, still containing the data it had in it when it was printed, will be readable by generations more to come. On the other hand I have a number of essays I wrote on my Brother portable (far from a lap top in the day and barely portable) from 1989/90 when I was in England. These are on Brother discs and can now only be read by a specialist (if I find one) or line by line on the old Brother computer (which I retained for that purpose). They will, in time, become nothing but the 0s and 1s that make up the binary data stored on those discs.
I have old floppy discs (from when they were really floppy) that would also have to be read by a specialist now. The data and the formats constantly change and, unlike the printed word, could well be lost to future generations. What does it matter? The musings of a random individual can't really be worth all that much anyway, can they? And yet, it is often these very caches of information - the writing on clay tablets, scratchings in papyrus in a desert cave, the writing behind writing on parchment reused by illustrators for eons - that shed light on our past. When we slip to our Kindalls and our on-line journals (said by a guy typing on-line), what are we risking? Perhaps we are risking our past as we slip into a temporary future, a living only in the present as data storage changes on a whim, and the thoughts of our collective humanity slip away? I don't know, but it is why I publish and write and why I'll still collect books and read the tactile truth of the human condition.