(quote: Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle, video: Shit Just Got Real)
According to Philip Roth, in 25 years the novel will dwindle to a cult artifact. The novel is faced with a technological deficit in competition with film and readily consumable media. The number he gives is arbitrary, but one could argue that the novel is already dusty. But, I don't buy that our cultural evolution will be so clear-headed as to plow headlong into technological dissociation. What if, at some point in a coming generation there is a backlash. Corporate, electronic media finally coalesces into one gyrating, self-referential advertisement. A sobering reduction in disposable income, and a multitude of childhoods shaped by near-poverty, and there's fertile ground for resentment of anything handed down from on high. A recognition of the consumption cycle encouraged by everything you own with a screen. And so maybe, for a second, it will be cool to read again. To pick up a novel written by some starving rascal who refuses to sell you something.
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Whenever I hear Prozac I think of Sylvia Plath, and ADD Kerouac. Think of what Neal Cassady's teachers must have said in parent-teacher conference. Or what Kafka's father thought about his sullen, serious boy. I worry that mental illness, the vaguer forms of it not outright schizophrenia or psychosis, is a net cast too wide. We've deemed too many quirks obstinate distractions. And in the quantitative progression of medicine we've outlined a de facto understanding of 'normal'. The biggest influence on this taxonomy has been how well-adjusted a particular psyche is. How well a person can get through their day, focus on their job, appear seamlessly productive. But the environment we're to be adjusted to is not one we are born to understand. I expect children to be reckless and imaginative and flailing about. And when they grow up I'm not surprised they sometimes feel empty dragging themselves through the monotone. Or have anxiety attacks standing in line for groceries. Or weep for their long-gone spirituality when Disney animates a lovable predator.
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I sat outside for a long time today and listened to the leaves skitter across the concrete, the hush of defoliating limbs in the wind.
