Observatio

The reality of it is that books -- novels, I mean -- are competing with all other “entertainment” media, including You Tube, Twitter, video games, pop music, movies, television, and a few things I’m sure I haven’t heard of yet. And if this really is the case, novels probably don’t stand much of a chance against these more visual, more interactive, and less time-intensive activities (though in the aggregate, people spend much more time, or waste it, doing these things than they do reading novels). The question is, can writers find a way to refashion the novel so that it would appeal on a more visual level, or an interactive one, and pump up its competitive chops in the almighty marketplace?

I’m skeptical, to a great degree, because there’s no getting past the fact that consuming a novel is to read, not to view. And to insert, say in an ebook, video clips, musical excerpts, other sounds and images, or even the voices of characters, would be to push the novel beyond its own “novelness” and into the realm of performance.

One quintessential thing about the novel is that it is writtten by a single person; it’s not a collaborative effort. Introducing video and sound would involve other participants in the creation of the book -- directors, videographers, designers, actors -- and that would make it more of a hybrid thing, multimedia. Novels would need a production budget to get completed, and that would be a shame since writing a novel is probably the cheapest creative endeavor anyone can undertake. I happen to appreciate art that comes from the mind of a single person as opposed to a committee. Collaboration is often an avenue toward dilution, corruption (in the “less than it could be” sense), and sacrifice of quality in favor of marketability.

But it occurred to me, while reading a sample of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, that well-placed and relevant graphics can enhance a novel in a way that might attract more readers. A hundred years ago, many novels were illustrated, a practice that probably ended because of the expense of an illustrator, but I wonder now if there isn’t such an enormous stock of public domain images available that a novel could easily be illustrated with them for next to nothing. Authors could also create their own illustrations with photography or drawing, with collage, or even their own handwriting. From what I can tell, Mitchell uses illustrations to depict certain actual things or events in the book, such as what appears to be a seventeenth or eighteenth century drawing of a breech birth. In many ways, it supports his already vivid description by showing the reader how accurate his description is.

I remember the Griffin & Sabine books of the early ‘90s, when I was impressed by the tactile experience and the vivid detail and color of the materials Neil Bantock used to accompany his words. Not every illustrated novel could be that lush.

Nor could the illustrated novel approach the comic-style graphic novel -- an entirely different beast. The idea wouldn’t be to show every moment in images, only to highlight, enhance, pique, and lead, surprising the reader every now and then with something visual to contemplate.

For instance, I’ve written a novel that takes place in California in the late 1800s, and while working on it I came across a number of photos, maps, drawings, and portraits that enabled me to visualize scenes and locations much more clearly. It would be interesting to include some of them in the book, if it ever gets published (unlikely, it seems), not so much to show a reader what a particular character looks like or to dramatize a moment but to evoke a mood and subtly guide the reader toward a certain way of interpreting the language. W. G. Sebald famously used photographs in his novels for this purpose, and one of the best examples I can recall is Kurt Vonnegut’s drawings in Breakfast of Champions. There were times when his simple Magic Marker artwork made me laugh harder than his brilliantly funny writing.

It’s been a tough task for me to admit that today’s reader is largely different from the reader I was taught to be thirty years ago. Whereas I was encouraged to use my imagination taking in a novel, readers today, especially younger ones, seem to need visual cues because they are less attuned to (or less impressed with) the language. Raised on movies, TV, music videos, and the Web, they appreciate a more literal kind of stimulation. Books, and sentences, are getting shorter. Authors are putting promo clips on You Tube, as if seeing the author is more important to readers than hearing about a book from friends or reviews. And nothing sells books like a movie version, with a major star or two. These days, the experience of a novel has to encompass things beyond the novel itself -- how it came to be written, the author’s life story, how the book relates to the reader’s life. These are elements that weren’t much of a consideration before, or at least the lack of detail in these areas didn’t prevent readers from picking up any given novel. J.D. Salinger would have died in obscurity if he’d come of writing age today.

As I acquaint myself with the Nook, and compare it to the iPad’s bling factor, I can see that the publishing industry will be forced into a more aggressively multimedia approach in the future. The image has displaced the word as our primary unit of communication, though I’m not convinced that means the novel will become obsolete. As long as there is a demand for storytelling, or I should say sophisticated storytelling (and it’s debatable that there is such a demand), there will be a pool of readers for novelists to reach.

The problem will be how to reach a larger audience that will make the novel economically viable in the competitive media marketplace. Appealing to the visual might be one way novelists can evolve with the culture.

All of this is not to say that tossing a few illustrations between a novel’s covers will bring about a renaissance of the written word. Novelists will have to be as careful with the images they use as they are with words. But when the audience has changed, and the survival of the genre itself is at stake, it seems logical and even necessary to adapt.

I don’t mean to say that all novels must have images in them from now on. Only that, sometimes, and maybe more often than we’d like to think, readers will have to be drawn in and compelled to buy a book not because the prose of the opening page is so riveting and lucent but because a picture catches their eye and speaks to them in a way -- subliminally, subtly -- that words don’t achieve on first pass anymore.

Observatio

Photo: Syracuse Cultural Workers

Everyone’s growing vegetables in their yards around here. Even I’m doing it, and I’ve never been the type to follow the crowd or, for that matter, to care whether a specific plant lives or dies.

In the past, I always concentrated on tomatoes, because it’s true what they say: you can’t get a tomato in a grocery store like the ones you used to have when you were a kid. Grocery store tomatoes are red styrofoam seed-delivery devices. A tomato -- a really good one -- should bring you close to a juicy lingual orgasm. Always eat the good ones in private.

This year I’ve branched out into peppers, zucchini, green beans, beets, carrots, radishes, lettuce, cucumbers, and melons. If I’m lucky I’ll get two or three edible samples of each by the time harvest comes around. Because it’s a daily struggle to keep these goddamn things alive. The gophers, the insects, the snails, the diseases, the cats, the heat, the weeds -- my God, it feels like all of Nature wants my garden dead, and it’s only my constant, obsessive intervention that spares it. Now that I’ve eaten a few of my own carrots, I’m devoted to its survival.

What I don’t like about the home-vegetable movement, though, is how some people are going a little wild with it. A lot of our neighbors around here have dug up their front yards, installing raised beds and irrigation systems, compost heaps, trellises for the climbing plants, and even deer fencing to keep out the foragers. As practical as the idea might seem, these micro-farms are universally eyesores, especially when the “farmer” doesn’t have quite the green thumb he thinks he has. As far as landscaping goes, I’d lean toward a carpet of blooming dandelions over some of these little experiments in locavore living.

This all seems like a fad to me, and I’m guessing that this one will last another year or two, till people have a chance to compare the costs of maintaining a vegetable patch with the amount of food it actually produces for them (see Manny Howard’s cautionary tale, My Empire of Dirt). Looking at my own humble operation, I think I’ll have saved about eleven bucks all in all.

I’m not sure it’s worth it, but, damn, will those tomatoes taste good.

Observatio

It occurred to me last night that I can’t remember a lot about many of the houses I’ve lived in since I was a kid. I can easily, and in plenty of detail, recall certain parts of them all, but I can’t seem to do a mental walk-through and point out where closets were, what the baseboards were like, the window hardware, how many steps to the second floor. It’s as if my brain has erased the transitional spaces, in particular, the nooks and crannies and all those little things we take for granted every day because they’re in the background.

One house in particular is a real blur. My family lived there for only a few months when my mother couldn’t afford the mortgage on the one home we’d really gotten used to. (Not her fault, by the way.) The new place was a rental in a different part of the county, meaning that we’d be going to a different school on top of the fact that we didn’t much like the house itself. I can remember a strange divider between the living room and kitchen, a bizarre red (or amber?) Plexiglas thing, but I can’t remember which side of the room it was on. I can’t recall the kitchen cabinets or the tile -- a dull beige vinyl more than likely. I can’t remember what the front window looked like, or the color of the living room walls (white, I’m assuming), nor do I see much detail heading down the hall toward the bedrooms, of which I think there were three. How they were laid out I have no idea whatsoever. Odd.

The thing I remember most about the house was the garage, which had been converted to a bedroom. I dibbed it because I liked the idea of extra privacy, and I thought the Persian rug in there was exotic. The walls were of a rough gray stone about to waist height, then a cheap, dark-wood paneling took over to the ceiling. Where there’d once been the garage door was now an entire wall of that stone.

The unforeseen problem with the room was that it was unheated. Mom got me a second-hand space heater to use on cold nights, but I was always afraid it would burst into flames while I was asleep and I usually turned it off after a while. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I offered the room to my brother Joe, who was excited to take it off my hands.

That’s when I took over a bedroom in the back corner of the house, which I only remember because it had a window on two walls. Or did it? Maybe I’m mixing it up with another room from another house. I do know its walls were painted a sickly shade of sky blue. I hated the color but didn’t want to spend a lot of time painting it myself.

The bath tub in that house was infested for a few weeks with roly poly bugs. We had to scoop them out and flush them down the toilet before we could take a bath.

Another thing I definitely remember is the adhesive carpet squares Mom got to cover the bedroom floors, which were linoleum, I think. The carpet squares were a pukey moss green the texture and consistency of thick felt. I think I can recover the smell of them too. Not good. Armpit soup.

There are other places I’ve lived that I can’t piece together in their entirety, but this place might as well be a ghost house. Probably says more about my state of mind when I lived there than anything else. A strange feeling, though, all these years later, to realize that I walked through that door a few hundred times and remember so little about it.

A blessing?

Observatio

On the same subject, and in light of my ongoing conversation with a lifelong friend about faith and atheism, I sometimes wonder if the truth of the matter is that whatever we believe the afterlife to be is what it will appear to be to us as we die. I’ve always thought that those near-death experiences some people have border on autosuggestion, i.e., they expected, subconsciously, to encounter a tunnel, a light, and dead loved ones, and that’s exactly what they saw when their hearts weren’t beating and their brains were flat-lining.

If you’ve ever seen David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, you must have considered the possibility that illusion could be a huge part of the experience of dying. The entire movie takes place in the moment Naomi Watts’ character is dying. I can imagine that a person of deep faith, like my friend, would drift into a dream of everlasting life in the presence of Jesus simply because that is sewn into his very identity. I, on the other hand, will more than likely fade to black, since that’s what I expect the afterlife to be. A lot of nothing.

Religious ideas -- which are really all about immortality -- could well be a kind of archetypal message from our ancestors telling us that we are in control of our own afterlife. Peter Pan style, all we have to do is believe. Who wouldn’t want to train themselves to live forever?

But that introduces a very tricky dilemma. How can you brainwash yourself to believe in eternal life at the hem of Jesus when science and philosophy -- if you’re paying any attention -- point instead to a definitive end? Is living a lie the smoothest way to dying in peace? Can it even be accomplished, given our tendency to doubt? What if you are burdened with doubt at the very end -- does your fond vision of heaven evaporate with that small, badly timed chink in your faith?

I’m not the kind who would be able to hedge my bets by signing up with the outfit that has the nicest eternity plan. This is not like buying a car or getting a time-share. No, I’m afraid that even if I knew my dying thoughts would dictate my afterlife, I’d wind up devoted instead to the truth as I see it at the time.

Maybe if they come up with a drug -- some kind of Pearly Gates opiate that guides you along to your ideal eternity. Maybe I’d give that a try.

Observatio

I’ve been working out in my layman’s way these thoughts about mortality brought on by my dad’s death. Nothing makes sense -- either way you care to read that phrase.

I keep coming back to the religious idea that we might exist after this life in some eternal, nonphysical state, since that’s the default belief. But, like I said before, eternity is the absence of time by definition, so to “exist” is not really a correct way to refer to such a state. Existence is tied to space and time.

Only a state of nothingness can ever be thought of -- given the limits of our imagination -- as eternal, yet our physical lives are proof that nothingness is not eternal. It was perking right along in all its non-existential glory until we were born, or at least till our self-awareness kicked in, at which time nothingness ended. Therefore, we can say that nothingness isn’t eternal because it came to an end when we came into existence. If even nothingness isn’t eternal, then there’s no other kind of state that can have that characteristic because all other conceivable states depend on the presence of the “self” or a subject, an I (eye), or change of some kind (like the transformation of dead dinosaurs into oil), and that implies time. Since eternity is the absence of time, no state that requires those kinds of things can be eternal.

But if nothingness ended when we came to be, it’s not eternal and must have a beginning too, since anything that ends has been in existence for some period of time -- an unfathomably long time, but some estimable length -- implying that it also had a beginning. Anything with a beginning and an end can’t be said to be eternal, so nothingness can’t be said to be eternal.

Now that that’s settled...

If we accept that no consciousness-based afterlife can be truly eternal, and nothingness is not eternal, then what are the possibilities for the state of our “selves” after death?

Well, we might imagine existing in a non-physical state after death, but not eternally. In other words, if our identities are somehow preserved after death, then we still exist in time (if not literal space) because we’ll still be subjects and observers of (and in) the universe. This kind of existence is hard to imagine because we can’t quite grasp what it is to have a mind but no body. Are our bodies just suits of clothes during life, prisons of our true spirits? Or are mind and body really one neurobiological system, with the mind dependent on the physical body for its own existence? If it’s the latter, as science seems to be concluding, then any afterlife will have to be tied to some other system we don’t yet know about that provides a platform for the mind to retain its integrity. That means it will be “physical” in some sense, or at least anchored to time and space.

Another possibility is that we cease to exist altogether, entering the same nothingness we must have inhabited (in the form of a potential being) before birth. This state, though, isn’t eternal either, according to the rules of the game, so it might well be interrupted again, by other periods of consciousness, other lives, or other states of awareness of space and time, whether via the mind we’re used to or a new one, and presumably with some kind of body. (By the way, Seneca touches on just these points in Letter LXXXVIII, way back in the first century A.D.)

And still another possibility is that this life will be the only interruption of nothingness that we will ever experience and our state after death will be as if eternal. After all, eons passed before we were born, and we weren’t aware of ourselves in any way. It’s easy to imagine that eons will pass after we’re dead too, with no interruptions to make this nothingness anything but a de facto state of eternity, even if it’s constantly interrupted by other people’s momentary awareness.

But there’s one big difference between the prior state of nothingness and the one that’s ahead for each of us. We will have existed. We will have possessed a consciousness, a viewpoint, and that consciousness is something that did not exist in the prior state of nothingness.

We deduce that the universe existed during that state, though. We accept that the stars and planets existed, that life on Earth existed, that all of it wasn’t created out of nothing when we were born just to give us a context. So something existed in the midst and in spite of our personal nothingness. And something existed before there were any subjects or observers to notice it.

I’m not sure where this leads. Heavy drinking, probably. What I do know is that life certainly gives us plenty to chew on during the brief time we’re wading through it.

Observatio

Mouse is a syllable, a mouse nibbles cheese, therefore a syllable nibbles cheese. -- Seneca

Describes, fairly well, the state of our political logic these days.

Observatio

In that same realm, it’s fascinating to wonder whether consciousness is nothing but a biochemical accident in the first place. Living things, over eons, gradually became more complex so that their moment-to-moment actions were not automatic, like a one-celled organism’s, and their survival came to depend on an awareness of themselves in the environment. You can see how evolution would have favored individuals that had the biochemical advantage of, for instance, being able to detect changes in light or temperature, which would help them find food more easily or avoid predatory organisms and other dangerous thingys. Eventually, the more advanced these biochemical systems became, the more aware some species became. Is consciousness, the way we humans understand it, just a terrifically advanced level of awareness?

The kicker is that an advanced awareness of ourselves in the environment has also given us an awareness of mortality, self, time, and space. We have come to see ourselves as the reason the universe exists -- the ultimate subject -- which is probably a mistake of enormous magnitude. Instead, what if our consciousness is really just part of a larger system? We might be like the leaves on a tree, collecting energy and feeding something larger that we can’t perceive. Or we might be sensors, our consciousness a means of transmitting information back to a central brain or intelligence undetectable because we are too small or too close. (We’re soaking in it!)

You can’t be much of a narcissist when you contemplate this stuff.

Observatio

I’ve just read a short column about what happens to us when we die, theoretically. It seems a pretty good time to contemplate such meaty stuff, since my father died three weeks ago. Where he is, how he experiences his being, if at all, and whether his consciousness has survived intact are all on my mind. If there is an overriding justice in the universe, though, he has probably returned as a little black baby in Detroit.

The column -- I forget where I saw it -- tied the idea of consciousness to Einstein’s theory of relativity, which makes sense in a way. If time and space depend upon an observer, then the absence of the observer implies the obliteration of time and space. The writer said that time “reboots” at our death, though I’m not quite sure what he means by that. Sounds like a nod toward reincarnation, because if time reboots it means there must be a new subjective observer. In that sense, time begins when we’re born, or when we start to perceive the world as a subjective observer, and ends when we die. It is easy to imagine, along with a million other possibilities, that “I” will inhabit another consciousness after this one fades away -- a new one, or maybe even an older one embedded in another time. Who knows? All I know for sure is that it’s impossible to experience nothingness, so either my ability to experience at all comes to an end when I die, or “consciousness” is somehow renewed. It will be interesting to find out, though I’m happy to wait as long as possible for the news.

On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I had no consciousness prior to this life. Nothing comes right to mind. Maybe this life is my first appearance, or maybe, if time does reboot, the observer’s script is erased and there is nothing to be remembered of earlier struttings on the stage.

I’m willing to give Einstein the benefit of the doubt. He thought that the time-space bullpen we find ourselves waiting in -- the present -- is an illusion. That seems as realistic as anything I’ve heard on the subject.

Observatio

My wife has purchased shampoo that makes my head smell like a Junior Mint.

This is not a problem.

Observatio

Barry Hannah died not very long ago. He was one of those writers I was glad to have discovered, even if most of the time I didn’t quite grasp what he was trying to say through his madcap, absurdist, even bizarre tales. Often I laughed as I read him, but when I finished something like The Tennis Handsome, I’d shake my head and say to myself, That was interesting. It never occurred to me to emulate him, just as I’d never try to emulate Tom Robbins or Salman Rushdie, or Nabakov, or Twain. You can’t emulate the utterly unique.

But last night I read a short piece in Harper’s: “Why I Write,” by Barry Hannah. It was a speech at Bennington College in 2002, and it touched on what I think are the two most important drives any serious novelist must possess and cultivate. One is the drive to own the past in a comprehensive, personal way, and the other is the drive to venerate language. In the past lay the details and resonating emotional spikes that get deep into what it is to be human, the triumphs and humiliations we can’t forget, the seemingly inconsequential moments that somehow manage to form us though we may shrug them off at the time. Like Hannah, I can remember things my father said to me forty years ago, which, when he said them, had no context but the moment in which he said them. All these years later, they are draped with significance and large meaning, they deepen my sense of human contradiction and self-preservation, and they help to define him in a way he couldn’t have meant to project at the time. The past is where all your material comes from, even if you write about the here and now.

Language, Hannah says in the speech, “still strikes me as a miracle, a thing the deepest mind adores. At its best, when you lose your arrogance and are least selfish, it can sing back to you almost as a disembodied friend.”

You might have in your junk box the picture fragments of the time you found a young rabbit at the bottom of the basement stairs, its pink bowels protruding from a belly no thicker than the skin of a balloon. The cat did it, failed to finish the job out of boredom. You can’t let the thing die there like that, in a slow way, not with its dark, soap-washed eye looking up at you in something between fear and pleading. You will have to kill it, but how? And how do you tell the story of killing it, retaining every detail so that someone else can know what it was like?

Only language, with precision and surprise, is up to the task. Mr. Hannah knew it. All true writers do. And that is why there will always be a need for the writer who is first an artist (as distinguished from those who are first entertainers): so that we will know what we have been through and what it meant, and means.

Observatio

A Numbers Game

Rudy likes to tell of nine-one-one,
The time he didn’t poop his pants and run.
As people and paper fell from the sky,
He was New York City’s go-to guy.

But that was quite a while back,
And since then: no new attack.
Still, Rudy talks a lot of nine-one-one,
Every other word, in fact, a nine or one.

I wonder where he’d be if, on that day,
The Mets had beat the Cubs (or Tampa Bay),
And nothing tragic had undone
Us. Not much talk, for sure, of nine-one-one.

Observatio

I don’t know about you, but if Hillary’s faux weeper the other day did have anything to do with her success in the New Hampshire primary, there is no hope for ‘Murca. Like accused murderers who take a shot at crying on the witness stand but lack actual liquid coming out of their tear ducts, Hillary attempted to “show emotion” over the plight of our country. “I see what’s happening,” she said (I paraphrase), “and we can’t go backwards.” Presumably she meant the assault on the Constitution that the Bush administration has been able to pull off, lo, these last seven years. It does bring a tear to the eye, or should, but she looked and sounded more like someone bemoaning the loss of a favored pet. Her hand plied her cheek and she nodded in Oprahesque fashion as she whimpered.

Please, tell me this was not the moment that put her over the top.

I have to admit, I’m rooting for Edwards to claw himself up out of the political grave, or for Obama to pull back just a tad from the “second-coming” persona the media has applied to him, so a Hillary win in NH was disappointing on its face to me. I’m eager for the end of the Bush/Clinton/Bush era. I want the slate cleaned and the rancid chalk dust of the last twenty years vacuumed out of the crevices.

If it worked, Hillary’s quivering lip drains the last of my hope for reason this election year.

Observatio

I noticed that the five novels in the New York Times' list of the Ten Best Books of 2007 are all written by men. This is veddy veddy interesting because, as we all know, women are the primary book buyers in the U.S., and for the most part fiction is geared toward them. Am I wrong? Maybe you have not heard of Oprah?

I haven't read any of these five books yet, but I think there is an unspoken guideline being practiced in our culture. Male authors are the literary lions, female authors are the big sellers. Don't point to Grisham and King and Patterson and that lot to shoot my theory down; I'm talking generally. With some exceptions, men get the artistics kudos and women get the sales. That makes it hard for writers of both sexes if you think about it. If you're a man writing literary material (like me), the slots available for high art are few because those books don't do very well. If you're a woman writing the same, it's very tough to be taken seriously. If you're a man writing commercial novels, you're probably stuck with thrillers, suspense, or military because the gals have relationship stories covered. Chick lit changed everything.

I think the Times was making a statement, but I have to ask, why are men and women so different when it comes to what they read and write? Food for thought.

Observatio

Howcome everyone is shocked -- shocked! -- that the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogators torturing a human being?* It's the CIA, man. They toppled the governments of Iran and Guatemala (how soon we forget), they tried to kill Castro with sploding seegars and poisoned wetsuits, and they mined the harbors of Nicaragua, flouting international law.

It's the CIA.

*See also "Ends justify means."

Observatio

Thinking about this revised FISA law as I read about Oliver Wendell Holmes has raised an interesting idea. Holmes believed that "rights" exist only to the extent that the judiciary is willing to protect them. That is, what's on paper concerning, say, your privacy is only as good as the government's willingness to enforce the underlying law.

The new FISA, especially if it contains amnesty for the telecoms, is our government's way of saying that a constitutional right to privacy is passe. Cross-reference this with the quote from an administration official a while back, who said that Americans are going to have to get used to the idea of their communications being monitored. It's a fait accompli, and yet it's unconstitutional.

There will be more such adjustments to come.

Observatio

I am coming to the sad conclusion that I’m no longer demographically relevant in our culture. My age, if you’re familiar with the old style, is L, and it seems like when you hit L in this culture you’re ready for the glue factory as far as mass media is concerned. It will shoot Centrum Silver ads at you, sure, and AARP spots and pitches for absorbent underwear and supplemental insurance, not to mention quick fixes for your inevitable ED, but it refuses to make art for you, or even basic entertainment.

Full disclosure compels me to admit that I’m a fiction writer who has had a book published, but getting the second nailed down is apparently impossible. That’s because, partly, I’m L and I swing outie genitalia twixt my legs, but it’s also partly because the prime American demographic doesn’t read novels much anymore, or at least not literary ones. These people go to movies and download music and play video games, and that pretty much covers their spare time.

Two examples: I recently rented megahit “Spiderman III” and came away going “Huh?” It was pure garbazh from start to finish, a mishmash of poor special effects imposed on a moronic plot. It made no sense, had no internal logic, touched on no themes more complicated than “be true to yourself” or “good conquers evil,” and didn’t even offer the campy artistry of an old-time comic book. It was just something shiny to look at for two hours, which is enough to fascinate the 18- to 34-year-olds in our withering land. There are currently several high-quality movies out that deal with the fiasco in Iraq, but they are flopping. Meanwhile, the grown-ups’ movie season has arrived, not that anyone would notice. It’s artsier offerings are sure to vanish without a blip on the radar, making room for something more beefy: “Aliens vs. Predator -- Requiem.” Look for it on Christmas Day.

The other example is Guitar Hero, and its new clone Rock Band, video games that make you feel like you can handle an axe. GH costs a hundred bucks, RB one-eighty, and “playing” the instrument in them bears no relation at all to playing the guitar. Ironically, you can pick up a “real” instrument, used, for a hundred dollars and learn enough chords to simulate (in your basement room) all your favorite guitar heroes. The basics of guitar are not that hard to learn. I guess the flaw in it is that no virtual world is created when you play one, so you’re pretty much stuck in your own grim reality afterwards, void of hope and prospects.

I probably sound older than L. In my day, we played baseball with broomsticks and bottle caps and we loved it!