Hmmm… thought it best to get in at least one journal entry for 2008, so, before the new year – what?
It’s Already New Year’s Day?
Yesterday?
Oh, Bloody Hell!
I missed it! Damnation Personified!
Still, one mustn’t grumble…
And come to think of it, 2008 wasn’t, after all, that most definitive and consummate Year Of Years upon which we might hang our Highest Hopes and Most Somber of Expectations.
Yes- we managed to elect Barack Obama, but what about Sarah Palin, so worthy of a footnote*.
*I hereby declare 2009 the Official Year of the cyclical return of the obligatory footnote, wherein every printed page, whether given over to true fiction or some twisted and helplessly spun version of truth (i.e. our modern variant known colloquially as “non-fiction”), or even the feverishly dissimilar forms of modern poetry, shall each and all meet the minimum requirements of extra knowledge inconveniently provided/shared with/inflicted upon said reader, and not imprisoned in some tortured and obscure gulag at the rear of the book**, but made available at the bottom of each page, in a font size even more unreadable than the already compromised main text, scaled down to accommodate the copious and excessive footnotes already threatening to replace the actual text with full pages of self-reflexive joy.
** I attribute this hiding away of the embarrassing footnotes, this thoroughly dreadful shunting away of the problem child of additional supplied information to the rural rehab asylum situated in the countryside at the rear of the volume, to that mindless hack T.S Eliot, who in his infinite “wisdom,” placed the copious notes he gathered to explicate the labyrinthine complexity of his lyrical trifle THE WASTELAND to the end of the poem, firing the first shot in The Revolution that finally held sway in the early sixties, a seeming Golden Age when every Lit Professor in America preached the One And True Literary Gospel According to T.S.E., Ol’ Possum himself, wherein all footnotes should henceforth be hidden away from sight, fenced and stored safely away from all but the most persistent of searchers, those neurotic individuals compelled by OCD to insure the information stored away isn’t, after all, essential to the beloved Author’s essential argument. And, no doubt owing to the crypto-fascist nature attributed to our Right Reverend Eliot, who understood that banishing the unwanted into out of the way ghettos was the first logical step towards a more “Final Solution,” a brighter and more logical world, one not cluttered with any footnote afterthoughts, of endless library shelves sagging with the combined weight of a bewildering variety of literacy bound in volumes, their chief, possibly only, similarity being their entirety of footnote-free pages.
Which is an unfortunately roundabout and circuitous course toward my actual subject, now somehow buried deep within/beneath these endlessly inane footnotes footnotes, as it were: Steve Jobs, and how he has managed to piss me off so completely of late. But first, let’s cast a quick glance back to the inevitable backstory on this one.
Having spent any time at all on Earth during the last nine or so months, you, my humble reader, no doubt have opened up Amazon.com to find the front page completely taken over by CEO Jeff Bezos’ hard sell marketing of their electronic book reader, the Kindle. And while an amazing amount of actual media has been made available in this format, the Critics, those lovable fuzzy balls of personified goodness and impartial wisdom, have been much less than kind in pointing out a variety of shortcomings inherent in the Kindle’s initial software, prompting Bezos to suggest the Kindle platform would be opened to third-party software designed to improve upon the concept. True American sentiment, competition having always inspired towards a conceptually superior mousetrap.
However, when Steve Jobs (Mr MacWorld Apple Dude CEO and Intergalactic Overlord) was asked if his company (insert trademarked red, yellow or green edible pome fruit sobriquet, not to be confused with The Beatles Record Company) would consider developing alternative software for the Kindle, he immediately declined, explaining, and I quote: “People Don’t Read Anymore.”
What? Excuse me? Uh, Mr Jobs, may I call you Steve? No? O-kay… Mr Jobs, do you REALLY think people don’t READ anymore?
Sadly (for me anyway, one somewhat unaccustomed to having to admit to such shortcomings), Mr J is most likely in a better place to evaluate “people’s” reading habits, and lack thereof, than I, an inveterate and unrepentant word obsessive/book fetishist, and I defer to his dismal appraisal of the Common Man’s reading habits.
No, what pisses me off about this is Jobs being so utterly pragmatic and coldly realistic in his assessment of our collective humanity -done deal, accept/submit, no implied criticism suggested, get on with it.
But I digress. I believe I began this directionless rant with dear Sarah, our moose-busting Maverick Governor from the Upper One State, she who reads, you know, all the magazines, and feels Catcher In The Rye should be tossed atop the massive burning pile of all the mandatory Government-collected Korans, you betcha. Oh, and while we’re listing things to be tossed onto said bonfire, Ms Palin would most likely include Olbermann and Katy Couric.
So maybe Steve Jobs was thinking of Sarah Palin when he made his dismal assessment of our shared literacy. And just maybe Ms Palin is considering Mr Jobs as a possible Vice Presidential choice for her inevitable 2012 Campaign.
Or, as she calls him, Steve the Computer Guy.
Because if it is in fact true, that the “people” AREN’T reading anymore, then she is no doubt our next inevitable President.
God Bless America.
