Have I Read My Last Book?

When was the last time you read a clay tablet?  How about a papyrus scroll?  It is getting to be that way with paper-and-ink books.  eBooks represent genuine progress.  But something more fundamental is at stake.

Regardless of the physical medium of a book, the real problem is that a book is a gigantic pile of information that is mostly useless and therefore tedious to shovel through.  Books are one-directional.  They are not conversational and lively.

Maybe Twitter (X) has the right idea: the written word still has value, but say what you want to say in a paragraph or two, and then shut up.  Let somebody else respond.  

I am being too hard to please, because on You Tube I start thinking of new complaints: why so many talking heads?  Who needs video?  A radio or podcast would work just as well.  And why so many non-rhotic English accents?

It is ironic to be writing about this because yesterday I had the best conversation with a local in years.  Perhaps it happened because I was on my best behavior.  Old people should talk about the Present with younger people -- never start a sentence with, "I remember this time when..."

Both he and I never spoke more than two or three sentences before shutting up and passing the ball to the other guy.  There really is no way to make a book work like that.

It is time to clean out and organize my list of photographs from recent travels.  These have nothing to do with today's post:

Southwestern Utah.  Somehow I got a photo without a thousand tourists or cars.

Mollie's Nipple.  We rode the bike up to visit good ol' Mollie.  It had been a few years.

Differential erosion at its job, in Nevada.