Moving Backwards

A few months ago I went to a panel discussion where several novelists and essayists discussed the modern novel, and modern book sales, and modern despair. They criticized the Internet, too, for destroying everything. No one cares about new literature, they said, and I agreed with such force that I immediately ordered a 3,000-page Norton Shakespeare and the three-volume unabridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That served as a beachhead; I reinforced it by special-ordering, at great price, all 37 DVDs of the BBC Shakespeare in performance, which now sit upright like soldiers inside a black box printed with a four-color quill pen, next to my computer. I read a play, watch a play, then read some Roman history.

After I read reviews of new indie rock on Pitchfork I find myself listening to Paul Robeson or Steely Dan. When people tell me about the web framework Ruby on Rails, or the purely functional language Haskell, both extremely current, I download the tutorials, try some code, then take a deep breath and read more about Lisp, a language older than I am, or try to understand more about assembler, which is bare abstraction above a machine's churning metal. Then I go back to my job programming in old-fashioned Perl and Java.

Moving backwards is not a conscious choice; it's just the direction in which I find myself moving. The word “evangelist” is often used to describe people who advocate for a technology, and it implies that non-believers are going to hell. I was raised a mainline Protestant, and all that brimstone turns me off.