THE DEATH OF THE BOOK
- 30/5/2005 <--Prev : Next-->
THE DEATH OF THE BOOK
There are so many things that I miss now that our offspring have left
home for greener pastures
When HeeHoo and I got married our entire family lived in Zimbabwe but
now sadly we are the only two left.
Sunday lunches once used to be riotous ...grannies, grandpas, aunts,
uncles, cousins, brothers sisters, nieces and nephews.
We would all sit down to Charlie's magnificent roast potatoes, seven
sorts of veggies and a giant roast or two, often farm grown lamb,
succulent roast chicken and always a piece of prime beef.
But now Sundays are different, very different, HeeHoo and I balk
against the thought of just the two of us sitting at each end of the
giant family table, and besides we gave up roast potatoes on the
advice of Dr Atkins, and so if we are in town, we stumble down to the
Bon usually for a peri peri chicken and salad.
But don't get me wrong...I am not asking for your pity...(sob)...what
I am really getting at is ... although I miss every single thing
about the children ......I DO NOT MISS THEIR MUSIC !!
I must confess Mother used to say awful things to me about my
penchant for Beatles music...but have you actually ever listened to a
piece of MODERN rap "music". I hesitate to call it music because
music is supposed to at least be....WELL .... musical !!
Songs are supposed to rhyme and be pleasing to the ear ...but RAP is
just downright disgusting. There is a fellow out there called Eminem
who quite takes my breath away with his amazing command of the
English language. His vocabulary is peculiarly stinted, he only knows
THE four letter word and anything that rhymes with THE four letter
word !!
I guess it must stem back to his education, maybe his teachers
neglected to read him any of the beautiful poetry that our teachers
read to us. Poems like Longfellow's "Hiawatha" books with the most
mellifluous language like "The Wind in the Willows".
And he has obviously never heard of iambic pentameter, that's for
sure. The only blessing is his own version of ebonics is so hard to
hear as one gets older that much of his rhythmic mysteries sound like
total gobbledygook !!
The disturbing thing about this apparent lack of education leads me
to think about "book larnin" as they used to say.
Now my youngest child tells me that books will soon be a thing of the
past. They will become obsolete rather like those LP records we all
have faithfully stored away in the hope that we might be able to sell
them of e bay one day.
Pretty soon people will be describing the word "book" to their
grandchildren, because they will have never ever seen one !!
Books of course will be replaced by all things electronic, think
about it, Heehoo studiously devours his daily newspaper , his
periodicals, his Mac magazines, his fishing magazine, his golf
magazine and his favourite magazine "The Week" which is a
condensation of the weeks worth of worthy newspapers.
But do you ever see a youngster with a newspaper or book in hand
unless it is a school book ? Oh no .... they are pouring over their
laptops and digesting each and every word on the internet !!
I myself am also falling prey to these new fangled gadgets...it is
after all much easier to call up Google, scroll down on my bookmarks
to my favourite daily rag...make the font MUCH bigger so I don't
need to look for my specs, and digest in a flash the news headlines
of the day, occasionally calling in on a longer interesting article
once my interest has been piqued.
The entire news media is in fact under threat I am told, pretty soon
no one will ever read a newspaper, few people will turn on the telly,
even fewer will turn on a radio ...all you will ever need to know
will be encapsulated in the little computer of yours.
The search engines that are available to electronic media lovers make
life so easy that there is no need to go out of your door for one
second in order to be totally electronically entertained 24 hours a
day .
Your music is there on your computer, type in a song or story Play
your games, read your books, watch your movies type in any line or a
phrase and google will find it for you in a flash.
Now good must come out of anything I suppose, think of all those
trees we will be saving when no one reads books any longer !!
