technology

This Saturday we returned to Drumlin Farm for the Harvest Festival and we had a blast. We danced to the Old Mariners’ Dixieland Jazz - they were in their sixties and seventies and pretty hardcore, apologizing for playing a song so recent as from the thirties! We took a hayride into the fields I remember with such fondness and picked the last of the raspberries. I was wishing we had that much sunlight in our garden. I would love to have a berry patch like that, for the berries, for sure, but also for the picking, which is just such a mind-clearing and calming activity. We also got some gourds (now curing in our porch) and large as well as small pumpkins, of which Amie painted one.

On Sunday we drove “into the city” (it’s still funny to say it like that) and in between two parties we visited the MIT Museum.

There Amie got acquainted with the”emotional robot” Kismet (above), the kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson, and the ongoing and ever changing exhibition of holograms. Amie was most charmed by Ganson’s Machine with Wishbone and the tiny armchair jumping and bouncing over the cat. But she was most mesmerized by his self-oiling machine, of course, how could she not? All that sleek oil dripping down… Maybe that’s what caused her proclamation, as we headed back out again: “I want to go to a coffee shop!”

Two conversations.

The Future: Star Trek or Middle Ages?

We were noting all those people cueing up in front of the stores to get their hands on an iPhone.

- “Idiotic,” I judged, “an irrelevant piece of junk”.

- “Sacrilege!” DH countered - he’s not wanting to get an iPhone, he was just defending what it stands for.

Personally, I have been letting go, slowly at first, now faster and faster, of the idea of the future that most of us grew up with: that sci-fi sleek, sanitized, technologically facilitated world.

Now I am envisioning something more primitive and - in my eyes - wholesome: something a darker green, where growing food is the priority. No replicators a la Star Trek, but hands digging in the dirt, pulling out a carrot. No communicators, but a friendly chat with the neighbors. No transporting out to another continent, but a walk around the commons.

It all sounds very “medieval” to my husband, who is a real technology devotee and will not let go of that old dream. I don’t mind the word “medieval”: as a historian with an interest in those times, I have a more realistic - i.e., less dark - idea of the Middle Ages.

- “Well,” I concluded, “it is going to play itself out, one way or the other, in our lifetimes. We’ll revisit this talk in a couple of decades and see who was right.”

- “Okay,” he joked, “record it in that medieval contraption of yours, “your journal.”

What will we be consulting, in let’s say 30 or 40 years? The moleskine, or this blog?

Potboiler or highbrow?

Later in the evening I was reporting my progress on The Potboiler (working title of my adventure novel). Deep into my narration of medieval manuscripts, Greek myths, aniconic Bronze Age worship of the Mother Goddess, the metaphysics of time (*)… DH interrupted me:

- “That doesn’t sound like the Da Vinci Code!”

- “I found I just can’t write something like that. I think it will be more like The Name of the Rose,” I stated.

- “But I want those millions!” DH exclaimed.

- “The Name of the Rose made millions,” I could reassure him. “And they made a movie of it too. Don’t worry, we’ll still get by.”

(*) I hope that’s not a spoiler!