Posted 3/12/2006 04:25:00 PM by Douglas

Compelling interview with the one Mr. Tom Wolfe. I liked this chunk, but the whole thing is worth a read.

"Using the Internet is the modern form of knitting," he continues. "It's something to do with idle hands. When you knitted, though, you actually had something to show for it at the end. Thomas Jefferson used to answer all his mail from the day before as soon as he got up at dawn. In his position, think of the number of emails he'd have had. He never would have been Thomas Jefferson if he'd been scrupulous about answering all these things. I think email is a wonderful time-waster. It's peerless. Here it is," he concludes, "you can establish contact--useless contact--with innumerable human beings."

Boy, ain't that the truth. You can email anyone you want to, but the question is why? I also like this definition of the "parentheses states."

And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don't go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lies in between."

Wow, I never thought of that. California is even shaped like a parenthesis.