This won’t take long. I simply want to note my perplexity in the face of Google+, which I was invited to join last week. I am told that it is a real improvement over Facebook, but I haven’t spent enough time on the site to see anything different, except perhaps the circle3s, which could come in handy. And this time, I’m going to save all the email annoucements, in one gigantic Outlook folder. I came to feel that deciding to delete the ones that Facebook sent me was an error.

I never was able to make any use of Twitter, largely because I don’t do anything that’s interesting in 140 characters or less (fewer). Maybe I read too much Henry James as a child. That’s a joke! I didn’t read any Henry James as a child, nulla. I didn’t read much of anything when I was a child, besides the Hardy Boys books, which I would devour in an hour or two, like some sort of fast food. (Fast food hadn’t really been invented back then.) But there’s no doubt that repeated readings of The Golden Bowl have stretched my semantic wingspan to a trans-Twitter reach. I just couldn’t fit in that box.

I never followed anyone on Twitter, for the same reason. I’m not about to turn my attention — which is something of a dreadnought — to short messages of less than emergency import; it’s not worth my while. An epistle I’ll read, and happily. I got a great one this morning from the friend who invited me to Google+; it was taken up with a knockout story that it took two full paragraphs to tell well. I wish I could share it with you. I wish I could suggest it to you in a circumlocutory manner that hinted broadly without being at all specific. Henry James was very good at talking around things, and I suppose he taught me the rudiments of the craft, but I have always found that circumlocution is unpopular with today’s busy readers unless it’s fake circumlocution — unless its perfectly obvious what all the broad hints are pointing to, in which case you’re joking. 

Talking around a subjecct is very different, don’t you think, from talking until you find a subject? Now, there’s something that I ought to post about at Google+: Geoff Dyer’s very droll piece in last week’s Book Review about the academic habit of “recessive deferral.”

I realized I was reading something quite extraordinary: a masterpiece of its kind in that it takes the style of perpetual announcement of what is about to happen to extremes of deferment that have never been seen before.

Do you know how long it took me to find the “Share” button?

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.