View from the Boundary

I've just re-read Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth. In a very competitive field that includes Atonement and On Chesil Beach, it is a strong contender for his best novel and thus also for the best British novel, of the painfully small sample that I have read, published in recent decades. How much I enjoyed it, with its continual unfolding of various duplicities, is hard to express. And then you get the last few layers removed in the final chapter.
Next up on the reading list is All That Is by James Salter, the review of which in last Saturday's Times made it sound like something very important. So, it has to follow a magnificent warm-up act and will do well to live up to both its billing and the standard that has been set.
I'll read it in book form. I don't have a kindle, i-pad or any such gadget and don't expect I ever will. It's not that I'm hanging on doggedly to tradition with a Luddite view of anything new but I simply don't like the look of those things and I do like books. Even if you can hold a vast music library, the internet and hundreds of books in your hand and take them everywhere with you, I don't seem to need to.
But again, today, I joined in a conversation about how everyone in a bar was fiddling with or gazing at one of these new pieces of digital wonderment. I had been thinking along those lines only a day or two ago. But I said, yes, but these things are only the latest vehicle for the written word. We were brought up in an age when the book was the long established medium for writing to be carried by.
How far back could we take this. Did Ancient Egyptians bemoan the new trend when some of them, possibly the younger generation, were regularly seen to be gazing at hieroglyphics with rapt attention.
'Oh, look at young Rameses, staring at those funny shapes again. They are killing the art of conversation.' The same thing presumably happened the first time anyone scratched words on a tablet of stone or, at the outset of television's first predecessor, when cavemen and women were found absent from their nuclear family activity because they were enthralled by the paintings at Lascaux.
My own next forthcoming, modest contribution to the history of the printed word will only appear in hard copy form. The Perfect Murder is possibly ready to go to the printer's now but it does at present include my entry for this year's Portsmouth Poetry Society competition that I have also sent to a magazine that will appear after the competition result has been announced. It is somehow not the protocol to publish such a poem elsewhere before those events and so we are on hold for a few months and you never know what might happen in the meantime.