Wind down the chimney, pushing against the house, rain on the windows.
Next to the two-dimensional, virtual, commercialized world of the computer screen, downloading South Park episodes; and the more three-dimensional, slightly more real, but still rather predictable world of my apartment, with its IKEA furniture, books, foodstuffs; is this passionate, truly real world of winter weather.
It's not my world, of course; there's no way I could really engage with that world. Even going out and wandering around in it is implausible for me – wouldn't be much fun, really – and I am so not the person who would go sailing or mountain-climbing or whatever. That whole way of using it seems to reduce it to another version of passive entertainment, anyway.
But its big, sensual reality does make everything else seem so, well, trivial....
Under such circumstances, reading Ballard is probably a bad idea (well-written science fiction stories, but all paranoid, all about a malevolent universe – and in fact so paranoid that one can usually imagine the ending of the story from its beginning). I close the book and put it on the shelf, somewhat pointedly. Better, perhaps, to read something like Coleridge, de Quincey – something from an era where reading and writing were plausible, where they mattered more, where there was no television....
Perhaps that's one reason it's so difficult to write this article that is so very due: writing about television seems so second-hand, so innately marginal, especially when that wind is blowing.
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