ceci n'est pas une livre

I was sitting on the patio of a restaurant on Magazine last night and saw a very odd thing. There was a gentleman walking down the sidewalk while reading his Kindle in one hand. Reading while walking though interesting, and sort of impressive, by itself isn't what was odd about it. The odd thing was that in his non-Kindle holding hand he was carrying a Borders bag full of recently purchased books. Two bags, in fact, of real books. Yet he was reading a simulation of a book. Books are simulacra of reality and now we have a simulacrum to hold our simulacra.

I don't have a particular point in relating this story to the interwebs only that somehow what he was doing didn't seem like reading. I'm not sure how to describe it but his demeanor and physicality were not of a person reading. What it seemed like he was doing was text messaging. We all know the look that people have on their face when they are tooling with their mobile devices in class. In fact that pose has become pretty common. I know I will be walking towards someone I vaguely know. There will be maybe 20 yards between us but I never know what to do. Do I wave? Should I yell out, "Ahoy?" I'm not really prone to raising my voice. So I pull out my phone and pretend to have something incredibly engaging taking place on it. Once we come within normal conversation range perhaps I will break off and engage the person. But probably not. More likely is that I will just continue to avert my gaze and pass without speaking. This diverted attentiveness creates a sort of blindness that seems non-conducive to walking.

Also, the books this man was carrying were not small. They were the sort of hefty tome that one does not read while walking down the sidewalks of New Orleans. It made me start to wonder what he was reading on the Kindle. It could be "War and Peace" or "Atlas Shrugged" for all I knew. Which if you think about it having something as light as the Kindle would be incredible. On the other hand it could be the New York Times. In which case he was carrying a 10 ounce newspaper which is... about how much a newspaper probably weighs. But then I started thinking, "What if I could have the whole Oxford English Dictionary on my E-reader?" Wouldn't that be incredible! 135 pounds of reference in a search-able handheld device. It would easily fit I'm sure. Would it still cost almost a thousand dollars? I don't think that sounds right, but at the same time I don't think the usual 10 dollar e-book price is right. I think the equivalent-to-the-three-hundred-dollar-annual-subscription-fee-for-online-access-but-I-get-to-keep-it-forever price sounds pretty good. This is not available and I don't know that it ever will be but it raises an interesting benefit I hadn't considered before. Reading an e-reader could be easier than reading a book. I have several books that aren't exactly the type I can grab to take on the streetcar, but with an e-reader all books have the same dimensions whether it is an issue of "Spiderman" or the complete works of Shakespeare.

This post was highly digressive and to be honest completely stream of consciousness but my point (yeah I had one when I set out) is to ask how do you walk down the street in New Orleans and not pay attention to the pavement? I would be ass over tea kettle in a heartbeat.