So I’m going to digress here and talk for a moment about Second Life, the virtual world that is the current wild wild west of the online experience. I’ll get back to words in a moment, I promise.
In Second Life, a great deal of what happens mirrors real life. There is shopping (far too much of it to my taste), and art galleries and clubs and secret societies. You can study there, worship there (even at the venerable Church of Elvis), grieve there. And you can write there.
My husband Paul and I run a review website (http://www.secondseeker.com); we visit venues in Second Life and write about them, since one of the difficulties in this virtual world is finding your way around. And lately I’ve been visiting and writing about — writing. I went to the Bakery of the Poets (named after a venue in the Cyrano de Bergerac novel) — here’s what it looks like (sadly when the photograph was taken, sans poets!):
… and this morning visited the Charles Benjamin Center, notable in that it offers subsidy publishing services: for very little money indeed you too can have your opus available in Second Life.
So what I’m thinking about is this: with so many authors frantic about new technologies and the possible End Of Literature As We Know It, it’s comforting to know that even as our worlds expand to become virtual, the printed word is still very much part of it all.
In Bucharest last month I was told that publishing is doing very well indeed, and this in an exceptionally poor country by American standards. Seems to me that the thirst for words — something that in Open Your Heart with Reading I describe as the impulse to fly away — is alive and well.
And as long as it is, books — in some shape or another — will be as well.
– Jeannette Cézanne
www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: — jcezanne
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