Contemporanus

Don't ever let me be contemporary.

Even the word should have given it away 'con-temporary'. Your words will be temporary & any other option you come up with is just you trying to con yourself. It doesn't seem that long ago I was writing about a classic novel that was slightly out of time when it was published, but was perfect for the time of publication, even if it didn't intend to be - To Kill a Mocking Bird. It became a contemporary classic in a great sunburst of energy that imprinted on everyone's consciousness. It should have been temporary. Times change. Tempo. Now, reading that book without any reference to its time or place of setting, as it was intended, & also no connection to its time of publication, I easily labelled it irrelevant. 

I'm now reading The Grapes of Wrath, & I've quickly gotten the same impression - the post-depression migration of Americans does nothing for me. I have no sense of why it's important even for them, let alone for me. Yes, it's another book that had a big impact when published, & was picked up quickly to turn into a very successful - again, iconic - movie that I've never seen, but that doesn't make it good literature. In fact, I'd almost call it ... bad. There. I did. The language - the attempt to codify the way that ordinary people speak - is also forced in writing, because it's based on sounds & accents that you can't convey. We often have conventions for this that come about over time, but accents aren't fixed for a long period, so you can't rely on the impression lasting, & it's all relative to the author's own experience. The tone of the book, too, doesn't work for me. It makes sense that the author took a workmanlike approach to writing, because that shows & it fits. That simply makes the book, the process, the result, all a direct consequence of the times. Contemporary.

I know the problem from personal experience, though. I wrote some (unpublished) books in my misspent youth, & then went to re-write them, in the hope that my style had matured (heaven help me). The biggest problem is that such a youth was so long ago that computers were a revelation back then. I was sitting there at one of my laptops, writing my book directly into a cloud service while I was visiting my parents, & the subject of the chapter was the enhancement of computer services from three desktops in a cramped room to a converted pair of tutorial rooms where four desktops were networked to a printer. Heady stuff. How do you convey the excitement of such a transformation that would have empowered a whole range of students to do word processing & ... other stuff (who remembers)? My first thought was to 'dumb it down' or shy away from the reality that what I was writing - what I had written - was quite some time ago. Could I try to make it more 'now' - you know, contemporary? Not likely. In fact, the best course of action - which took a lot more writing - was to make it historical instead. That made sense. "I remember when we didn't have computers!" I do. I was a child. Computers were things that filled a whole room in Sci Fi movies in the 1960s - preferably a closed room, if it was a low budget movie.

All of the magic is happening there - inside that room. Don't open the door, because that's where the past is. Stay here, where we don't have to talk about computers or racism or socialism or any of those things that will just just disappear if we wait long enough. Let's be in the now, without necessarily claiming to be contemporary.