James Hynes

In my (probably futile) efforts to remain au courant with the inexorable digitization of literary life—and to shamelessly promote my new novel, Next, soon to available as both a book-book and an e-book and who knows what else, maybe a direct download to your cerebral cortex, so you can remember having read it with actually having to take the time to turn the pages and have my prose pass before your eyes—I now have an author page on Facebook. This is in addition to my Twitter page, of course, and this blog. They are all linked to each other in the sticky, organic, and kind of creepy way everything is these days. It doesn't really matter if I think all this is a good thing (and believe it or not, sometimes I actually do), because it's not just coming, baby, it's here, and it's sink or swim from here on out, especially for aging midlisters like me. It's hard, though, I'm just saying. Sometimes I enjoy it—I actually like Twitter's 140 character limit, because it plays to my strength (aka, my weakness) for making short, glib jokes. On the other hand, Facebook baffles me, and makes me feel like I'm my mom, and it's 1987, and I've got my first VCR, and it's blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 at me—let's face it, it's laughing at me—and I haven't got the slightest idea how to make it stop, let alone how to record or play back anything. As for programming the fucker, forget it; it's like learning Urdu, which I'm guessing is the original language of the guy who wrote the instruction manual.

Okay, anyway, so you get the idea. I'm old, all this shit is new, and it scares the hell out of me. People, I didn't even have a cellphone till about eight months ago, after I locked my keys in my car with the motor running in the Central Market parking lot (talk about your senior moment) and couldn't find a payphone within a ten-mile radius, and I had to go into the camping store next door and ask the earnest, young camping-store hipsters if I could use their phone to call a locksmith, and it turns out locksmiths don't even answer their fucking phones anymore, they have a service, and the first thing they ask you for is your cellphone number. (I ended up calling a cab, because it turns out cabbies carry jimmies and can pop the lock for you for about 25 bucks, a good thing to know if you're in your mid-50s and your mom already has Alzheimers and you can feel your own brain slowly turning to oatmeal.)

Anyway, as I was saying, Facebook is a baffling, strange new world for geezers like me—it took me all day yesterday to figure out the difference between a "page" and a "profile," and even now, I'm still not sure I've got it right. But at any rate, the author page is there, under the pretentious title, James Hynes, Author,  to distinguish it from my other Facebook page, which is personal, and which you can't get to unless you know me or used to know me, and which, let's be honest, I hardly ever look at because it comes at me like a firehose of information, often from people and sources (friends of friends, apparently) whom I've never heard of before. It's an adjustment, is what I'm saying, for a 54-year-old novelist who is used to spending vast amounts of time by himself, to find that in order to swim and not-sink in the ocean of digital literary culture, he needs to open himself to the hive mind of the internet, that he has to switch off the solitary, austere, I-wanna-be-Tolstoy mindset of the creative artist and turn himself into Locutus of Borg in order to sell the book. Though there are worse things, I guess, than being Locutus of Borg, like, say, being a former midlist novelist.

Anyway, there it is, my geriatric rant, my cranky, catlike rage at a world that insists on changing and requiring new skills of me when all I want to do is lie in the sun and wait to be fed. I got it off my chest. I'm done. My resistance, it turns out, really is futile. I have been assimilated. See you on Facebook.