Zelig to Awk in the blink of an eye
NOVELS that send you to the dictionary are the ones I like best. There’s a certain pleasure in pausing mid-sentence to put the story you’re reading into suspended animation, clearing just enough mental space to take up the dictionary and hunt down the meaning and provenance of a fresh new word.
This equilibrium between two books lasts only so long. If you yield to the dictionary’s many temptations — chase your word to its farthest, most speculative proto-Indo-European roots, say, or succumb to the siren-song of a different word you’d earlier paged past — your spell of cerebral poise will break and the novel will fall into the fog.
Lately, I’m happy to report, I’ve been able to skirt this dangerous pitfall by wearing a computer on my head.
Just the other day, for example, I encountered the word “Zelig”. I was fairly sure I knew what it meant, but since it came at a critical juncture in the story, I thought I would double-check. I looked up from my book, and kept looking up, until my head reached the angle of 20° required to activate the computer that hovered just below my right eyebrow, like a displaced pince-nez. A bright little screen appeared in my top-right field of vision.
“OK, glass,” I said. A sound twinkled in my ear to indicate the computer had heard me. I then uttered a little-known web shortcut that allows you — lifehack alert! — to look up word definitions via Google using a precise search format. “Google define colon Zelig,” I said.
The computer understood my command perfectly. It searched Google for the text “define:zelig”. In a blink the definition appeared on the screen.
The world is suddenly walking
around with you
Satisfied that I’d correctly remembered what it means to be a Zelig, I returned to my book with no further thought of extending my word search. The screen switched off. I was alone with the story again.
Well, alone with the story and my Google Glass, which delicately places the entirety of the internet on your nasal bridge. Forget the temptations of the dictionary, what’s happening on Twitter? You can find out in a highly distracting glance with Glass.
On the whole it’s quite useful to have hands-free internet. The world is suddenly walking around with you, or sitting with you as you read. The few thousand of us who have the device are officially called Glass Explorers. (Those who don’t have one sometimes use a different term: Glassholes.) One of the things I’m exploring, I suppose, is the new art of augmented reading.
The next experiment is to try writing while wearing Glass. Or perhaps dictating what I wish to write to it, such as this column. Perhaps, in fact, I’ve simply told Glass to write this column for me — “work in a mention of books so that it fits the brief” — and have ventured out into the world, trying to be a Zelig while wearing a computer on my head. “OK, glass, order me a cappuccino.” I honestly don’t fancy my chances.