cac.ophony.org

Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the final in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

Since golf began being widely played during the 19th century until sometime in the middle of the twentieth, clubs had shafts of wood, not metal, certainly not graphite. The heads of clubs were slivers of metal about the thickness of a frying pan, the size of a silver dollar and had only a rumor of a “sweet spot.” A comparison might be playing tennis with an old-style 80-square-inch wooden racket strung with cat gut. Golf balls were originally stuffed with feathers (called “featheries”).

Today, the technology that goes into golf clubs and balls is seriously NASA-like. But without going into any more detail about polymers and titanium, let me get straight to the point: from the wooden clubs of the past to today’s clubs that amount to swingable periodic tables, something rather interesting has failed to change, namely golfer’s scores. The average amateur score is stuck at about 100, which stinks. (Almost everyone who golfs stinks at golf, myself included.)

Is it easier to hit the ball farther and straighter with hi-tech clubs? Yes. But if you then practice less it cancels out. Thus universal mediocrity on the links.

Perhaps readers can sense where I’m going for the writing tie-in. What if all the tech-centered promises of usefulness and openness and rethinking of pedagogical frameworks that we all talk about so much have downsides that cancel out any real improvements for young people learning to communicate? In golf, you might just as well play with a crisply rolled umbrella in your hand instead of a $400, wind-tunnel-tested science experiment UNLESS YOU HAVE A GOOD, REPEATABLE SWING. In regard to writing and reading in the web-world (yes, including “web 2.whatever we’re up to now”) is any amount of access or connectivity or integrated learning or p2p or interactivity or blogging or Wiki-ing going to make a difference – or rather, is the difference worth it – if it comes at the cost of implicitly discrediting the fact that there is no substitute for sitting down and reading a whole book? Lots of whole books. Yes, hours of time with just you and the (paper) pages. It is empowering for students to direct their own learning, but how impotent is a mind left without at least some relatively deep reading? Blogs keep us connected to those who share our various interests, but how disconnected from the human spirit are we without having read great novels? How can one really appreciate good writing if the most challenging thing one reads is cac.ophony.org?

I’m trying to be a little provocatively anti-tech here, and I ask: Workers of the Post-Book Techmad Connectiverse Freedom World – are you united? Is it OK that people don’t read books and that we imply that anything that takes so long is old-fashioned, unconnected, Luddistic and lame?

Happy US Open viewing!

Extras: Best golf instruction book: Harvey Pennick’s Little Red Book. Best golf-based literature: P. G. Wodehouse, Heart of a Goof.