August 7,2009/1

It's no fun to feel old and out-of-date. I had lunch yesterday with a very smart younger friend, a writer. She extolled the virtues of Chris Anderson's Free, the book on the future economy that's drawn a lot of ink. Enough to make me decide to read it. Then she got on to the subject of Twitter. I tweet occasionally myself - to promote my novel or make my few "followers" aware of something I've written or posted somewhere. The funny thing about both these phenomena is, they seem to forbid rational explanation: they just are and ever will be, world without end. Yesterday, while we were lunching, Twitter went down, succumbing to one of those hacker attacks. Judging from the report in today's Wall Street Journal, Tweeters the world over would have sooner given up their left arms. Twitter I just don't get, I admit it. It seems to me to be an updated version of what we saw when teenagers first got cellphones; you'd seem them crossing a street, saying "I'm on 53rd St.," "I'm crossing the street now...." Anyway, as a writer in search of a readership, I won't give up. I'm going to try to figure out how to use Twitter to make people aware of my work. At my age, what else is there?
On another subject, another friend, the Vanity Fair writer Vicky Ward, has a post on her Facebook page (when I write a phrase like that, I feel like that old Flanders and Swann song that went something like "We're ever so very contemporary at number 7B") that reads like a preemptive strike. Vicky's writing a book on Lehman, and reading between the lines on her comments on what others have written and published, I think she'll be giving us the Paulson Version. I've advised her to tread carefully.