There was a bit of glitch about loading photographs from the camera onto the All-in-One computer, and in the process of figuring out the problem I had to watch as the contents of my Canon S95’s memory card, which was new in December and from which I have deleted nothing, marched past as they poured into the new base. For the most part, I take two kinds of pictures, one of sidewalks scenes and the other of my grandson, and I usually take several of each at a time. I regarded the street scenes, as they whisked by, with a vague awareness of the shift in seasons, but the shots of Will, playing in his room or in Tompkins Square Park or even at our apartment, had an epic feel, as though they had been shot over many years, centuries perhaps, and not just weeks apart. I’ve taken hundreds of photographs of the neighborhood over the years, registering changes that are generally rather slight, but that day in February when it was so cold, and Will figured out that you wait until the last minute to sit down at the top of a slide — there won’t be another one of those. The juxtaposition was unsettling. The three months of everyday walking about partook of a different order of time from the three months of Will’s proceeding from two years of age to two years and a quarter, and I felt physically tightened and stretched by the camera’s indifferent shift between the timelines.

Something else that’s completely new to human experience is the touch screen. I say this not because I’m particularly wowed by my iPad, my Kindle Fire, or my HTC Inspire. I say it because I’m stunned every time I watch Will swipe his way to the episode of Kipper that he wants to see. There is no fiddling around; he knows exactly what he’s doing. Even though his complete sentences are rudimentary and his work with colored pens and pencils little more than scribbling, he handles the iPad pretty much the way I do. His little hands move with adult dispatch. Please don’t think that I’m bragging; I suspect that any reasonably bright kid who has been playing with an iPad from a tender age (3 months in Will’s case) will display the same facility. What’s surprising is the expertise. The touch screen clearly unleashes a skill set that we didn’t know about, because there was no way for a child to express it. Or perhaps it does no such thing. Perhaps what makes the touch screen unlike all the other switches in life is that it transparently overlays the objects to which it leads. You don’t move a mouse over here to bring up a screen over there. You touch the screen itself and there it is. It’s just like opening a drawer — something that Will is almost as good at doing. (Touch screens are so easy!)

A hundred years ago, there were no Kipper episodes to watch. Then we went through a long period where adults had to stage-manage such entertainments, by powering and loading devices, from phonographs and radios to DVD players. Now the little ones can do everything all by themselves. Will no longer says “More?” when a show comes to an end. He hops off his seat (assuming that his face is not already half an inch from the screen) and swipes away. And I shiver: he will never remember not having an iPad.

***

It’s late, and I’m not going to write about the play that we saw this evening, Matt Charman’s Regrets, at MTC; that can wait. I simply want to notice a charming book that I picked up yesterday, Love, Fiercely, Jean Zimmerman’s book about the subjects of one of John Singer Sargent’s more remarakable paintings, Mr and Mrs Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, which, unlike the painting in Erica Hirshler’s Sargent’s Daughters, hangs in the American Wing galleries at the Museum, where, I tell friends and visitors, I keep my good stuff. Edith Minturn Stokes is perhaps the first unmistakably American woman of style to appear in a painting, and it’s no accident that, in her Sargent portrait, she is dressed in wealthy America’s contribution to high fashion, “sportswear.” She had, earlier, posed for Daniel Chester French’s monumental (but impermanent) sculpture for the Chicago World’s Fair, The Republic , and job that she got, so to speak, on the strength of her apparently riveting performances in swank tableaux vivants. I didn’t know about any of that until I read it in Zimmerman’s book, and I’m prepared for further surprises. Edith and her husband were very much in love when they married, late, at the age of 28, and they were still in love when they lost all their money in the Crash, or something like that — I haven’t got that far. Mr Phelps Stokes was a committed, arguably obsessive antiquarian in the field of New York City history, a hobby horse that I believe also contributed to the couple’s financial reverses. Stay tuned for corrections. Jean Zimmerman writes very well, if a little too imaginatively for my taste (but what’s a biographer to do, confronted by respectable families that revered the ban on committing important things to writing), and I’m tickled by the sense that a new corner of Gotham is being opened up to me.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2012 at 9:28 am.